Immigrants

December 13, 2006 by gbrown

I’m not listing up a hit list for an anti-immigration soapbox short but the intro to an interesting story about my Polish decorator.

Immigrants to Ellis Island

I was letting out a property in Surrey and contacted local tradesmen to tender the decorating work. A number replied, but only one came round the next day. I’ll call him Bog for short – a Polish decorator who unlike the locals actually wanted my business.

Within the week he had me a quote which we agreed and went ahead with the following week. 2 weeks later John (name removed to protect his identity) contacted me to arrange a time to come round to quote me on the decorating work.

A microcosm of globalization in the decorating trade.
Some weeks ago, Radio 5 ran a piece on immigration which invited numerous tradespeople to phone in, complaining about the unfair practices of Polish decorators. They were sleeping “10 to a room” etc etc. How could locals compete with that? Well maybe they could try sleeping 10 to a room I thought?

Immigrations drives growth, drives economies, drives wealth. The Polish decorators will before long be leveraging each other, just as Bog is currently doing.

Bog has a Masters in E-Business from Poland. I wonder how many MSc grads from the UK spend 7 days a week plastering?

Strange that immigration be such a close subject to my heart when I was born in bred in England. However, my parents were from Yorkshire and Glasgow (doesn’t bode well for my sense of generosity) and I have spent most of my working life either working abroad or working with those who were working abroad. One thing I have learned is that in adversity, the human spirit creates resilience and fosters hope.

My grandfather built ships in the Glasgow docks, an area of the world that experienced the first ripples of globalization back in the 60s. He was a working class tradesman, staunch Glaswegian in the Calvinist/Protestant tradition.

When the work dried up, he moved his family to Canada and then the US in search of opportunity. He saw education as the route out of poverty and after a lifetime of service with the docks invested his pension (wisely) in the 80s into telecommunications stocks. “When there is a revolution”, he said to me (despite being just a child), “the first thing they seize is the telecommunications network”.

I guess for somebody who had lived through wartime, the politics of power had provided insights into the economic value of such services. There is are admirable qualitied to be found in all immigrant workforces that we often overlook when “they” steal “our” jobs.

Immigrants have no comfort zone. Their communities are fragmented, family often left behind and language counts for nothing. Their route to success is the hard one – hard work, education, stoic saving and investment. There are no MBA, school tie networks or “friends of father” to pull on to make it work. So it’s no coincidence that these communities produce some of the most successful people in their field. Jack Welch – son of an Irish immigrant. Procter & Gamble – Irish immigrants. Andrew Carnegie – Scottish immigrant. And only now in the UK are we starting to see very successful figures emerge from the Asian community in telecoms and property.

And the next wave? Well Bog has the Masters and is already outsourcing work to other Polish decorators.