I am a migrant
I have been a migrant for twenty-five years.
Since walking away from the Germany of my birth in the year 2000, I have built lives in six different countries, laid my head in more cities than I care to count, and learned to call the entire world my workshop.
Yet, I have never felt more politically homeless than I do now, caught in the crossfire of a global argument about people like me.
I listen to the political left and the political right debate immigration, and I feel a profound and unsettling sense of unease. In their shouting, in their certainty, in their simplistic, self-serving narratives, I do not recognise my life. I do not see my truth. I see only the distorted reflection of their own fears and ambitions. I do not belong in either of their camps.
This feeling is never sharper than when I sit with my own kind—fellow Germans who, like me, have built lives abroad. It’s often shocking to me, a deep, visceral jolt, to hear associates, YouTubers, and professionals I meet—men and women who packed their own bags and sought their fortunes elsewhere—make the most viciously derogatory statements about the new wave of migrants arriving on Europe’s shores.
The irony is so thick it could choke you. I listen to them complain about the Syrians, the Afghans, the Eritreans, and I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them. Don’t you see? Don’t you realise that you are them, separated only by the flimsy conceits of circumstance and paperwork? Don’t you realise that you, too, left your country in search of a better life? The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Where is their humility? Where is the simple, honest gratitude for the countries that took them in?
I have lived in six countries, and in each one, I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that were offered to me, the trust that was shown to me and the optimism and charity they embraced me with.
When I arrived, a stranger with a strange accent, I was not met with suspicion but with a handshake. I was not seen as a burden, but as a possibility. Did I deserve it? No. Of course, from a purely transactional perspective, one could argue I earned my place. I created jobs, I invested, I paid taxes, I consumed. But the cold, hard truth is that none of those countries needed me. Britain would have been fine without me. The United States would have continued its thunderous march. I was a drop of water in their ocean.
And I am acutely, constantly aware of this fact. It governs how I behave, how I interact, how I walk through the world. I know that I am still a guest. And always will be. This is not a lament; it is a statement of fact, a code of conduct. It is the foundation of my respect for the people and cultures that have hosted me.
And to be brutally honest, I don’t mind being the foreigner. I am man enough to stand on my own two feet. I don’t need the sense of belonging to a nation in a way I belong to my woman, for example.
My identity is forged in my actions, my integrity, my love for my family—not in a flag or a passport. My home is not a place on a map, but the ground beneath my feet, wherever I happen to be standing.
The Well-Intentioned Road to Ruin
Let me be clear: I am not naive about mass immigration. I know about its risks. I know about the damage it can do, especially to the countries of origin of these people, which are often bled dry of their brightest and most ambitious minds. And I see, with my own eyes, how our own populations can be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of uncontrolled migration we see today. Nowhere is this catastrophic failure of governance more painfully evident than in my birth country, Germany.
The German government talks a big, beautiful game about Willkommenskultur, about humanitarian responsibility. They open the doors and congratulate themselves on their moral superiority. And then? They abandon the people they’ve invited and the communities expected to absorb them. The talk is grand, but the follow-through is pathetic. They let a flood of people in, and then completely fail to provide or pay for the adequate infrastructure to support them.
This isn’t an abstraction for me. I have a number of teachers in my family, and their stories from the front lines are a damning indictment of this policy of benevolent neglect. They all say the same thing: Many classes now have a share of 50% or more in migrant kids. Many of them speak no German. These are children, desperate to learn, to connect, to build a future. And what support do they get? What support do the teachers, stretched to their breaking point, receive? Little to none. No additional teachers. No specialised language assistants. No ideas. No plan. Just a gaping void of political incompetence, filled only by the echoes of self-congratulatory speeches.
This is not the fault of the migrants. It is not their fault that they are fleeing war, poverty, and hopelessness. It is not their fault that they are looking for a better life abroad; any sane person in their position would do the same. The fault lies squarely with a political class that confuses gesturing with governing. They want the moral high ground of letting people in without accepting the immense, costly, and difficult responsibility of integration. This failure is what breeds resentment. It’s what gives ammunition to the far-right. It’s what transforms a manageable challenge into a societal crisis.
And on the other side of the aisle, the right has no answers either. They thunder against the newcomers, blind to a simple, inconvenient truth: we need them. Quite frankly we need those migrants because we decided long ago to stop having kids. Our societies are aging, our birth rates have plummeted.
So I ask the populists who scream about closing the borders: Who should work in our factories? Who should take care of our old people? Who should pay the pensions of our retired people? On these questions, they offer only a deafening silence, because the answer reveals the bankruptcy of their entire position. They want the fantasy of a hermetically sealed past without confronting the demographic reality of the future.
The Migrant's Creed: A Rejection of Pity
For all the failures of the right, I find myself equally, if not more, alienated by the orthodoxy of the left.
Again, I am a migrant. I have done it. I am living it.
And from that perspective, I can tell you that the last thing we should be getting are handouts, pity and special treatment. We should not be infantilised.
This narrative of the migrant as a fragile, helpless victim is not only condescending, it is profoundly disempowering. It is a lie told by privileged progressives to signal their own virtue, and it does a grave disservice to the very people it purports to help.
Post-colonialism attitudes in action is my view.
