Reaping The Benefits Of A Migrant Population
I'm a firm believer that the free movement of people is beneficial in so many ways. For instance, research has shown that both science and innovation benefit when people travel and live outside of their homeland. The general finding underpinning these trends is that innovation is increasingly recombinative, which in lay terms means that most innovation today sees existing ideas and innovations spun in novel new ways.
Migration helps this as the act of living abroad allows us to bring values and norms from our homeland into a new environment, which can spark a wave of fresh ideas. What's more, this cultural reassessment can prove hugely beneficial to our work in other ways too as people act as cultural and intellectual bridges between the two cultures.
This has been shown to massively help introduce new businesses into territories or to help bring finance and knowledge into the homeland of the migrant.
The introduction of free movement across the European Union has allowed us to monitor the impact this has had on the flow of knowledge, and research shows the benefits to be considerable.
What's more, recent data from the U.K. government highlights how migrants are almost universally beneficial to their host country. They don't really undercut wages, they're typically better trained than native workers, and because of their age they contribute far more to the public purse than they "consume."