This is an interesting phenomenon that has happened before. You can look back at most ancient empires and find that at their peak they had vibrant cities, populated with the best and brightest from all over the world. Egypt, Athens, Rome, etc. People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
That makes the current debates in the US and the EU about limiting migration so silly and backwards. I come from the Netherlands; a country that used to punch way above its weight economically, militarily, and scientifically in the seventeenth century when New York was still called New Amsterdam. That happened on the tail-end of the rest of Europe pushing out intellectuals, religious minorities, etc. a lot of whom ended up in Amsterdam. You might think of Amsterdam as the seventeenth century Silicon Valley. Modern day dutch politics are dominated by populists with an anti migrant sentiment. They are longing for the good old days when the Netherlands was so great without realizing that migrants were a big part of that greatness.
Later London took over. And eventually the US ended up absorbing a lot of immigrants and became a world power. Twentieth century New York became the amazing place it is today. These events are not disconnected. You need a critical mass of migrants for stuff like this to happen.
I currently live in Berlin, which has a lot of people moving to it from all over the place. It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades. If it does, it will be despite of the locals. Silicon Valley increasingly feels like it has a lot of greatness in its past but not necessarily in its future. There sure is a lot of money there. And some good universities. But moving there is not the logical move it would have been twenty years ago. I never did but it could have easily happened.
> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
Not saying you're wrong.. but what's the proof? It's easy to think of counterexamples. Places like Malaysia that are full of immigrants and are not particularly successful. Or Japan, which is notoriously insular and successful. London has the whole industrial revolution and boom before colonialism and the wave of immigrants
One would also expect a major difference between for instance the US siphoning off the world's top talent (ex: post USSR collapse immigrants from the scientific community) and undereducated economic refugees from Central America. For instance you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders in the US (not the best metric, but still)
I'm not a historian of course. But it seems that the empirical evidence is that this has repeated itself historically. You look at historic hubs of innovation and scientific progress and you usually find them in places with migration and relatively wealthy and free thinking populations.
But of course there are counter examples and there are probably other factors. London's industrial revolution and the boom of the British empire was driven by trade and a scientific revolution. That started with them cutting loose from the catholic church and limiting the power of royals. The resulting influx of people from all over Europe and later the rest of the world probably helped. Some of the more radical people at the time actually ended up in New England where they helped bootstrap the modern USA.
Japan's industrial revolution started with the royals realizing they needed to catch up and importing a lot of knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_era. Japan of course did not keep the foreigners but they did catch up in a hurry by interacting with a lot of them. China is doing an interesting reverse take on this where they send people all over the world and they then bring back knowledge.
So, yes it's not all black and white. But this stuff usually starts with places being open to outside influences and importing and generating a lot of new knowledge and skills locally. Typically, with the help of foreigners in some way. London is a melting pot of nationalities from all over their empire. And the US bootstrapped from the British empire and absorbing bits and pieces from other European colonists (Dutch, French, Spanish, etc.).
There is a difference between huge cities of cheap labor and innovation hubs.
> you're not exactly seeing a flood of Latin-America-born founders
Maybe not of tech companies, but you'll be shocked how many highly profitable "boring" companies like construction companies, staffing agencies, and auto sales/repair companies are owned by Latina/Latino owners. BTW: owning a business is legal, even if you are in the US illegally, also that has fueled a boom.
>It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades.
I would bet the exact opposite.
Let's start off simply with the fact that Berlin is not intended to be SF or SV in any capacity by the German elite(you're better off going to Munich or Frankfurt for that). There is 0 institutional interest to make it an innovation hub on top of the political center, as once again this can be done elsewhere(preferably closer to actual industrial centres).
Secondly, it's simply impossible to get tier 0 tech talent to come to Berlin(unless you give a lot of equity or you have a very elaborate scheme to pay them via offshore, which most startuppers simply don't know how to do) due to salary/tax differentials with either US or even something like Zürich/London.
Lastly, there is 0 evidence that I've seen that German bureaucracy(Berlin included) is going to down, and that's been the case since the last 10 years. This will pretty cleanly stop most innovation.
Except at that time migration was a relatively hard process and quite time consuming so those who migrated had interest in migrating there to conduct business. Not just to come to the streets paved with gold.
For the last 20 years across the whole western world we have seen that despite having more migrants than ever, the cities are not becoming cleaner or more vibrant - but rather everything goes backwards.
Ancient empires, early 20th century USA etc. succeeded not due to migration but due to government and people willing to work for the government to make it more successful.
And expensive. In many cases if you were poor you needed to be hardworking or already semi successful at business to afford emigration. Plus you'd really get cut off from everything you left behind. Has nothing to do with today's emigration that probably equates to moving to a different town in the same country back then.
Yeah. It is basically coming to streets paved with gold - "I will come here and will have access to more services and things to do. There are lot of friends and compatriots".
Netherlands back then flourished thanks to being a trade superpower (similar to Venice a couple centuries earlier), not thanks to being open to immigrants. Poland was also extremely open to immigrants back then, but didn’t have the high seas trade and colonial empire - and didn’t do nearly as well as Netherlands did.
