Photo: Drew Nash/Times News
Hamdi Ulukaya believes deeply in helping refugees, employing hundreds at his flourishing yogurt company, Chobani. He may be motivated by ethical and business reasons, but as new research shows, employing migrants is also great for the economy of the receiving country.
Now that I’m back at my volunteer gig (helping ESL teachers work with refugees and other immigrants), you can expect more on the topic of migration. Honestly, it’s hard for me to understand antipathy to migrants. On an individual basis, sure, you meet some who, like other humans, may be self-centered or grumpy, but most are incredibly grateful for any help and just a delight to be around.
As many people already know, companies often find that hiring immigrants is good business. Now there is research suggesting it can also improve productivity in the receiving nation.
Dany Bahar and Hillel Rapoport write at the London School of Economics blog, “Similarly to trade and investment, migration is also linked to productivity: as people move across locations, they typically bring along new skills and knowledge to their country of destination. In similar ways, countries of origin can also benefit from the skills and knowledge that their emigrants gain while abroad. If this process of knowledge diffusion through migration is significant, we should be able to see it in important economic outcomes, such as productivity.
“This was the main goal of our recent paper. In our research, we explored a novel aspect of how migrants can induce productivity, investigating whether and how they can contribute to the export diversification of countries by fuelling the emergence of new export sectors. …
“In particular, we found that a 10 per cent increase in the immigrant stock from countries that export a certain good can explain a 2 per cent improvement in the probability of the receiving country exporting this same good to the rest of the world, competitively and from scratch. Our results, therefore, imply that the inflow of immigrants coming from countries with a comparative advantage in a given product can lead to a strong increase in the likelihood that the receiving country will start to export that same product competitively in the following ten years. …
“Migration may be, perhaps, the most effective driver of knowledge diffusion across nations. This is due to the ability of migrants to bring along ‘tacit knowledge’: a type of knowledge that requires direct human interaction to be transferred appropriately, and hence cannot be embedded in goods or written down on a website or a piece of paper,” as other researchers have shown.
You can read more at the London School of Economics, here.
I wish everyone could have an experience similar to yours–it would be sure to change attitudes.
There are few things as powerful as face-to-face contact.