The Talent Pool of Immigrants
They are a talent pool that raises the most eyebrows. We resist them. Should we?
The Economist’s cover story this week caught my attention. It was all about attracting talent - defined as people with undergraduate degrees and beyond. There is a great case to be made for immigrants. The immigrants (foreign born) make up 14% of the population in America, but 16% of the inventors are immigrants. Immigrants account for 23% of the patents and when the many value of these patents is calculated, the immigrants contribute 36% of the innovation. And there are new talent pools emerging with Digital Natives who make up 14% of Americans. (Read The Economist’s View)
Given the greying population in many parts of the world, countries (and communities) will need to rethink their views about immigrants. That also means questioning the politicians who have told us that immigrants take away our jobs. They don’t. They are 80% more likely to attract investments and bring in companies from their home country. That creates jobs.
Work permits vs citizenship
Dubai makes it easy for immigrants to get a work permit. Citizenship is not that easy to get. Anyone who earns more than $13,600 (approx 50,000 Dirhams) a month gets a 10 year Golden Visa. It takes a week for the expats to get a drivers license, open a bank account, a mobile phone connection, and a credit card to start operating in Dubai.
“Britain an obsession with cutting overall migration has led the Labour government to urge tech firms to hire fewer foreign en-gineers, on the false premise that this will create more high-tech jobs for natives. As for America, though it has the world's most attractive labour market, it has one of the vvorld's most dysfunctional immigration systems,”says The Economist. In many cases it is easier for an illegal immigrant to claim asylum than to come in through the legal system and get a work permit.
Two third of permanent resident visas in the United States are given to family based migrants and 13.5% are given to employment based migraine annually.
The Truth About Immigration
Zeke Hernandez has this book called The Truth About Immigration. It opens with a quiz that is quite sobering. The most common fear is that immigrants take away jobs. They don’t. Skilled immigrants have a positive effect on the employment of native workers, meaning that they create new jobs. Unskilled immigrants have a neutral effect, meaning they do not take jobs from native workers.
The other fear is that the immigrants do not assimilate well into the local communities. The data shows that immigrant assimilated the same rate today, both economically and culturally as they did more than 100 years ago. A lot of violent crime is attributed to the immigrants. The violent crime rate for undocumented immigrants is 55% lower than that of native born individuals.
Innovation needs new ways of thinking
The knowledge network of immigrants are one of those differences, the relationships they maintain in the home countries and the experiences they had while living there, allow them to unlock and transfer new ideas to the adopted countries.
Many of the high-tech companies that we take for granted was started by immigrants. Intel, Google, Instacart, Stripe, Tesla, Databricks, Nvidia, Epic Games, Discord, Zoom… that is quite a list.
Will AI change the need for immigrants?
Think of ChatGPT, the most famous product that OpenAI launched. Open AI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever was born in Russia, raised in Israel and educated in Canada. Between 2014 and 2018, nearly 1800 people graduated from top US universities with PhDs in AI. 53% of them were immigrants.
Immigrants represent 39% of science and engineering workers with Masters degree and 45% of those with doctorates. They are pivotal in fields like computer, science, biotech technology, physics, social science, and engineering.
Nearly a quarter of science and engineering workers with PhD are Chinese. Indians make up 15% of that group followed by Iranians, Taiwanese and South Koreans. Each of whom contribute about 4% of the AI talent pool. 53% of the worlds migrant Nobel Prize winners, 57% profits migrant inventor and 41% of its educated migrants live in the US.
The way to the talent pool is through the stomach
AI is going to do a lot of the routine grunt work. The talent pool of humans will have to work on creative projects. We have all seen that countries that attract the world’s talent are the ones that create path breaking products. Immigrants bring in money, create jobs, innovate, drive up consumption and pay towards the state pension funds of every government. Bringing in immigrant workers is a smart way for countries that are dealing with a greying world. Access to global media has made it possible for kids in rural India to dance to Korean pop. Bollywood’s soft power is stronger than what any legislation can create to keep away the youth. The genie is out of the bottle.
When people move to a new country they feel home sick. They want to try the cuisine that they grew up with. Someone starts a small restaurant and that attracts the people who were craving that taste. Vey soon the locals start sampling the food and the slow integration of the immigrant starts happening.
Here is a piece of graffiti I saw in a small tow in Scotland
