Why migrants have become key players in innovation

Audio 03:55

French police confiscate the tents of migrants with nowhere to go after the dismantling of a camp in Saint-Denis, on the night of November 23 to 24, 2020 © AFP / Greg Ozan

By: Dominique Baillard Follow

8 min

Migrants increasingly play a key role in technological innovation.

This is what the Germans are discovering today with the success of the vaccine from BioNtech, a company founded by two nationals of Turkish origin.

Publicity

The story of this couple of scientists who became successful entrepreneurs is enough to make the young generations of migrants living in Germany dream.

Thanks to their intuition and their tenacity,

, both doctors, both from a family of Turkish migrants, are revolutionizing the vaccine response.

On the way they join the club of great German fortunes.

Such success remains exceptional among the four million Turkish nationals living in Germany.

But this fairy tale may well have to repeat itself as migrants have become the spearhead of German tech.

One

in four German

was founded by a migrant or the son or daughter of a migrant.

For fifteen years, the number of businesses created by people of foreign origin has increased by a third while nationals have less and less appetite for business creation.

Is the Silicon Valley model taking a toll

?

It is true that in California, in the crucible of innovation, more than half of the

created between 1995 and 2005 are the work of migrants.

The Tesla electric car and the Google search engine are innovations brought by newcomers to American soil.

In the United Kingdom, entrepreneurs with an immigrant background are also over-represented in the tech sector with the same ratio: one

in two

founded by people of foreign origin.

And their success is resounding: 9 of the 14 British unicorns, that is to say promising companies worth today more than a billion dollars, were created by men - or women, of migration.

Many countries are trying to replicate this model with special programs to attract young foreign talent.

This is the case, among others, of France, Ireland, Estonia, Canada, Singapore, and Chile. 

But if migrants do better in Germany, it's not really because we roll out a red carpet for them

It is rather because they have difficulty in being recruited at their level of competence that they turn to business creation.

In Germany, getting a foreign diploma recognized is an obstacle course, and those who have arrived to escape war or other disaster have often lost their precious diploma along the way.

The experience of exile has made them hardened, it multiplies their energy and their determination to overcome the multiple obstacles which mark out the creation of a business.

This is true for those who arrive in Europe as well as for those who are tempted by the

.

The Chinese Eric Yuan, the founder of the Zoom application, which became our essential virtual meeting place during the confinement, had to do it 8 times before obtaining a visa for the United States.

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