Like many Americans before him—and many who came after—Andrew Carnegie and his family were immigrants. They came to the United States in 1848 to escape a life of poverty in Scotland, settling in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Carnegie’s first job was as a bobbin boy in a mill, earning $1.20 a week. Though lacking a formal education, he eventually became an industrialist who controlled most of America’s iron and steel production. In 1901, he sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan, a New York banker, for $480 million. From that time on he devoted himself to various philanthropic projects, donating generous amounts to thousands of libraries and educational institutions. He also founded more than 20 philanthropic organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Carnegie’s life embodied the American dream: the immigrant who went from rags to riches, the self-made man who became a captain of industry, the king of steel. He always remained proud to have made America his home and wrote of his adopted country, “Immigrants come to her from many nations…she welcomes all, and shares her privileges with them. She is the pioneer nation proclaiming the brotherhood of man.”

As more and more people of different races and cultures entered the U.S. and the ethnic composition of the country changed, the federal government tried to control immigration by introducing restrictive laws. Carnegie was a strong opponent of these efforts; in 1915, for example, he wrote to President Wilson, strongly opposing a literacy test for immigrants that had just passed Congress on the grounds that it was grossly unfair to the millions who “have no opportunity for education in their native land.”

Eighty-eight years after that letter, the men and women who continue Carnegie’s philanthropic work have taken up the cause. In the Corporation’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy program, grantmaking focuses on immigrant policy, including strategies to offer bridges to new immigrants in diverse 21st century destinations like Maine, Tennessee and Iowa, where today’s immigrants are making homes. And in the seven cities participating in the Corporation’s Schools for a New Society initiative, our Education Division is reforming urban high schools to ensure that those who come here have the opportunity to read, learn and advance just as a Scottish bobbin boy did a century ago.

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