Migrants founded 59% of US billion-dollar startups in one 2026 analysis, while their fiscal effects vary across countries and levels of government

Correction, 15 September 2026: The original headline said migrants generally pay more tax than they cost and prop up ageing societies. OECD estimates show positive net contributions in some countries and negative ones in others once all public expenditure is included; the aggregate fiscal effect is usually small. The demographic effect is also limited without very large, sustained migration.

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 NFAP figures concern US companies and do not establish a corresponding percentage across Europe. They also describe founder representation, not the motive or personality of every migrant entrepreneur.

Fiscal effects are small and context-dependent

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 covering 25 countries found that immigrants contributed more in taxes and contributions than governments spent on their social protection, health and education. When all public expenditure was allocated, however, their total net fiscal contribution was positive in about a third of the countries studied and negative in the rest; for most countries it remained between minus 1 and plus 1 per cent of GDP.

That result cuts against simple slogans. Fiscal estimates depend on which costs are counted, the age and skills of the population, employment, migration category, time horizon and level of government. Higher employment generally improves the balance, but policy is not the only determinant and a snapshot cannot capture every lifetime contribution or cost.

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 are often concentrated in working ages and can add workers and contributors to tax-funded systems. That can soften some labour shortages, but OECD analysis cautions that stabilising age-dependency ratios would require migration rates far above recent averages. Migration can contribute to an ageing society’s response; it does not by itself solve population ageing.

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 US billion-dollar startups in the cited analysis and can add labour, innovation and tax revenue. Net fiscal effects vary across countries and levels of government, while costs and benefits can be concentrated among different workers, places and services.

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.