My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant - Jose Antonio Vargas

Jose Antonio Vargas, an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines who went on to become a Pulitzer prize winning author, has written a moving account of his personal experience in an attempt to influence immigration policy in Washington, D.C.

A brief excerpt:

I’ve tried. Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.

The complete article:

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant - NYTimes.com

With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America - The Washington Post

An interesting Washington Post article on the growing economic disparity in the nation:

An excerpt:

For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent. But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled.

The complete article:

With executive pay, rich pull away from rest of America - The Washington Post:

Immigrants or their Children Founded 40% of Fortune 500 Companies

An informative new report by the Partnership for a New American Economy has revealed the extent to which immigrants and their children contribute to the national economy.

The report, The 'New American' Fortune 500, has just been released.

Key findings include:

More than 40 percent of the 2010 Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Even though immigrants have made up only 10.5 percent
of the American population on average since 1850, there are 90 immigrant-founded
Fortune 500 companies, accounting for 18 percent of the list. When you include the
additional 114 companies founded by the children of immigrants, the share of the
Fortune 500 list grows to over 40 percent.

The newest Fortune 500 companies are more likely to have an immigrant founder.
Just shy of 20 percent of the newest Fortune 500 companies — those founded over the
25-year period between 1985 and 2010 — have an immigrant founder.
Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or children of immigrants employ
more than 10 million people worldwide. Immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies
alone employ more than 3.6 million people, a figure equivalent to the entire population
of Connecticut.

The revenue generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants or children
of immigrants is greater than the GDP of every country in the world outside the
U.S., except China and Japan. The Fortune 500 companies that boast immigrant or
children-of-immigrant founders have combined revenues of $4.2 trillion. $1.7 trillion of
that amount comes just from the companies founded by immigrants.

Seven of the 10 most valuable brands in the world come from American companies
founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. Many of America’s greatest brands
— Apple, Google, AT&T, Budweiser, Colgate, eBay, General Electric, IBM, and McDonald’s,
to name just a few — owe their origin to a founder who was an immigrant or the child of
an immigrant.

Immigrant-founded Fortune 500 companies drive a wide range of industry sectors
across the American economy. Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants are not
confined to a small subset of industries or fields. Instead, they range across aerospace,
defense, Internet, consumer products, specialty retail, railroads, insurance, electronics,
hospitality, natural resources, finance, and many other sectors.

The full report can be found here: http://www.renewoureconomy.org/sites/all/themes/pnae/img/new-american-fortune-500-june-2011.pdf