In January, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting immigration, the news was met with clenched fists in Silicon Valley. On big tech campuses, like Facebook and Google, there were protests, rallies, and boycotts. Of the hundred-some companies that signed an amicus brief protesting the decision, most were tech companies. This sudden political awakening, some argued, was confirmation of tech’s liberal slant. Of course the young employees who populate the Valley bleed blue.

Here’s the other interpretation of what inspired the top rungs of tech companies to stick their necks out in protest: America’s tech industry is wholly reliant on immigrants. Big name founders, from eBay’s Pierre Omidyar to Elon Musk, are immigrants. If you count the first-generation offspring of immigrants, the number grows. (Let’s all remember that Steve Jobs is the child of a Syrian refugee.) Last year, the National Foundation for American Policy released a study of the startups that were worth over a billion dollars. More than half had at least one founder who was an immigrant. When the authors expanded the search to senior, non-founding roles, that number rose to 71 percent.

Innovation is bred when diverse viewpoints intersect, and that only happens if you can get all of those diverse ideas in the room. As Silicon Valley has emerged as a beacon for the most groundbreaking companies, its ability retain its ordination is reliant on attracting a steady supply of the best ideas—regardless of their country of origin.

Thanksgiving, like the tech industry, would not exist without immigration. So, in celebration of the upcoming holiday, Backchannel is running a series of portraits of what the immigrant experience looks like in America—as seen through the lens of tech. Miranda Katz looks at how the promise of the gig economy left one immigrant lukewarm, while Scott Rosenberg looks at a new founder who hopes her outsider’s viewpoint will fuel a meteoric rise. Steven Levy looks at the guy with the hardest job in tech: Uber’s newly minted CEO, who fled from Iran with his parents. And I write about an IT worker who found notoriety in an unexpected place: maneuvering the H-1B visa process. Individually, they show meaning in a single life, but together they illuminate the varied roles that people from outside the US play in creating the most American things.