#Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here? @FoxNews
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2017
There are 42 immigrants on the Forbes 400 list of 2016. That’s just over 10%. Most of them have a very high “self-made score.”
For instance, Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, is 40 years old and worth over $8.8 billion. That’s more than twice the net worth of Donald Trump, at $3.7 billion.
Koum immigrated from the Ukraine with his mother in 1992 due to the political and anti-Semitic environment there. His mom worked as a babysitter. Koum was 16 years old and he got a job as a cleaner in a grocery store. They got an apartment through government assistance, and bought groceries with food stamps. Then Koum went to San Jose State, definitely not ivy league, and then got a job at Yahoo! where he worked for nine years before he started WhatsApp.
The American system has supported this immigrant in the beginning, yes. Cynics will lament that our tax dollars paid for penniless immigrants. They did. However, Koum created American jobs and American wealth, for himself, and for many others. He made many people millionaires.
The fact that 10% of the Forbes 400 are immigrants, and that many of them came to this country with a single suitcase, no money, two hands to work menial jobs, and an indomitable belief in themselves and the American Dream, attests to the value of immigrants in America.
Nothing can be more misguided than the nonsense we’re hearing spouted every day now. Go get the Forbes 400 edition of 2016. It provides many inspiring stories.
Steve Jobs’ biological father was an immigrant from Syria.
Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, was an immigrant from Hungary. He escaped from communist control at the age of 20.
Sergey Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of 6. He studied mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate and then enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. That’s when he co-founded Google.
Albert Einstein escaped the Nazi regime in Germany before the war.
Elon Musk grew up in a middle-class family in South Africa, before he moved to Canada, alone, with just a few dollars in his pocket. He started working doing menial jobs, like shoveling out sewer tanks, just to survive. He then put himself through school, co-founded PayPal, and finally created Tesla and SpaceX – and he is just getting started.
The entire story of America is studded with sparkles supplied by immigrants, many from very underprivileged countries and environments.
In comparison to Musk, Brin, Grove, Einstein, Jobs and Koum, Tucker Carlson looks silly and small-minded as he panders to the followers of a misguided idea. He is contributing not to making America great, but making America dumb again.
What an asinine tweet that is!