Articles · Migration

Migration, Unequal Exchange and an Uncomfortable Question: Who Really Benefits?

Published 15 October 2026 · Drawing on Roots and Raincoats
Who Really Benefits? Streams of people, value and conflict sweeping from the Global South to the North

In August 1967 a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Karachi landed at Heathrow carrying my parents. My father had already been working in England; my mother, who had studied at college in Lyallpur, was seeing the country for the first time. Their first home was a single room in a shared house in High Wycombe, with a kitchen and bathroom shared with two other families. My father worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, at a rubber seals factory.

Eight months after they arrived, on 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell stood up in Birmingham and gave the speech that would define the British migration debate for a generation. My parents were part of the "problem" he was describing.

I have written their story in my book Roots and Raincoats, where they appear as Khalid and Zainab. I have been rereading it this year against the noise of the current migration debate, and it has changed the question I think we should be asking. This piece steps outside my usual writing on ESG, sustainability and AI, because the migration conversation has become one of the most heated in public life and I think a family history can add something that statistics alone cannot.

Roots and Raincoats: the family story behind this article

The Debate Then and Now

Much of the migration debate in Europe focuses on demographics, labour shortages and fiscal sustainability. The argument is familiar: ageing societies need working-age people, and migration helps sustain tax bases, pension systems and economic growth.

There is truth in that. Europe's demographic challenge is real. Eurostat reports that the EU's total fertility rate fell to 1.38 live births per woman in 2023, well below the replacement level of 2.1, and the number of births fell by 5.4% in a single year, the largest annual drop since records began in 1961. Fewer workers are supporting more retirees. Selective, skills-based migration can help fill shortages in healthcare, engineering, technology and social care, and well-managed migration can create opportunities for destination and origin countries alike.

In the UK, the policy pendulum has swung hard. Net migration peaked at 944,000 in the year to March 2023. The ONS's provisional estimate for 2025 is 171,000, roughly half the revised 2024 figure, driven largely by a 47% fall in non-EU arrivals for work. Overseas recruitment of care workers closed on 22 July 2025, and the government has proposed doubling the standard qualifying period for settlement from five years to ten. As of this month those settlement proposals are still not in the Immigration Rules.

Whatever one thinks of those choices, the tone of the conversation around them has often been vicious. What strikes me, reading my mother's experiences from 1967, is how little the underlying assumptions have changed. In the book she overhears two women in a High Wycombe shop: "There's more and more of them coming over every day." A few years later in Govanhill, Glasgow, my father walked past walls painted with "Pakis go home." The question then, as now, was almost entirely about what migrants cost or contribute to Britain.

I increasingly think we are asking only half the question. The discussion centres on what migration does for Europe. Far less attention is paid to what it does to the countries people leave, and to the economic system that sits behind their leaving.

One family, one debate: a century of moving people and value

Beyond Brain Drain

The traditional concern is brain drain. When a doctor trained in Morocco works in Manchester, or an engineer educated in Pakistan contributes to Germany's industrial base, the receiving country gains skills while the sending country loses talent that it often paid to educate.

The scale is now considerable. According to the General Medical Council's 2025 workforce report, around 42% of licensed doctors in the UK qualified overseas, and more than 20,000 international doctors joined the UK register in 2024. NHS Digital data for September 2023 showed that 20.4% of hospital and community health staff in England were non-UK nationals, including 36.3% of doctors and 30% of nurses.

Who keeps the NHS running?

The World Health Organization maintains a Health Workforce Support and Safeguards List of 55 countries, 37 of them in Africa, whose health workforce is so thin that WHO asks other countries not to actively recruit from them. That list exists precisely because the movement of health workers from poorer to richer health systems is not a neutral market outcome.

The counterargument is equally familiar. Remittances flow home. The World Bank estimated that remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached $685 billion in 2024, more than foreign direct investment and official development aid combined. Pakistan received a record $38.3 billion in workers' remittances in the 2024-25 financial year, according to State Bank of Pakistan data, with the UK among its four largest sources. My own parents were part of that flow. Like most families in their community, they sent money home to support relatives and to buy land in Lyallpur for a return that, in the end, never came.

The evidence suggests reality sits somewhere between these positions. Some countries gain from mobility; others experience lasting shortages in key sectors. The outcome depends heavily on governance, education capacity, labour market conditions and migration policy. Yet even this debate may be too narrow.

Jason Hickel's Challenge

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel poses a more fundamental question. His work argues that the transfer of value from the Global South to the Global North is not primarily about people moving across borders. It is about how the global economic system prices labour, resources and production.

