Open Letter: Don’t Deport the Statue of Liberty!
To: Ms. Jessica Bowron
Acting Director
National Park Service
1849 C St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20240
Dear acting director:
Many of us have visited the Statue of Liberty either as tourists, or in some cases, as immigrants. Immigration and innovation are inextricably coiled into the DNA of our country. All Americans know the famous lines “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The complete poem, “The New Colossus,” from which these lines are taken, refers to the statue as the Mother of Exiles. The statue and its welcoming message to the entire world is an American icon. Let’s mention a few other American icons:
Blue jeans (with rivets) were invented by a tailor named Jacob Davis, who immigrated from Latvia and partnered with Levi Strauss, a German immigrant. Hamburgers, the invention of which the Library of Congress credits to Danish immigrant Louis Lassen. Doughnuts: The first doughnut made by a machine was made by Adolph Levitt, a refugee from tsarist Russia. Budweiser beer was invented by a young German immigrant named Adolphus Busch. American cheese was invented by an immigrant from Canada named James L. Kraft. Basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian immigrant. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, an immigrant from Scotland. Google was co-invented (with Larry Page) by Sergey Brin, an immigrant from the Soviet Union. Apple was invented and co-founded (with Steve Wozniak) by Steve Jobs whose biological father was a Syrian refugee.
Hot dogs were invented by Charles Feltman, who immigrated from Germany to Coney Island, New York. The song “God Bless America” was composed by Siberian immigrant Irving Berlin. YouTube was co-founded by Jawed Karim from Germany and Steve Chen, who had immigrated from Taiwan, with third co-founder Chad Hurley. The American rock idol Eddie Van Halen was born in the Netherlands and immigrated to the United States as a child. The Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb that ended World War II, would not have been possible without immigrants like Albert Einstein (Germany), Leo Szilard (Hungary), Enrico Fermi (Italy), and Edward Teller (Hungary), who was later known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.
According to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants have founded or co-founded two-thirds of the top AI companies in the United States. Seventy-seven percent of leading U.S.-based AI companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. The same study found that immigrant entrepreneurs started more than half of all U.S. billion-dollar companies. The most valuable company in the world, Nvidia, with a current market cap close to $4 trillion, was cofounded by Jensen Huang, who was born in Taiwan and arrived in the U.S. as a child. One of Nvidia’s close competitors, Advanced Micro Devices, is led by Lisa Su, who was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States as a child.
A major study of the impact of immigration on innovation was completed in 2025 by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). It concluded that while immigrants represented 16% of all U.S. inventors, they produced 23% of total innovation output, measured by the number of patents. Immigrants accounted for 26% of U.S. Nobel Prize winners.
The current administration seems intent on deleting a great deal of our immigrant and multicultural heritage. According to Forbes magazine, the current Department of Defense has flagged for deletion all photographs or mention of the World War II plane Enola Gay—because … gay. The federal government is doing everything it can to delete immigrants by raiding their communities, snatching people off the streets or out of their workplaces, usually without legal process.
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Universities like Harvard have been told by our federal government that they cannot admit international students. The very purpose of these very public anti-immigrant activities is to deter immigrants. One of the individuals who would not be allowed in this country if these policies had been in place is Elon Musk, the self-described richest man in the world, who recently boasted that he spent $277 million to elect Donald Trump president. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and founded Tesla Motors and co-founded OpenAI—the company responsible for the development of ChatGPT. Musk moved to the U.S. on an exchange visa to study here. Recently, President Trump has suggested that perhaps Elon Musk should be deported.
If any of us want to see the Statue of Liberty, now would be a good time to visit given her advocacy for immigrants, and particularly those who are homeless, wretched, and poor; she may vanish, self-deported!
Sincerely,
Vance K. Opperman
A friend of the statue
