Immigrant labour has made outsize economic contributions to the world’s wealthiest countries

As anti-immigration rhetoric surges across Europe and the United States, it is vital that we look beyond the fearmongering and analyse what is really going on. While human mobility is often presented as a burden, the truth is quite the opposite. It is an essential driver of economic growth, demographic resilience and cultural cohesion.

Ignoring this fact is not just a miscalculation – it flies in the face of both empirical evidence and the democratic principles that modern societies claim to defend.

Migration is also not a 21st century anomaly. From the Mediterranean diasporas of antiquity to the mass migrations of the 20th century, human history has been defined by movement. City-states, colonial empires and modern nation-states have been built – and rebuilt – through the movement of people, languages, knowledge and goods. Presenting human mobility as a threat ignores this historical pattern, and tries to turn the exception – isolation – into the rule.

Any political discourse that presents migrants as intruders, rather than as potential citizens or economic agents, is a dangerous distortion, not only in moral but also in strategic terms.

Migration drives economies

In 2016, an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute drew some compelling conclusions. While migrants accounted for only 3.3% of the global population in 2015,...

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