"Every time that flag's unfurled/They're coming to America" -- Neil Diamond's "America"

Immigrants come from all over the world to share in the American dream.

They are drawn to a country where opportunities abound, "where you can be anything or do anything," as Japanese immigrant Michi Yaganishita puts it.

In this land of opportunity, grateful immigrants are making their mark, excelling in a variety of endeavors--and seizing the initiative to become American entrepreneurs.

With that in mind, meet immigrant entrepreneurs from five countries.

Russia
Simona and Mikhail Ioffe were among the last of a wave of Jewish refugees accepted into the U.S. in the 1980s. The Ioffes immigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, along with Simona's parents, the family dog and their 12-year-old son, Yevgeny.

The Ioffes had an extra complication, however: Simona had taught Yevgeny, who is deaf, to speak and read lips. He attended regular school in Russia and had adapted to the hearing world.

"So he was OK in Russian," Simona recalls, "but doing the same thing in English--we thought that would be impossible."

It wasn't, of course. Yevgeny attended Clark School for the Deaf in Northhampton, Massachusetts, on a scholarship, learned English and married a hearing woman.

Life had been difficult for the Ioffes as Jews in Russia. Even finding a job was tough. But it wasn't easy finding employment in America, either, for a pair of engineers who spoke limited English.

Eventually, Mikhail found a job as a technician at Fishman Transducers Inc., now a leading company in acoustic amplification for professional musicians. Simona soon joined Mikhail there as an assembler. Mikhail was quickly promoted to designer. He worked alongside owner Larry Fishman for 10 years, making pre-amplifiers that take a source signal from a guitar, for example, and pass it on to an amplifier.

"It was one of the best stages of our lives," Simona says, "and we were involved in all aspects of product development, customer support and troubleshooting--so we got to know the process from the inside." That proved useful when the couple decided to pursue their own business.

A couple of years after leaving Fishman to pursue other endeavors, they decided to plunge back into the acoustic industry as entrepreneurs. They had come to America with nothing but $200 and two suitcases. Now they were part of the American middle class.

"We had a car. We had a house. Now it was time for the last dream," Simona says. "We wanted to own our own company."

Simona knew that she and Mikhail could make the best pre-amp on the market. But she was canny enough to realize that simply building the best product wouldn't bring the world running to their door.

"We needed something absolutely unique," she says.

Pre-amps all have batteries, and musicians typically replace the battery--at about $2 a pop--before any gig. So Simona told her astonished husband to design a pre-amp that didn't require a battery.

The Ioffes designed it, patented it and established Mi-Si Electronics Design Inc. It takes 60 seconds to charge the pre-amp before a performance.

In addition to her work with Mi-Si, Simona earned a Ph.D. in audiology She performs in-home hearing tests and prescribes hearing aids. She likes helping people and feels as though she's giving back to a country that's been good to her.

"We love Boston, we love the weather, we love America," she says. "We believe if you need to emigrate, this is the only place in the world where you can feel comfortable and be successful."

China
After the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, Mei Xu and other college graduates were sent to work in the countryside and factories for their "re-education." Frustrated, Xu decamped to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a master's degree in journalism and communications at the University of Maryland.

Graduating in a tight job market, she took a position with a medical equipment company in New York, while husband and computer scientist David Wang remained in Washington, DC. Although her job was less than satisfying, for Xu, a self-described "fashionista," being on her own in New York was like being let loose in a candy store.

"It was a lot of fun," she recalls. "I was exposed to so much sensory experience."

Her husband had always wanted to start a business, and in New York she saw the possibilities everywhere she looked.

She focused on products for the home, and she and Wang began by importing items from China, ranging from silk flowers to candles. When the couple sold $90,000 worth of candles at a South Carolina trade show, she knew she'd found her niche.

Xu's next step was to add fragrance and unusual colors to her candles. She contacted fragrance magnate Peter Friend, who gave her a crash course in melting wax, adding color and mixing fragrances. She started experimenting in her Annapolis basement, using soup cans as molds and kitchen pots to melt the wax and add colors.

Fortuitously, as it turns out, Xu left out an ingredient designed to produce a satiny finish. Without that chemical, the candles came out with a unique snowflake texture. That texture became Chesapeake Bay Candle's signature finish.

The texture, however, wasn't the only unique thing about Xu's products. Her candles boasted atypical colors, such as lime green and mango, and she formulated unusual fragrances, pairing lime with ginger and basil with mint, for example.

Nordstrom snapped up the candles in 1995, and Bloomingdale's and Bed, Bath and Beyond started selling them the following year. By 1997, Xu realized that she needed a factory.

Undaunted, Xu contacted her sister, a computer engineer in China. Two months later, Chesapeake Bay was producing candles in China. (Today, her sister runs three Chinese factories.) Xu next set her sights on Target and secured all 800 Target stores at her first meeting with the company's buyer, who predicted $2.5 million in sales the first year, 1998.