The numbers his team produces are striking, and they are model-based estimates rather than observed payments, so they deserve to be read carefully. A 2022 paper in Global Environmental Change (Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland and Suwandi) estimated that in 2015 alone the North drew a net 188 million person-years of embodied labour and 12 billion tonnes of embodied raw materials from the South, worth $10.8 trillion at Northern prices. A 2024 paper in Nature Communications (Hickel, Hanbury Lemos and Barbour) found that in 2021 the North made net use of 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the South, equivalent to €16.9 trillion at Northern wages, and that Southern wages were 87% to 95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. The same paper estimates that Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy but receive only 21% of global income.

The flow the migration debate does not count

Whether one agrees with Hickel's methodology or not (and economists do argue about it), his work forces us to examine the assumptions behind globalisation.

Here my family history becomes uncomfortably relevant. Lyallpur, the city my parents left, did not grow up naturally. It was founded in the 1890s as the headquarters of the Chenab canal colony, a British irrigation project designed to turn millions of acres of scrub into farmland for cotton, wheat and sugarcane, and it was named after the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, Sir James Lyall. In the book, my maternal grandfather's family served as the village numberdar, collecting land revenue from local farmers to be remitted to the colonial administration. The city was later renamed Faisalabad and became known as the Manchester of Pakistan for its textile industry.

So the value flowing from that corner of Punjab to Britain did not start with my father boarding a plane. It started with the land, the water and the crops, and only later did it include the people.

Two Lenses, One Reality

The migration perspective and Hickel's unequal-exchange argument are often presented as competing explanations. I see them as examining different aspects of the same system.

The migration lens focuses on the movement of people and asks what happens when talent leaves. The unequal-exchange lens focuses on the movement of value and asks what happens when labour and resources stay where they are but are systematically undervalued. Both point towards a similar conclusion: the Global South contributes more to global prosperity than conventional economic narratives acknowledge.

Institutional policy in the North rarely treats these as connected. In February 2025, the same year that the GMC reported more than 40% of UK doctors were trained abroad, the government announced that UK aid would fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027, its lowest level in roughly a quarter of a century. I understand the defence pressures behind that decision. But it means that a country increasingly reliant on clinicians trained elsewhere is reducing its investment in the countries that train them, and it was done explicitly to pay for more defence spending. That brings me to the flow that this debate almost never mentions.

Who Profits When the South Is at War?

There is a third channel through which value moves from South to North, one that neither the brain-drain debate nor Hickel's trade data fully captures: war.

I want to be careful here. The claim that conflicts in the Global South are simply engineered in Northern capitals to seize resources does not survive scrutiny, and it lets local elites and warlords off the hook. But it is true that conflict creates winners, and many of them sit a very long way from the fighting.

The first winner is the arms industry. According to SIPRI, the world's 100 largest arms-producing companies earned a record $679 billion from arms sales in 2024, a rise SIPRI links to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and to rising geopolitical tension. US companies accounted for $334 billion of that and European companies for $151 billion. Over 2021 to 2025 the United States supplied 42% of the world's arms exports, and the top five exporters (the US, France, Russia, Germany and China) supplied 70% between them.

The second is access to commodities on cheaper and less accountable terms. Conflict hollows out states, and a hollowed-out state cannot bargain hard over what leaves its ground. The clearest current example is eastern Congo. UN experts have reported that coltan from the Rubaya mine, held by the M23 armed group and estimated by the UN to produce around 15% of the world's coltan, has been smuggled into Rwanda at unprecedented levels and mixed into legitimate supply chains, describing it as "the greatest contamination ever recorded of mineral supply chains in the Great Lakes region." Coltan ends up as tantalum in the capacitors of the phones and laptops we all carry. For anyone who works in ESG, this is where supply-chain due diligence stops being a compliance exercise and becomes a moral one.

The third consequence is people. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that the post-9/11 wars displaced at least 38 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, more than any war since 1900 except the Second World War. UNHCR counted 117.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2025, and 68% of refugees were hosted in low- and middle-income countries, not in Europe. The Global South absorbs most of the human cost of conflict.

My family knows this pattern from the other end. Roots and Raincoats records families who followed ours to Lyallpur after Partition, when Britain's hurried exit from India in 1947 uprooted millions of people.

Put these together and the sequence is uncomfortable. Weapons flow South, minerals and profits flow North, and eventually some of the people displaced along the way follow the value to the countries where it ended up. Those same countries then debate, often viciously, whether to let them in, treating the arrival of refugees as a cause of instability rather than one of its consequences.

Weapons flow South, value flows North, people follow

The Limits of Simple Narratives

None of this means migration is inherently exploitative, or that global trade is automatically unfair. The world is more complicated than either extreme, and my own family is proof of that.

My parents arrived with two suitcases. My mother opened a fabric shop on Cathcart Road in Glasgow in 1978, and she still unlocks it most mornings. All four of their children went to university in Glasgow and three went into engineering, finance and business. Migration gave our family opportunities that Lyallpur in the 1960s could not, and it gave Britain two working lives, a business that has traded for almost fifty years and four children educated in its universities. That is the "contribution" story, and it is true.

