… is from pages 192-193 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:
Whole new industries have been created by some immigrants. There was, for example, no watch-making industry in England before the Huguenots fled religious persecution in seventeenth-century France and brought with them to London their skills as watch-makers. This turned England into one of the world’s leading watch-making centers, much like Switzerland, to which other Huguenots fled. Virtually the entire modern industrial, commercial, and financial sectors of colonial Malaya’s economy were created by foreigners – immigrants from China and India supplying most of the labor on the rubber plantations and tin mines, as well as setting up small-scale retailing and money-lending businesses, while enterprises requiring large-scale investment, such as shipping, were financed and run by Europeans. German immigrants built the first pianos in Russia, as well as in England, France, and colonial America.
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