Migrants have become a flashpoint in global politics. But new research by an MIT political scientist, focused on West Germany and Poland after World War II, shows that in the long term, those countries developed stronger states, more prosperous economies, and more entrepreneurship after receiving a large influx of immigrants. Those findings come from a close examination, at the local level over many decades, of the communities receiving migrants as millions of people relocated westward when Europe's postwar borders were redrawn. 'I found that places experiencing large-scale displacement [immigration] wound up accumulating state capacity, versus places that did not,' says Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor in MIT's Department of Political Science. Charnysh's new book, 'Uprooted: How Post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe,' published by Cambridge University Press, challenges the notion that migrants have a negative impact on receiving communities....
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