On ABC RN’s Sunday Extra with Hugh Riminton on 20 April
Listen here.
Refugees
The huge potential of refugee entrepreneurs
Despite the huge challenges they face, refugees are the most entrepreneurial migrants in Australia – and are nearly twice as likely to start a business as Australian taxpayers in general.
Read my piece in the Guardian to coincide with the publication of my new study for the Centre for Policy Development and OPEN on refugee entrepreneurship in Australia.
Why businesses should employ refugees
Refugees are typically very hard-working, highly motivated and loyal employees, and many are highly skilled too. On a fantastic speaking tour of New Zealand organised by Host International and other partners on 6-10 August I made the case for employing refugees including at a parliamentary breakfast hosted by Minister of Finance Grant Robertson and a lunch hosted by the British High Commissioner in New Zealand, Laura Clarke.
I was interviewed on TV on the AM Show and The Project
I wrote an article for the National Business Review
Here’s my interview with Sam Sadcheva for Newsroom.co.nz on refugee employment and the broader threat to openness from President Trump
Here’s a press release from Multicultural New Zealand calling for action to employ refugees
Here’s a great piece by Thomas Manch on stuff.co.nz
Trump’s refugee and Muslim ban isn’t just morally wrong, it’s also bad for the economy
Refugees are a tiny proportion of the U.S. population — some 3.3 million have been admitted since 1975 — but they have had an outsized impact. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was a child refugee from the Soviet Union; Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is now America’s second-most valuable firm, with a market capitalization of $553 billion. WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin were refugees from Ukraine. The late Andy Grove, who helped start and was later CEO of Intel, fled from communist Hungary. So, too, did hedge-fund manager and philanthropist George Soros; Thomas Peterffy, the founder of Interactive Brokers Group; and Steven Udvar-Hazy, the founder of Air Lease Corp.
People originating from the seven countries on Trump’s blacklist already have contributed a lot to America. eBay was founded by an Iranian-American, Pierre Omidyar. Its market capitalization of $36.1 billion dwarfs the value of Trump’s unlisted business holdings, while Omidyar’s self-made $8.2 billion fortune is more than twice as big as Trump’s partly inherited one. Oracle Corp., a software giant worth $162.2 billion, was co-founded by the late Bob Miner, who was also Iranian-American. While the communities from the other countries are much smaller and generally more recent, one notable Somali-American is author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of both Islamic extremism and Trump’s anti-Muslim policies.
Read my piece for Foreign Policy
OPEN, an international think-tank that seeks to defend and advance open liberal societies
Our open societies are under attack from the likes of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Viktor Orban, who want to pull up the drawbridge, stamp on difference and try to turn the clock to an idealised past.
That’s why I’ve founded Open Political Economy Network (OPEN), a campaigning international think-tank, to defend and advance open liberal societies.
We believe in being open to the world, open to everyone in society and open to the future and all its possibilities for progress.
We’ve already done groundbreaking work on why welcoming refugees is a humanitarian investment that yields economic dividends, how to get refugees into work quickly and how to open up Europe’s digital single market. We publish insight on immigration, trade, Brexit and much else.
Check out OPEN’s website. Join us. Follow OPEN on Twitter at @open2progress Thanks!