IMMIGRANTS YESTERDAY & TODAY

Sergey Brin founded Google. His family suffered greatly to flee the Soviet Union in 1979. In America his company has changed the way the entire planet interacts with information. (Image: by Steve Jurvetson (Flickr: Idealism), via Wikimedia Commons)

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, early champion of labor unions and children's rights and namesake of Mother Jones Magazine, moved to Michigan from Cork, Ireland in the 1850s. (image from the U.S. Library of Congress)

Andrew Carnegie, founder of the Carnegie Steel Company, was one of America's most famous entrepreneurs, industrialists and philanthropists. He immigrated from Dunfermline, Scotland in 1848. (Image from Project Gutenberg).

Isabel Allende—world famous Latina author—born in Peru, raised in Chile. U.S. citizen since 2003. (Image by Mutari (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons)

Alexander Hamilton—intellectual forebear of our modern Federal State and face of our $10 bill—hailed from the West Indies, prodigal son of a single mother. In fact, nine Founders and signers of the U.S. Constitution were immigrants: Butler, Fitzsimons, McHenry (as in Fort) and Paterson (as in New Jersey) were all born in Ireland; Davie and Robert Morris came from England and Wilson and Witherspoon hail from Scotland.

Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss), one of the world's most famous magicians, emigrated from Budapest, Hungary to the United States in 1878. (Images from the U.S. Library of Congress)

Albert Einstein, among the most highly regarded scientists of all time, immigrated from Ulm, Germany, to the United States in 1933. (image from the U.S. Library of Congress)

Margaret Marshall, born in South Africa working as a human rights activist. She moved to Boston in 1964 to attend Harvard and later Yale Law School. She was the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (the first appellate court in the Western Hemisphere) and was instrumental in the 2004 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in the state. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Composer and lyricist Irving Berlin, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history, emigrated from Tuymen, Russia in 1893. (Image from the U.S. Library of Congress)

Yo-Yo Ma is among the most highly regarded cello players of the 20th and 21st centuries. He moved to the United States with his parents in 1959. (Image: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland)

Madeleine Albright moved to the U.S. from Prague in 1947. She gained citizenship in 1957 and went on to become the first female Secretary of State in 1997. (Image from the commons.wikimedia.org)

Levi Strauss, the inventor of blue jeans, emigrated to San Francisco from Buttenheim, Germany in 1853. (Image from the commons.wikimedia.org)

Celia Cruz, born in Havana Cuba became an American citizen in 1959. The most popular salsa artists of the 20th century with 23 gold albums, known as the "Queen of Salsa" as well as "La Guarachera de Cuba". (Image By Lionel Decoster (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons]

Felix Frankfurter came to the U.S. from Vienna with his family in 1894. He became a Supreme Court Justice, serving from 1939 to 1962. (Image from the U.S. Library of Congress)

John Muir, the naturalist responsible for creating Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, emigrated with his family from Dunbar, Scotland, in 1849. (Image from U.C. Berkeley, Bancroft Library).