But often my first hand experience as a migrant is met with ignorance. Bizarrely, it seems that to many of these left-wing arbiters of authenticity, I don’t even count. Because I am a migrant who is six feet tall, with blond (now mostly grey) hair and blue eyes, my story is dismissed. They don’t take my experience seriously because I don’t fit their narrow, preconceived notion of what a migrant looks like. Talk about racism. It is a perverse, inverted bigotry where only the brown-skinned are deemed worthy of being taken seriously as migrants, where my own lived experience of twenty-five years is invalidated by the colour of my skin. My journey, my struggles, my contributions—erased, because I don’t look the part of the victim they need me to be.
The journey of a migrant is, by its very nature, an act of profound strength, ambition, and resilience. To leave everything you know behind, to cross borders and oceans, to start from nothing in a new land—this is not the behaviour of a victim. It is the behaviour of a pioneer. And we should be treated as such.
The contract between a migrant and their host country must be one of mutual respect, and that respect must be earned. It is not a birthright. It is us who have to deliver. It is us who have to prove ourselves. It is us who have to behave as guests and win our hosts over. To expect anything else, to demand acceptance without first demonstrating value, is frankly completely ludicrous.
If you are a migrant and seek handouts, hit the bricks, pal. You’re not welcome.
We do not need to be handled with kid gloves. Life is hard. Starting over is harder. We know this. Expect it. Embrace it. You can expect from us to work extra hard, accept discomfort and pull our weight. You can expect us to learn the language, respect the laws, and contribute to the society that has given us a chance. This is the price of admission. It is a price I have paid gladly in every country I have called home.
And there must be consequences for those who refuse to pay it. The bargain must have teeth. If we don’t conduct ourselves in a way that is expected of a guest - if we are lazy, entitled, self-righteous or god forbid entangled in criminality then we deserve the full consequence of the law and frankly we should be kicked out of the country. This is not cruelty; it is justice. It is the only way to preserve the integrity of the system and maintain the goodwill of the host population, on which all successful immigration depends.
I simply cannot stomach the self-victimisation stories anymore, the endless tales of woe curated to justify a left-wing political agenda. During all my life abroad I cannot remember any incident where I was treated with racism, disrespect or as subhuman. Not by the people, the police or other institutions. Quite the opposite.
Sure, there are the jokes. The clumsy cultural references. The Heil Hitlers. Are they tasteless? Sometimes. Are they a sign of systemic oppression that should break a man’s spirit? Absolutely not. If that breaks you, then frankly, stay at home. The world is a rough and tumble place. A migrant, more than anyone, must have thick skin and a strong spine. We are not delicate flowers to be shielded from the slightest breeze. We are builders, fighters, and survivors.
The Thorny Path: Between Law and Reality
What then, of illegal immigration? I know this is a controversial topic, but I believe the answer depends heavily on context. In the United States, the majority of undocumented immigrants are from Latin America. They may have crossed the border without papers, but they often share a fundamental cultural and religious background. They work hard, they raise families, they integrate. They fit.
In Europe, I am not so sure. The cultural distance is often far greater. The question hangs heavy in the air: Do the immigrants really want to assimilate? Be part of the big melting pot? Or take over the culture? I don’t know. This is not a racist question; it is a practical one. A successful society requires a shared commitment to a core set of civic values. If a significant portion of a newcomer group rejects those values, the project is doomed to fail.
I do not support illegal immigration. My own journey is a testament to that. I had to jump through huge hoops to get US visas. It was a gruelling, expensive, and stressful process. And when my time was up, I left. I left the U.S. under heartbreaking conditions because my visa had expired. But I left. I respected the law, even when it broke my heart.
Yet, we must be pragmatic. The system is broken. The country needs workers, at least for now. Perhaps one day Elon Musk’s Optimus robots can do many manual jobs, but until then, we need the illegals already here. I would not grant a blanket amnesty, as that would reward law-breaking and incentivise more of it. But I wouldn’t round them up and lock them in camps either. We need a modernised system, a pathway for the workers we need to earn their place, to pay taxes, and to step out of the shadows.
The Builders of Nations
For all the turmoil and debate, one fact remains undeniable: the immense, world-changing power of the migrant. We are not a burden to be managed, but an engine of progress to be unleashed. When we are allowed to work, to create, to strive, we build the future. The statistics speak for themselves, and they paint a staggering picture of contribution.
In the United States, immigrants are a force of intellectual and entrepreneurial nature. They earn around 35% of all doctorates despite being a much smaller share of the population. They constitute over 40% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers. On the entrepreneurial front, the impact is even more stunning: immigrants founded more than half of U.S. unicorn companies (startups valued at $1 billion or more), with nearly two-thirds of these unicorns launched by immigrants or their children. In the critical field of Artificial Intelligence, more than 60% of startups include at least one immigrant founder.
The story is the same across the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, foreign-born individuals account for under 15% of the population, yet they hold an outsized role in innovation. An incredible 39% of Britain’s 100 fastest-growing companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants. In academia, foreign-born PhD holders in the STEMM workforce are not only vital contributors to cutting-edge research but also earn significantly more, a testament to the high-level skills they bring.
These are not just numbers. This is the concrete, measurable dividend of welcoming ambitious people from around the world. We are not taking jobs; we are creating them. We are not draining resources; we are generating wealth and knowledge that benefits everyone.
Looking at these figures, at the sheer scale of our collective contribution, I believe we can be proud of ourselves. We have faced hardship and uncertainty, we have navigated complex bureaucracies, we have adapted to new cultures and new languages. We have done so not as victims, but as agents of our own destiny. We have done so as guests who understand our responsibilities. And in doing so, we have helped build the very nations that gave us refuge.
My name is not important. My story is one of millions. But my identity is everything. It is the lens through which I see the world, and it is the only label I need.
I am a migrant.
