Foreign-Born U.S. Billionaires Discuss Trump's Immigration Policies

Forbes

09-07-2025

'I f it were up to today's administration, my family's hopes for living in a land of freedom and opportunity would have been significantly challenged,' says billionaire real estate developer Jorge Perez, referring to the government of his former friend and business partner, president Donald Trump. 'My family – and countless other Cuban families trying to escape the Castro regime – would have never been allowed to enter this country…and I wouldn't have been able to contribute to the development of cities like Miami, which was transformed from a sleepy tourist and retirement town into a thriving global center.'
Perez, 75, was born in 1949 to Cuban parents in Argentina. He has built an estimated $2.6 billion fortune since moving to Miami in 1968, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1976 and teaming up on some Florida property deals with Trump, who called Perez 'the one person who could teach me something about real estate' in the forward to Perez's 2008 book, 'Powerhouse Principles.' But Perez has become an outspoken critic of Trump since 2017, when Perez told CNN he had turned down a request from the president to help build a Mexican border wall and called the idea 'an insult to all Hispanics and maybe all immigrants in this country.' Eight years later, Trump kicked off his second presidential term with promises to restart construction of the border wall and to launch the largest deportation effort of illegal immigrants in American history.
Something must be done about illegal immigration, says Perez, who agrees that undocumented immigrants who violate the law after arriving in the U.S. 'should face appropriate consequences, including deportation.' But Perez makes it clear that he 'find[s] the actions of this administration deplorable' and that he believes 'those [undocumented immigrants] who have worked hard, followed the law and contributed to our communities deserve a fair path to citizenship.'
The Jacksonville Jaguars' owner Shahid Khan, 74, who came to the U.S. from Pakistan at age 16 and almost immediately got a job as a dishwasher making $1.20 an hour ('more than 99%' of Pakistanis back home), isn't as blunt, but says a lot of 'innocent' people have been caught in Trump's immigration 'net' and that it's hurting the country. 'We need (immigrants) to survive,' says Khan, whose original equipment manufacturer Flex N Gate employs refugees and immigrants from such countries as Bangladesh, Tunisia and Morocco at its U.S. factories.
Perez and Khan are two of 116 immigrants in the U.S. who have built billion-dollar fortunes from scratch since moving to America. (Another nine billionaire immigrants inherited some or all of their fortunes.) Forbes reached out to many of these entrepreneurs to get their points of view on immigration to the U.S. today, whether they think the country is still the land of opportunity it has always been and if they'd still pick the United States as the place to come. A dozen spoke about their own experiences, opening up about how being immigrants contributed to their success and the advice they have for newer arrivals.
These immigrant billionaires appear to have come to America legally – though there is some question about whether South African native Elon Musk started working at a tech outfit before he had an appropriate work visa. Last week, Trump seemed to threaten Musk with possible deportation as part of an ongoing feud between the former political allies over Trump's 'One Big Beautiful' tax and spending bill.
Some immigrant billionaires would likely not be allowed into America today under the Trump administration, which has also made legal immigration more difficult in a number of ways. For example, in January, Trump signed an executive order that indefinitely suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which admitted more than 100,000 people to the country during the last year of the Biden administration. Then, in June, Trump signed another executive order reviving a controversial travel ban from his first term that restricts or prohibits entry into the U.S. by citizens of 19 countries. That includes the birthplace of Perez's parents, Cuba, and Iran. The latter country is the birthplace of half a dozen U.S. billionaires, including AppLovin's Adam Foroughi and Clearlake Capital's Behdad Eghbali. It's also where the founder and former CEO of medical technology firm Masimo Corporation, Joe Kiani, and his family are from.
'We wouldn't have come [to the U.S. under the Trump administration] because not only is there a travel ban on my country of origin today, but we came at a time when America welcomed us with open arms and we felt wanted,' says Kiani, 60, who immigrated with his family as a child in the 1970s so that his father could study at the University of Alabama in Huntsville; they lived in a housing project for years. 'If my dad was thinking of getting his engineering degree today, he would go to a country that was as warm and friendly to foreign students as the U.S. was in 1973.'
Another Iranian immigrant billionaire, biotech firm Summit Therapeutics' co-CEO Maky Zanganeh, 54, declined to comment on President Trump's policies but disagrees with Kiani, saying that she would have still moved to the U.S. under the current administration: 'At the end of the day, nothing compares to the American values of innovation, opportunity and the willingness to fund and support the best ideas.'
Trump has plenty of immigrant billionaire backers, including one of his biggest donors, Israeli-born Miriam Adelson, who gave nearly $6 million to pro-Trump groups in 2024, and Mark Jones, a former truck driver born and raised in Canada who cofounded and runs Texas-based Goosehead Insurance. 'The Biden administration did our country a profoundly dirty move by opening the borders and just allowing people to flood in,' says Jones, 63, whose wife and cofounder Robyn Jones is also a billionaire immigrant from Canada. 'I'm very pro-immigrant but I do think that…if you have people coming into the country and then going on government assistance, that's very different than people coming into the country and [becoming] contributing members of society, paying their taxes [and] holding down jobs.'
'When I had a discussion with President Trump just before the election, I said to him, 'Why don't we get rid of all the criminals first?,'' says billionaire John Catsimatidis, 76, when asked about his friend and fellow New Yorker's immigration policy. 'Get rid of the drug dealers, get rid of the murderers, get rid of the people that are pushing people off the subway stations, and if there's an immigrant that's working seven days a week, maybe ICE should look away and let 'em work.'
The New York grocery mogul and his family came from Greece when he was an infant; he grew up in a Harlem apartment, while his father worked seven days a week as a busboy, waiter and then chef at the since-closed Manhattan eatery Longchamps and Italian restaurants in Queens. Asked whether Trump's deportations are sweeping up hardworking people along with the criminals, Catsimatidis says he thinks 'mistakes get made but not intentionally.' As for whether Trump's promised crackdown on undocumented migrants is fueling anti-immigrant sentiment in the country, Catsimatidis says he doesn't think so. 'I'm pro-immigrant. I am an immigrant. But people want immigrants that are going to work as hard as their fathers and their grandfathers and not ones that want a free ride. I mean, I don't want to pay $300 a day for their hotel rooms when the veterans who fought for our country are left on the sidewalks of New York. That's not fair,' Catsimatidis says.
Israeli born VC Oren Zeev, 60, is also in favor of Trump's focus on the issue of illegal immigration and says that being in favor of legal immigration is not anti-immigrant at all. 'In parallel to the crackdown on illegal immigration, legal immigration should be looked at and made easier for applicants who can contribute to the country. The US can only gain by attracting highly skilled and capable immigrants,' says Zeev, adding that new immigrants should never forget that being American is a privilege. 'If you choose to immigrate, you shouldn't try to hurt or destroy the country you immigrated to. If you support radical ideologies, stay home,' Zeev says.
No matter where they stand on Trump's immigration policies, the billionaire immigrants surveyed by Forbes almost unanimously agree that the U.S. is still the best place to be. 'The great thing about America is that you go through ups and downs and eventually it turns out right,' says the Jacksonville Jaguars' owner Khan. 'It's still the promised land and one guy will not screw up the American dream. It's pretty bullet proof right now.'
Additional reporting by: Kerry Dolan, Luisa Kroll, Chase Peterson-Withorn, Giacomo Tognini and Itai Zehorai.
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