How do you think it became a trade super power? It was interacting with a lot of foreigners. And that was after they cut loose from the Spanish Empire around the same time of the Spanish Inquisition and the arrival of a lot of Spanish jews, French Huegenots, and lots of others in the Netherlands. The renaissance started in Venice and then moved North.
To my understanding, Netherlands had a long-standing tradition of maritime commerce. Before discovery of sea routes to Asia and Americas, they were doing a lot of trading within Europe (e.g. selling Polish grain on the Western markets). After the discoveries, it was somewhat natural for them to expand on to new markets. Spanish Jews or French Hugenots (to my knowledge) didn't have much of expertise in terms maritine commerce, so I don't think they were a factor (however, the Jews might have facilitated development of financial markets for financing the overseas trading expeditions).
I see many people speculating in the comments about whether or not this may be true. Amy Chua wrote a book (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Empire) which makes exactly that point and presents compelling evidence going back as far as the Mongol empire.
The modern immigration is a lot different than in the past. Amsterdam, London or New York offered no support to immigrants, more like the opposite, where immigrants worked themselves to death in factories, plantation, mining, etc.
And modern immigration can split between legal immigrants with skilled professionals and illegal immigrants.
Europe is receiving a lot of ilegal economic immigrants with low education, doesn’t know german/french/italian/dutch or barely know English, and many are religious fundamentalist. What kind of innovation do you expect from them?
I don’t understand why Europe keeps accepting ilegal immigrants.
> People confuse cause and effect here. These places become so great because of the people that move there.
What’s your evidence for this? It’s more plausible that immigrants come to rich places for the potential to make money.
I don’t know about the Netherlands, but Silicon Valley arose in America during a time of historically low immigration. 1920s immigration reforms caused the foreign born population to drop from 15% to under 5% by 1970. Bill Shockley was born in London to American parents but raised in America. Six of the “traitorous eight” that founded Fairchild semiconductor were born in America. All the founders of Intel were born in America, same for AMD.
The UK established world dominance due to colonial trade during its Empire era, the industrial revolution, and the rise of financial institutions (in the early 19th century).
The UK's international heyday came at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Arguably, the power and influence of the UK has declined significantly since WW2.
Immigration to the UK prior to WW2 was pretty minor (e.g. the Huguenots and Irish immigrants). The last census prior to WW2 was in 1931 and showed England and Wales had only a 2.1% foreign-born population. By comparison, immigrants made up 6.6% of France's population.
Widespread immigration only occurred in the post-WW2 period, due to serious labour shortages in the UK. It was then that large numbers of immigrants, mostly from former colonies, settled in London. And then there were significant waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 20th century due to globalisation and the enlargement of the European Union.
With that in mind, we need to be careful we're not confusing correlation and causation.
My interpretation of the timeline is that the UK became an immigration magnet due to its prosperity, rather than its prosperity being the result of mass immigration.
> My interpretation of the timeline is that the UK became an immigration magnet due to its prosperity, rather than its prosperity being the result of mass immigration.
Also by having colonized a bunch of places whose residents then wanted to move to the UK.
I do agree with you here, but the broader problem with immigration is that in the context of your point I'd say that those weren't war torn or economic/welfare migrants but people who knew that heading to Rome would be for business first.
Essentially the type of immigration and it's lax rules in Europe isn't really comparable to labor immigrants, when you can have an entire city area of people who only lives on welfare with 0% interest in getting a job or even learning the language.
Which causes taxation to be delegated to an endless spiral of newly arrived immigrants who repeat the cycle.
And with that foundation you don't either always get 2nd/3rd generation that are working but instead doing crime.
Which drives the demand for labor immigrants down because they ofc don't want to establish themselves in a country that is dangerous.
Hence why most of the anti immigrantion policies are meant to only curb economic/welfare migrants and limit for now war refugees.
Ironically, most of the immigrants to Europe are from countries that have a strong sense of nationality and would never tolerate mass immigration into their own countries.
That makes the current debates in the US and the EU about limiting migration so silly and backwards. I come from the Netherlands; a country that used to punch way above its weight economically, militarily, and scientifically in the seventeenth century when New York was still called New Amsterdam. That happened on the tail-end of the rest of Europe pushing out intellectuals, religious minorities, etc. a lot of whom ended up in Amsterdam. You might think of Amsterdam as the seventeenth century Silicon Valley. Modern day dutch politics are dominated by populists with an anti migrant sentiment. They are longing for the good old days when the Netherlands was so great without realizing that migrants were a big part of that greatness.
Later London took over. And eventually the US ended up absorbing a lot of immigrants and became a world power. Twentieth century New York became the amazing place it is today. These events are not disconnected. You need a critical mass of migrants for stuff like this to happen.
I currently live in Berlin, which has a lot of people moving to it from all over the place. It's too early to tell for sure but I wouldn't be surprised to see some beautiful things happen here over the course of the next decades. If it does, it will be despite of the locals. Silicon Valley increasingly feels like it has a lot of greatness in its past but not necessarily in its future. There sure is a lot of money there. And some good universities. But moving there is not the logical move it would have been twenty years ago. I never did but it could have easily happened.