Sam Bowman, deputy director of the Adam Smith Institute, has made the bold claim that taking in a large number of refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq could be beneficial to UK business and the country’s economic growth, in his column for City AM.

Bowman draws on previous case studies in order to explain why the UK should be enthusiastic about accepting more asylum seekers, asides from the pressing humanitarian reasons. In the 90s and early 2000s, Denmark welcomed an influx of Yugoslavian refugees; despite the vast majority lacking skills, their addition to the Danish workforce resulted in Denmark’s economy becoming more complex and productive, with many native Danes moving away from the low-skilled jobs filled by new immigrants and taking on better-paying, skilled jobs.

A similar phenomenon was seen in 1980 when 125,000 Cuban immigrants settled in Florida after fleeing Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.

Many citizens, and much of the media, in the UK is solely focused on the short term ramifications of immigration without considering the bigger picture. Bowman closes by pointing out that “the compassionate case for letting more refugees in is very strong. But we would be mistaken to think that, at least in the medium-to-long run, this would be at a cost to ourselves.”

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