Stories
Assistant Public Defender for Prince George’s County Knows First-hand the Difficulties Many Immigrants Face
After growing up in the United States as the daughter of two undocumented immigrants, Llamilet Gutierrez decided to dedicate her career to protecting the rights of immigrants by becoming an assistant public defender for Maryland’s Prince George’s County. Yet current deportation fears have made life harder than ever… Read More
Despite the Challenges Posed by the Immigration System, Georgia Tech Professor Helps Dozens of Start-ups Take Flight
Back in his native country of India, Dr. Raghupathy Sivakumar says he always dreamed of working for Microsoft or Oracle. “But here,” he says of the United States, “I fell in love with academia.” Dr. Sivakumar, who goes by Siva, did his undergraduate studies in computer science in Chennai,… Read More
This Family Came to Down East Maine as Migrant Workers, but Left their Mark as Entrepreneurs
When Juana Rodriguez Vazquez moved to the United States at age four, her father was already something of a go-getter. For years, he’d been spending time in the United States—traveling from state to state as a migrant laborer, following the blueberries and oranges that were ripening in the fields. By… Read More
Immigrant Entrepreneur Says Immigration Reform Will Keep U.S. Businesses Competitive
Fernando Gaxiola is a San Diego-based Mexican wine importer and travel entrepreneur working hard to change Americans’ cultural impressions of Mexico. Several times a month, his company Baja Wine + Food offers trips to the Valle de Guadalupe about an hour south of the California border to explore the region’s… Read More
“Talent Does Not Have a Zip Code” Says Mobile Advocacy App Founder
When Ximena Hartsock first began looking for a solution to the lack of digital grassroots tools for advocacy in late 2012, she quickly learned she was up against some major obstacles. She was a Latina woman, with no entrepreneurial or tech experience, in a room full of skeptics. Hartsock was… Read More
A Former Undocumented Immigrant is Behind One of Kansas City’s Most Popular Youth Soccer Facilities
Raul Villegas had been living in America as an undocumented immigrant for more than 20 years when he decided to build an indoor soccer facility in Kansas City, Kansas. That was in 2013, long before the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, removed the threat of deportation for… Read More
Without Immigrants ‘Almost Every Service Industry Would Collapse,’ Says Former Cop and Community Leader
Hector Flores, National Immigration Committee Chair for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), was raised by his Mexican-American grandparents in South Texas. He spent summers doing migrant work, traveling north to Indiana to pick cherries then south to West Texas to tend to the cotton crop. When he’d… Read More
After Coming as a Cuban Refugee, This Entrepreneur Built a $50 Million Business
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, Cuban-born entrepreneur José Prendes watched the ensuing chaos carefully. He was trying to determine which e-businesses would survive and why. One that continued advertising with television commercials, he noticed, was 1-800-Pet-Meds. “I thought that it had to be a good business, since amid… Read More
This Indian-Born Immigrant is Unshackling Opportunity
A few years after arriving in the United States in 2005 to work for a large multinational corporation, Indian-born entrepreneur Nitin Pachisia decided to start a company of his own in California’s Silicon Valley. U.S. immigration policy nearly got in the way of his efforts, presenting incremental challenges on top… Read More
Immigration Policy Nearly Prevented This Jordanian-Born Entrepreneur from Bringing Millions in Investment to America
Everything was going well for Mohannad “Moh” Arbaji. It was September of 2015, and he had just raised $2 million in venture capital funding for his educational prep business, Chalk Talk. But after a temporary trip to his native Jordan, where Arbaji had traveled to expand his investor pool, the… Read More
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