How Do You Deal With Immigrants?

Research by Duke, UC-Berkeley, NYU and Harvard has revealed that immigrants founded 52 percent of start-up companies in Silicon Valley between 1995 to 2005 and filed 25.6 percents of patents in the U.S. Immigrants start companies at twice the ratio of the U.S. population. One quarter of American Nobel Prize winners since 1901 have been immigrants. One quarter of the Nobel Prizes that came to the UK were won by immigrants from outside. Today, a third of all the scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley are immigrants or foreign-born. Furthermore, 40 percent of the Ph.D. scientists working in the U.S. are foreign-born.It is not that only good things are ascribed to them. Immigrants have been blamed for  everything from  terrorist-created swine flu pandemic to unemployment, crimes and what have you. The natives keep thinking of solutions to keep out the immigrants. The solutions to keep them out often sees ingenious suggestions - including one that advises having them take intelligence tests! For instance, in Germany, Peter Trapp, a domestic policy expert with the ruling conservative CDU party in Berlin, said; "We have to establish criteria for immigration that really benefit our country." In addition to adequate education and job qualifications, one benchmark should be intelligence. I am in favor of intelligence tests for immigrants. We cannot continue to make this issue taboo."Immigrants raise the hackles of nations. The "natives" dislike this group that seems to be claiming space which the natives do not wish to share. This feeling of resentment towards immigrants results in discrimination, hate crimes and in many cases denial of even basic human rights. Natives resent the immigrants getting voting rights and access to health, education, housing and certainly the subsidies that seem to go towards supporting immigrants. Many elections are won or lost on the issue of the government being too supportive or lenient towards immigrants than the original inhabitants of the land.Even organizations face immigrants. They face two kinds of immigrants - the ones that step in when a company acquires another or when they hire new employees. Just walk in to a company that has acquired another player and ask them about how well they have managed to engage with the minds and hearts of the employees of the acquired companies and you will see what I mean. Scratch the surface and you will see that almost all struggle with these "immigrants" and how to integrate them. There is disproportionate time and effort put in during mergers and acquisitions to blend the sales engine, the financial systems etc but not enough in taking care of integrating the immigrants who will now be part of the new landscape. So while the merger takes place smoothly on paper, the integration in the minds and hearts of the natives and immigrants rarely (if ever) happens quickly.The same thing happens when a company does not spend time integrating their new hires. We all know that new hires brought in from other companies are chosen because they bring in a fresh perspective and valuable experience from the world outside, but that is precisely why they annoy the old timers of any organization. The new hires seem to question the time honored traditions. They do not know even speak the language in which the natives communicate. Just ask an immigrant if they understand all the acronyms in their new land.  No wonder they all look blank each time someone uses an acronym in a meeting and some will even interrupt to ask silly questions. The well meaning natives very often will advise the immigrants to first learn to become one of the natives and then try out new ideas. So every effort will be made to "Widget-ize" all new hires of Widgets Ltd. Unfortunately it is this very process of making the new hires fit in that can lead to an organization becoming extremely inward looking.Immigrants bring with them the lens of curiosity. They can quickly discover inconsistencies and question practices that have been time honored in their new home. They do not understand what may be obvious to natives. Yet, looking at the organization through the lenses of a new hire can be the greatest opportunity one could leverage. But that is also threatening. No wonder organizations drag their feet before they grant the freedom of speech and the right to vote, to immigrants. Just as countries debate how long the person must stay in a country to be eligible for citizenship, the organizations also have an informal understanding of how long it takes a new hire to prove their allegiance to the new employer before they are granted "citizenship". This is the organizational equivalent of giving the immigrants the right to franchise and freedom of speech. At the risk of incurring the displeasure of few natives, this can be the single largest advantage that an organization could get.So the next time when a new hire looks fondly into the horizon and starts off saying, "When I was working for ..." do not rush up to stop the rambling. Look at what new ideas you could get from the immigrant. It is an opportunity to benchmark with the world outside. Just as the nations who have integrated the immigrants well tend to gain substantially from, so do the organizations that win the minds and hearts of the new hires.