Forbes Magazine recently released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans, a record 42 of whom are immigrants from 21 countries.
The 42 have a combined net worth of $250 billion, Forbes reports, and include New York City grocery mogul John Catsimatidis ($3.3 billion, Greece), Tesla founder Elon Musk ($11.6 billion, South Africa) and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum ($8.8 billion, Ukraine), the Washington Post reported.
"Six of the 42 richest immigrants on the Forbes list are from Israel, five are from India, and four each are from Hungary and Taiwan. Moscow native and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose parents brought him to the United States when he was six, leads the immigrant list with an estimated net worth of $37.5 billion," the Post reported.
Brin’s “mathematician parents faced anti-Semitism in their homeland,” Forbes writes. “They were reportedly forced to sit in separate rooms during university entrance exams, and were limited in their choice of careers.”
According to a report on immigration and entrepreneurship by the Kauffman Foundation, “there is a little debate about the economic contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs.” The Kauffman report said “immigrants are twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.”
Meanwhile, a recent study has discovered that Americans largely agree that foreign trade is costing U.S. jobs, but they also hold an increasingly positive view about the value of immigrants to the economy.
In a new study by the Pew Research Center, eight out of 10 adults regarded increased outsourcing of jobs overseas and the growth of imports of foreign-made goods as harmful to U.S. workers.
“The public’s widespread mistrust of trade has been seized upon by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, and pushed Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, to reverse her support for the pending U.S.-led trade deal with other Pacific Rim nations,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Trump fell 35 spots to No. 156 on the list, which pegged his net worth at $3.7 billion, The Chicago Tribune noted, adding that a softening real estate market in New York contributed to Trump's $800 million decline in net worth from last year.
The complete list is posted on the Forbes website.
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