By Eden Siskind
Mike Krieger is an immigrant from Sao Paulo, Brazil who came to the United States in 2004 to attend Stanford University. Krieger co-founded the popular picture-sharing site, Instagram, in 2010 with Kevin Systrom. His path to immigration was far from easy and he almost had to leave the United States and give up his company before it even launched. Krieger described the experience: “It took less time to build Instagram than it did for me to get my work visa”. Today, instagram is one of the hottest social media apps available. President Obama even referred to the difficulty of Krieger’s struggle to find an H-1B visa in his 2013 speech on immigration.
Mike Krieger is a great example of how the United States has advanced because of immigrants. It also raises the troubling question of how many Instagrams never get off the ground because a visa wasn’t secured?