Immigrants are the secret engines of innovation:

Immigrants are the secret engines of innovation.

They are the ones who push the boundaries of what’s possible.

They don’t take no for an answer. They keep going.

When you come from another country to the West, everything seems amazing because it’s so different from the third world.

People have opportunities. If you work hard, you can achieve so much.

If you outwork your competition over long periods of time, you can get so much farther than others.

But it’s not just work because a cashier may work for just as long, but not have had the same opportunity as others.

It’s about education.

Immigrant parents sacrifice so much for their kids to get an education.

They drill into them from a young age how important a work ethic is.

Sure it’s not all immigrant parents, but if you take hard working people from the third world who have achieved success in those places, it’s likely those kids are going to be successful in a new environment.

Why?

Because they’ll have opportunities their parents never had.

If they’re able to go to a good school and have good access to healthcare that’s paid for by the government, they have an equal chance at achieving a great life. Especially if they’re fleeing a war torn country or one that’s affected by climate change.

This is why I think Canada could have a major advantage in the next decade if they play their cards right.

If crime continues to go up in the US, politicians like Trump blame immigrants for their problems, and they can’t solve their healthcare issue, Canada becomes a pretty attractive destination.

If you can get over the weather, it’s a fantastic place to live.

This is why I also think Australia may have a massive advantage because the weather is so great. Although it’s not on the East Coast of the US or close to Europe’s timezone, they’re close to Asia.

That’s where the world is going.

China is tough for immigrants because you have to speak the language.

The thing is there’s so many English speakers so it’s easier to get around the Western countries or Australia.

I wonder who’s going to be the Asian country that steps up immigration because they’ll have a massive advantage in the next 50 years.

Nearly half of all S&P 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their kids.

Think about that, 45% of all companies in the US were founded by people not directly born there or who’s parents came to those countries for better opportunities.

That’s a lot of productivity and economic power created by outsiders.

There’s going to be so many more climate refugees in the next 50 years, on top of the ones who are leaving war torn countries and whoever captures a lot of them could have the next Elon Musk, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos in their country.

The conditions have to be solid in their country to let these kids thrive and have a more equal opportunity.

Sure there’s a lot of confirmation bias in this argument, but it’s also a feeling.

I’ve grown up that way and seen how valuing education is important to the trajectory of someone’s life.

I look at friends who go to University of Toronto’s med program for example and see many brown or Asian kids.

Those are all immigrant kids.

When your parents value education for highly skilled jobs like medicine, law, and engineering, you’re going to have a lot of kids striving to achieve that.

Hard work pays off. There’s this sense in me that the proportion of kids who work hard is proportionally higher in immigrants than those whose parents have lived in a specific place for generations.

People feel entitled by what they have.

Immigrant parents keep you in check. They teach you to respect authority. They show you through their actions how much they work to survive. They’re often working jobs that are not as skilled as compared to where they’re from but they’re doing it to give their kids a better opportunity at life.

The reason this came up is because I recently listened to an All-In podcast episode and Chamath Palihipatya was talking about a new innovation in batteries. He mentioned how the people working on superconductors were all immigrants or kids of immigrants.

There’s this thing in them that just pushes through no matter the failure. They face problems head on but just keep working. There’s no sense of entitlement, it’s continuously working on a problem for years at a time.

The next global innovators that are going to solve the world’s biggest problems like climate change are going to be immigrants. They’re going to be outsiders who don’t accept failure and just keep going.

So whichever country invests heavily in bringing in high skilled immigrants will win the next several decades.

There was a paper written on this exact issue and here was the conclusion:

‘In summary, our study – which is based on a large new data set matching millions of inventors from patent records to individuals in Federal Censuses – provides suggestive evidence that immigrant inventors were of central importance to American innovation during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although the migration of high-skilled inventors to the US involved some costs, immigrant inventors contributed heavily to new idea creation, through both their own work and collaboration with domestic inventors. Our evidence aligns with the view that growth in an economy is determined by its ablest innovators, regardless of national origin. The movement of high-skilled individuals across national borders therefore appears to have aided the development of the United States as an innovation hub.’

America was the innovation engine in the 19th and 20th century, so who’s it going to be in the 21st century?

The race is on.