Migrants Built the West. Now We Blame Them.

America, Britain and Germany became richer by importing people, skills, ideas and ambition. The real migration scandal is how quickly we forget it.

One of the strangest things about today’s migration “debate” is that some of the countries that have benefited most from immigration now seem determined to portray it as a national catastrophe.

History tells a rather different story. I was reminded of this recently while reading about Malacca, one of the great trading cities of Southeast Asia.

Malacca did not become rich despite the Gujaratis, Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Tamils, Javanese, Sumatrans and Malays who converged there. It became rich precisely because they converged there.

People arrived carrying far more than labour. They brought languages, skills, capital, technologies, religions, recipes, commercial contacts and different ways of solving problems.

Put enough different networks into the same place and interesting things start to happen. History is full of cities like this: Alexandria, Constantinople, Venice, Amsterdam, London, New York, Singapore. Yet we cling to the curious idea that successful nations were once culturally pure places which  became diluted by foreigners. Nothing could be further from the truth.

America may be the greatest immigration success story in recent history

Take the United States. A 2025 analysis of the Fortune 500 found that 46.2% of America’s 500 largest companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Those 231 companies generated $8.6 trillion in annual revenue.

I am talking about Amazon, Apple, Nvidia and Levi Strauss.

America did not merely tolerate immigrants while somehow becoming the world’s greatest economic power around them. Immigrants helped build that economic power.

That makes some current political stances extraordinary. For example, Donald Trump’s mother was an immigrant from Scotland. His paternal grandfather arrived from Germany at the age of 16. His wife Melania was born in Slovenia, moved to New York and later became a naturalised American citizen.

“Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938

This isn’t a cheap argument that says, Your family migrated, therefore you cannot favour immigration controls. Of course countries need borders and immigration rules. But let us not forget that migration is woven into the very success story that politicians invoke when they promise to make America great again.

Take the migrants out of American history and there isn’t much of America left.

Britain has an equally selective memory

Britain congratulates itself on the NHS while frequently becoming agitated about the foreigners living among us. Around one in five NHS staff in England are non-British nationals.

Among doctors it is approximately 36%.

Among nurses, around 30%.

So we have arrived at the peculiar situation in which politicians can blame immigration for putting pressure on public services that could barely function without immigrants.

That doesn’t mean migration places no pressure on public services. Of course it can. More people require more homes, schools, doctors, transport and infrastructure. There is, however, a rather important missing step in that argument: we have to build them.

Britain’s own Migration Advisory Committee has acknowledged that the UK does not have a strong record of ensuring that infrastructure investment keeps pace with population growth. If a government allows the population to increase while failing to build enough houses, and rents subsequently soar, it is politically convenient to blame the people who arrived. Yet this is clearly blaming the wrong people.

The same applies to wages. Employers importing cheap labour while refusing to train local workers can cause genuine problems. Migrants can be exploited. Communities can change too rapidly. Integration can fail. But these are all cogent arguments for competent migration policy, labour protection, housing construction and investment. They are not evidence that foreigners make countries poorer.

Indeed, British government research has found migrant workers bringing skills, international networks and knowledge that helped companies innovate, improve productivity and expand into overseas markets.

Once again: migrant workers are not a burden reluctantly carried by the economy. They are instead a crucial part of the economy.

And then there is Germany

Germany provides an even more striking historical example. During the post-war Wirtschaftswunder, its booming economy ran short of workers.

So Germany went looking for them.

„Wir riefen Arbeitskräfte, und es kamen Menschen.“
— Max Frisch

It recruited Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Turks, Moroccans, Portuguese, Tunisians and Yugoslavs as Gastarbeiter. Germany’s own Federal Agency for Civic Education now says those migrant workers contributed “to a high degree” to the economic miracle.

And there is a wonderful sequel. One Turkish Gastarbeiter worked at the Ford factory in Cologne. His four-year-old son joined him in Germany. That boy was Uğur Şahin.

Decades later, Şahin and Özlem Türeci — herself the daughter of Turkish migrants — co-founded BioNTech and led the work that produced one of the world’s first successful mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

The journey from Turkish guest worker to German biotechnology pioneer took one generation.

And yet Germany now has one of Europe’s most successful anti-immigration parties.

Its leader, Alice Weidel, combines calls for mass so-called “re-migration” with a thoroughly international private life: she has lived and worked in several countries and shares her family life with her Swiss, Sri Lanka-born wife, partly in Switzerland.

There is something almost comic about modern nationalism, were not actually so toxic for our society.

Globalisation for me. Borders for you.

Migration is not magic

None of this proves that every form of immigration, at every level, is automatically beneficial. That would be just as simplistic as claiming that immigration is automatically harmful.

Rapid migration can strain housing. It can complicate integration. It can create competition especially at the bottom of the labour market. Cultural diversity sometimes produces friction rather than harmony.

Malaysia provides a fascinating historical warning about this. British colonial authorities encouraged large-scale Chinese and Indian migration partly because they wanted economic development. After independence, many Malays feared they were becoming economically disadvantaged in their own country. Those tensions eventually contributed to terrible ethnic violence in 1969.

Fortunately, the Malaysian government faced the right question full-on: how does a society capture the enormous economic and cultural benefits of migration while managing its genuine pressures fairly?

Unfortunately, blaming foreigners is considerably easier. Perhaps that is why the tactic is so old.

History nevertheless keeps giving us the same awkward answer: successful societies are rarely sealed containers. They grow by exchanging people, ideas, technologies, capital and culture with the world around them. We see concrete examples when we look at Malacca, London, New York, Singapore, the United States, Britain and Germany.

And long after migrants have helped transform a country, something else happens. Their children become natives. Their food becomes national cuisine. Their businesses become national institutions. Their inventions become national achievements. And eventually, everybody forgets that they were foreigners at all.

Migrants don’t simply move into successful societies.

Again and again, they help create them.

“If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
— Ronald Reagan, 1989