Few subjects generate more heat and less light than migration, and any honest look at what migrants bring has to begin by admitting that the debate is genuinely contested and the effects are genuinely mixed. But contested is not the same as unknown. Economists have studied this for decades, and once you set aside both the boosterish and the alarmist versions, a fairly clear picture emerges: migrants bring real and substantial value to the societies that receive them, the value is larger in some areas than the headlines suggest and smaller in others, and how much of it a country actually captures depends heavily on the choices that country makes. Here is what the evidence shows, disputes included.
The startup engine runs on migrants
Start where the value is least ambiguous, because it happens to be the area a technology audience knows best. Immigrants are wildly overrepresented among the people who build the companies that define modern economies. According to a 2026 analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or co-founded 455 of America’s 775 billion-dollar startups, roughly 59 per cent, and the collective value of those immigrant-founded companies came to about 5 trillion dollars, more than the entire stock market of every country in the world bar a handful.
These founders came from some 76 different countries, and they did not merely enrich themselves. They built firms that employ enormous numbers of native-born workers, pay large sums in tax, and push whole industries forward. The pattern is not unique to Silicon Valley either; across Europe, a strikingly high share of fast-growing technology firms have a founder who arrived from somewhere else. Migration and entrepreneurship are deeply linked, partly because the sort of person willing to uproot their life and start again in a strange country is, almost by definition, a risk-taker, and risk-taking is the raw material of new businesses.
They tend to pay in more than they take out
The second area of value is fiscal, and here the honest answer is more modest but still positive. The exhaustive review by the United States National Academies of Sciences concluded that immigration has little effect on the wages and employment of native-born workers over the long term, that immigrants contribute significantly to human capital, entrepreneurship and innovation, and that high-skilled immigrants in particular raise patenting and productivity in ways essential to long-run growth. Comparable OECD work across dozens of countries finds that immigrants are typically net contributors to the public purse, though the size of that contribution is usually small and swings with how many of them are in work.
That last point is the crucial one, and it cuts against the simple slogan. Migrants are not a fiscal windfall, and they are not a drain either. On average they pay in slightly more than they take out, and the gap widens sharply the more of them are employed. A working migrant is a taxpayer; an idle one is a cost. Which of those a country produces is largely a matter of policy, not of the migrants themselves.
The demographic maths is quietly decisive
There is a third form of value that rarely makes the front page but may matter most of all. Nearly every wealthy society is ageing, with birth rates below replacement and a swelling population of retirees leaning on a shrinking base of workers. Migrants, who arrive disproportionately young and of working age, soften that arithmetic directly. They fill the shifts in hospitals and care homes, staff the warehouses and building sites, and pay into the pension and health systems that an ageing native population is drawing down. In many countries the alternative to immigration is not a higher-wage economy but simply a smaller and older one, with fewer hands to do the work the elderly increasingly need done. That is not an ideological claim; it is a demographic one.
The honest disputes
None of this means the concerns are baseless, and pretending otherwise is how the pro-migration case loses credibility. The most serious dispute is about wages at the bottom. While the average native worker is barely affected, the effect is not evenly spread. The economist George Borjas has argued, against the more optimistic consensus associated with David Card, that large inflows of low-skilled migrants can measurably depress the wages of the native workers who compete most directly with them, often earlier immigrants and those without a high school education. The profession has not fully settled this, and anyone who tells you it is obvious in either direction is overselling. The gains from migration are real, but they are unevenly distributed, and the people who bear the costs are frequently those least able to absorb them.
There are other honest caveats. Rapid, poorly managed migration can strain housing, schools and public services faster than they can expand, which is felt acutely at the local level whatever the national accounts say. Integration is not automatic, and where it fails the fiscal and social benefits shrink or reverse. And averages hide a great deal: the skilled founder and the struggling new arrival are both migrants, but they bring very different things. The value is real, but it is a potential to be realised, not a guarantee that arrives with a passport.
Where it leaves us
Put the evidence together and the picture is neither the threat of the alarmists nor the unmixed blessing of the enthusiasts. Migrants build a remarkable share of the world’s most valuable companies, they generally pay in more than they cost, they prop up the finances of societies that are otherwise ageing towards decline, and they do all this while imposing real, concentrated costs on some native workers and some local services that deserve to be taken seriously rather than waved away.
The useful conclusion is not that migration is always good or always bad, but that it is a genuinely large source of value whose benefits a country either captures or squanders depending on how well it helps people find work, settle and contribute. Handled well, migration is one of the most reliable engines of prosperity a society has. Handled badly, it delivers the costs without the gains. The migrants bring the value. Whether it is realised is up to the rest of us.
