Yes, Albert Einstein was an immigrant. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled permanently in the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen on October 1, 1940. His story is one of the most prominent examples of a refugee scientist rebuilding his life in America.
Einstein’s Citizenship Before America
Einstein’s national identity shifted several times before he ever set foot in the U.S. Born in the German Empire in 1879, he grew up disliking the rigid, militaristic culture of the country. As a teenager, he renounced his German citizenship and was stateless for several years. In 1901, the same year he earned his university diploma, he became a Swiss citizen. He lived and worked in Switzerland for over a decade, holding jobs at the patent office in Bern and later teaching at universities in Zurich.
In 1914, he moved to Berlin to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and became a German citizen again. He held both Swiss and German citizenship simultaneously through the 1920s, a period when he published some of his most famous work and won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Why He Left Germany
The political situation in Germany deteriorated rapidly in early 1933. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30. Within weeks, the Reichstag burned, martial law was declared, and the Nazi party began consolidating power. Einstein, who was Jewish and internationally famous, became an immediate target.
On March 14, 1933, his 54th birthday, Nazi troopers searched his Berlin apartment in the first of five raids over two days. Six days later, soldiers raided his country home in Caputh, claiming to look for weapons hidden by “Communists.” By April 2, the government had seized his Berlin bank account and his apartment. The following year, his country house was confiscated as well.
Einstein was traveling abroad when much of this happened. From Belgium in late March 1933, he renounced his German citizenship for the second time and resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He and his wife Elsa never returned to Germany.
The Journey to America
Einstein spent several months in Belgium and England before making his final crossing to the United States. He and Elsa departed separately in October 1933. Albert sailed from Southampton on the SS Westernland, while Elsa left from Antwerp. When the ship neared New York harbor, officials from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton arranged for the Einsteins to be taken off quietly before docking, partly for security reasons.
He had already been offered a professorship at the Institute, a newly founded research center in Princeton, New Jersey. Co-founded by Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld, the Institute was described by the New York Times as a “scholar’s paradise” where Einstein could pursue research free from the distractions of regular university life. He held that position from 1933 until his death in 1955.
Becoming a U.S. Citizen
Einstein lived in the United States for seven years before taking the oath of citizenship on October 1, 1940. That same day, he appeared on a radio program called “I’m an American,” produced in connection with U.S. immigration services. He was 61 years old.
Notably, Einstein never gave up his Swiss citizenship. He kept his Swiss passport for the rest of his life, maintaining a dual connection to the country where he had first found intellectual freedom as a young man. So from 1940 onward, he held both American and Swiss citizenship.
Immigrant, Refugee, or Both
Einstein fits both descriptions. He was an immigrant in the straightforward sense: he moved permanently to the United States from another country and became a citizen. But he was also a refugee. He didn’t leave Germany by choice or for better career opportunities. He left because the Nazi government raided his homes, seized his property, and posed a direct threat to his safety as a Jewish man. Had he returned, he almost certainly would have been imprisoned or killed.
The FBI maintained a file on Einstein for years, driven by concerns about his political views, particularly related to atomic energy and his associations with left-leaning organizations. Despite being one of the most celebrated scientists alive, his immigrant status and political activism made him a subject of government suspicion throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
Einstein’s path from stateless teenager to Swiss citizen to German professor to American refugee traces one of the 20th century’s most dramatic immigrant stories. He spent 22 years in Princeton, longer than he lived in any other city, and it was there that he did much of his later work, became a cultural icon, and lived out the rest of his life.