That forecast turned out to be much too low. Xu was soon advised to triple her capacity, and the first year the candles garnered $8.3 million in sales.

Today, Chesapeake Bay has sales of $60 million in the U.S. and about $40 million globally. And in 2005 Xu added Blissliving Home, a line of home décor products that focuses on the bedroom and takes its inspiration from design ideas all over the world.

Xu's Chinese roots have been an asset to Chesapeake Bay in terms of sourcing items in China. For Blissliving, Xu has taken a more global approach. Materials come from Europe, India and Thailand, as well as China.

Xu gives America a large measure of credit for her phenomenal success.

"This is the country that gives people opportunities," Xu says. "That's why I chose to become an American."

India
Sneh Metani was 23 years old when she left India for America in 1971.

"I wanted to see America. I was fascinated by it," she recalls. She slept and showered at the bus station the first few days after arrival in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Thereafter she held a variety of jobs, from beautician to airline sales representative, before she found her calling in 1983. That's when a friend offered her the chance to open an Indian restaurant at a Penta hotel in Manhattan.

Despite her complete lack of experience, Mehtani jumped at the opportunity, contacting friends in Delhi who owned a restaurant.

"I talked to them and said, 'If I do it, would you help?' They said, 'Yes, we will.' "

At that time, Indian food wasn't as popular in the U.S. as it is today. However, Mehtani's husband, a former engineer, was working in the insurance field and helped steer business to Moghul.

"The Indian doctors were coming from India at that time, and my husband used to sit at the airport and do their insurance," she says. "He met a lot of people, and between his people and my people, we started the business." Mehtani Restaurant Group Mehtani Restaurant Group boast an empire of nine New Jersey eating and drinking establishments, plus the catering and consulting business, Your Weddings. Catering takes her to venues as far-flung as Arizona, Michigan, Florida and Puerto Rico.

It's a family affair. Son Shaun runs three of the restaurants, and husband Satish handles finances and construction on new restaurants. Mehtani herself has a flair for designing interiors.

"I feel satisfied that I achieved what I wanted," she says. She also gives generously to charitable causes. "We did well, and we like to pay back to America," she says.

Vietnam and Japan
There's an unmistakable international flair to Front Studio, a New York-based architectural firm owned by Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita. And no wonder.

Ha came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975, when she was just a year old. Her upbringing in a strict Buddhist household was different from that of her peers, she says, so to some extent she straddles the line between the American and Vietnamese cultures. Similarly, Yanagishita spent part of her childhood in Washington, DC, and part of it in Tokyo. Her family presently lives in Japan, and she retains her Japanese citizenship.

Between them, Ha and Yanagishita speak four languages--English, French, Vietnamese and Japanese. That's a point in their favor when it comes to landing international clients.

In fact, Ha says, her fluency in French landed her the project that initially funded Front Studio. A client with a project in New York needed an architect who could speak to his decorators in Paris.

"It enabled us to set up office space and buy equipment," she says.

Yanagishita says that being bilingual also affects the way she thinks. She believes her facility with two languages opens her to more artistic possibilities. "Since the languages are so different," she says, "the way you think is different."

Certainly, Front Studio's projects have a unique stamp. For example, at the Badge Building, a residential condo in Long Island City, the pair designed a curvy, sky-blue wall that transforms the lobby into a work of art. In remodeling a Brooklyn kitchen, they paired Ikea cabinets with a crystal chandelier. Their work ranges from French Embassy diplomatic residences in New York to the overhaul of a pedestrian overpass in Poland--which won an international competition--and the renovation of a Harlem townhouse.

"We try and work on competitions a lot," Ha says. "It's hard to do because it's not paid work, and you do it after hours." However, she adds, "It exercises our creativity and allows us to think with [fewer] physical boundaries."

The two women met when they were students at Carnegie-Mellon. But they parted ways for a number of years before joining forces to create their distinctive partnership.

Ha studied in Paris, worked for a boutique architecture firm in New York, then started Front Studio in 2001 with another partner from Carnegie-Mellon. Yanagishita worked for several architectural firms before joining Ha at Front Studio in 2005.

Yanagishita appreciates the contrast between Japan and the United States.

"In America you can be anything or do anything," she says. "You don't have to be bound by things you think you're supposed to do."

The duo's goal down the road is a staff of 10 or 20 people, larger projects and plenty of variety. Although Front Studio does mostly residential work now, it's starting to get more commercial work, designing office and retail spaces, Ha says.

"It's important to keep the mind active by not necessarily doing just one type of architecture but as many types of architecture as we can," Ha says. The firm's sales totaled about $250,000 last year, and Ha estimates that 2008 will see $250,000 to $500,000 in sales.

Ha's advice to other entrepreneurs:

"To be flexible--to have a dream but not worry so much about the path of how to get there. Michi and I agree, as long as we're having fun with this and we look forward to coming to work, then that's worth doing."