Stories
Russian Immigrant Builds a School for Newcomers to Strengthen America
Andrey Dolbinin came to the United States from Russia as a college student in 1997. Now he is helping new arrivals adapt, while still maintaining ties to their culture. In 2003, he founded a private bilingual school called Slavic Christian Academy. “I saw the youngest students getting discouraged when they… Read More
‘Moved by Unfairness of System,’ Executive Skips Retirement to Create Legal-Aid Program
After a 30-year career as a telecommunications executive, Ray Garrido had planned a quiet retirement. But while volunteering as an English tutor in Bremerton, Washington, for immigrants from Mexico and Central America, he heard stories of struggle and hardship that kept tugging at his heart. “I realized there was no… Read More
Princeton Grad – And DACA Recipient – Works in Houston School System to Help Others Achieve Potential
Carlos Sotelo is a high-flyer: a newly minted Princeton graduate with an impressive resume that includes a semester at Oxford University. He’s also an undocumented immigrant, brought to the United States by his parents as a baby, and raised in near-poverty by his mother after his father passed away. Now… Read More
Iranian Immigrant Builds Homes and Donates Millions in California’s Central Valley
In 1978, Darius Assemi emigrated from Iran to California, seeking an American education and better career opportunities. Today, the entrepreneur and CEO of Granville Homes, in California’s Central Valley, builds an average of 200 homes annually in the greater Fresno region and employs a staff of 80. Over the last… Read More
California Entrepreneur Has Immigrant Parents to Thank for His Civic Pride
During his college years, Heberto M. Sanchez knew fellow students who were forced to sleep in their cars. “They had nowhere else to go,” he says. “They were in college and couldn’t afford an apartment. Still, they wanted to succeed.” This struck a chord with Sanchez. His parents were paying… Read More
Lebanese Family Creates American Entrepreneurs
Lebanese-American entrepreneur Richard Kabbany was a business major at California State University, Fullerton when he came up with the concept for his first business. “At the time, there was a huge push for green, renewable energy, and I thought, Well, if there’s a push for it and it makes financial… Read More
Politics Professor: U.S. Universities — and Their Towns — Need Foreign Students
As a child, Leslie Caughell watched her father, who was born in Canada, navigate the “anxiety-inducing” U.S. immigration system. It’s something the family can laugh about now. But far more anxiety inducing today, says Caughell, a political science professor at Virginia Wesleyan University, is the prospect of U.S. universities losing… Read More
Republican Senator: My State’s Economy Needs Immigration Reform
Before becoming a United States senator in 2015, Thom Tillis led North Carolina’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives during a time when the state unemployment rate dropped after the Great Recession, from 10.4 percent, in 2010, to 4.5 percent, in 2017. Now, however, the state is facing a… Read More
U.S. Farmer Moves His Operations South — Where the Workers Are
Each winter, an estimated two-thirds of the vegetables consumed in the United States are grown in California’s Imperial Valley. One of the largest operations there is the Scaroni Family of Companies, a multimillion-dollar farming enterprise that employs more than 5,000 people and, according to owner Steve Scaroni,… Read More
Without Immigrant Pickers, U.S. Mushrooms Scrapped for Fertilizer
This year C.P. Yeatman & Sons, Inc., a Pennsylvania farm that sells under the brand Mother Earth Organic Mushrooms, faced a problem it hadn’t encountered in more than 35 years: It didn’t have enough people to pick the mushroom crop. “A lot of harvesters will go back to Mexico for… Read More
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