But host countries do not always make full use of what migrants bring. The same GMC report found that of the international doctors who registered after passing the UK's licensing exam in 2024, only around one in eight was connected to a UK employer or designated body within six months. A country that recruits talent from poorer nations and then leaves much of it unused is not only draining origin countries. It is wasting the very skills it says it needs.

So the reality is unlikely to be either a "win-win" utopia or a simple story of exploitation. It is both, often inside the same family.

Ghettos Are Built, Not Chosen

One of the most common charges in today's debate is that migrant communities "refuse to integrate" and cluster in ghettos. My family's history suggests a different explanation.

When my parents arrived, many landlords simply would not rent to Pakistani families. Immigrants responded by pooling their savings to buy run-down houses and letting rooms to one another. In Glasgow, my parents moved through damp tenements in the Gorbals and Govanhill because those were the doors that opened. Many of the first concentrated "immigrant areas" in Britain formed this way: not through a preference for separation, but because the alternatives were closed.

What helped my mother integrate was not exhortation. It was small, concrete things: English classes, a local community centre where she made her first English friend, and a Glaswegian neighbour, Mrs McLean, who became a surrogate "Gran" to us children. Almost none of that came from a national plan. It came from local institutions and individual goodwill.

Mrs McLean with my youngest brother and her grandson Johnory
Mrs McLean, our Glaswegian neighbour, in the snow with my youngest brother in her arms and her grandson Johnory beside her. No integration strategy produced this; a neighbour did.

Half a century later, the picture has not changed as much as it should have. Oxford's Migration Observatory has noted that there is no UK-wide integration policy. The government's own Casey Review in 2016 concluded that promoting the English language was the most important single step it could take. Yet the House of Commons Library found that adult ESOL funding from the Adult Education Budget fell by 56% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2016-17, and a freedom of information analysis published this month by Hyphen found that adult ESOL spending in England in 2024-25 was still 39% lower in real terms than in 2009-10.

Compare Germany, where many newcomers are entitled, and some are required, to attend a state-funded integration course of around 700 hours: 600 hours of German and 100 hours of orientation on the legal system, history, culture and society.

If host countries want shared civic values, they have to teach them and fund them. It is not credible to underfund the language class, the community centre and the civic orientation course, and then blame newcomers for the segregation that follows. Integration is a two-way contract, and too often only one side has been asked to sign it.

Integration costs money: who is paying?

A Better Question

Perhaps the most important question is not whether migration is good or bad. It is whether current systems sufficiently compensate the countries that educate workers, supply resources and provide the human capital that wealthier economies increasingly rely upon.

If Europe requires skilled healthcare workers, should origin countries receive greater investment in their training systems? Proposals such as the Global Skills Partnership model, developed by economist Michael Clemens, suggest destination countries could co-fund training in origin countries, so that some graduates stay and some migrate, rather than simply recruiting the finished product.

If developed economies benefit from global labour and resource networks, how should that value be shared more equitably?

If migration is part of the solution for ageing societies, how do we make sure it does not become another mechanism through which weaker economies lose vital development capacity, while the people who do arrive are left to integrate on their own?

If wealthy countries profit from arms sales and conflict-linked supply chains, what responsibility do they carry for the people those conflicts displace?

These are uncomfortable questions, but they are worth asking. Regardless of where one stands politically, sustainable prosperity depends not only on what economies gain, but on whether the gains are distributed fairly.

My view is that migration, trade, conflict and development should not be analysed separately. They are interconnected parts of the same global system, and my family's story runs through all of them: Partition, the cotton fields of a colonial canal colony, a rubber seals factory in High Wycombe, money sent home to Lyallpur, and four degrees from Glasgow. Understanding that system honestly may be the first step towards making it work better for everyone.

My parents' story is told in full in Roots and Raincoats.

When we debate migration, are we asking the wrong question? Not what migrants contribute to Europe, but who benefits from the wider system that drives migration in the first place?

I'd value your view, especially if your own family carries a story like ours. Join the conversation on LinkedIn, with the carousel version of this article →

Sources

The family story

  • Shakoor, N. (2026), Roots and Raincoats, first edition. A novel drawn from my parents' lives, in which they appear as Khalid and Zainab. It is the source for every family episode in this article: the 1967 journey, High Wycombe and Glasgow, the Govanhill graffiti, money sent home to Lyallpur, my mother's shop, the village numberdar and Partition.

Migration and demographics

Health workforce

Remittances, trade and unequal exchange

Aid, arms and conflict

Integration

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Author & ESG / AI Governance Advisor

Across genres and disciplines, the same instrument recurs: a record that survives suppression, a silence that finally speaks, a ledger made to answer for itself. Nadeem Shakoor writes and advises from the conviction that these are not separate practices: they are one discipline, applied at different registers.

— N. Shakoor
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