The Pyramid and the Dream
It was always a financial scheme
Every generation produces its version of the same conversation. A bright, capable, frustrated person — somewhere in Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East — looks at their circumstances and looks at the West, and concludes that the distance between the two is a problem with a solution. The solution is to move. The calculation seems obvious: higher salaries, better institutions, more opportunity, a fairer system. Pack the things that matter. Sell the things that don’t. Buy the ticket.
What is rarely discussed — certainly not in the promotional literature, and almost never in the carefully curated social media dispatches of those who have already made the move — is that the Western migration system is not one system. It is two distinct systems, operating on different mechanics, offering different terms, and failing the people who enter them in different ways. The American system and the Western European system are both pyramids. They both extract more value from migrants than they return. But they are pyramids built on different foundations, sustained by different myths, and they collapse their participants in different ways.
The American Pyramid: Maximum Promise, Maximum Extraction
The American version is the louder and more familiar of the two. The mythology is total: a land where anyone, from anywhere, with enough drive and enough willingness to work, can ascend to wealth, status, and belonging. The “City on a Hill” — the meritocratic paradise — has been sold to the world so effectively for so long that it has become difficult to separate from reality, even as the gap between promise and delivery widens with each decade.
The mechanics are those of a classic financial pyramid. Early entrants — those who arrived when land was abundant, labour was scarce, and the barriers to capital accumulation were low — captured disproportionate value. Each subsequent cohort arrived to find that the desirable positions were already occupied, the professional networks were closed, and the path to comparable prosperity required considerably more effort than the path taken by those who preceded them. The Irish who were exploited in the nineteenth century became the gatekeepers of the twentieth. The process repeated with each wave: Italian, Eastern European, Latin American, Asian. Each group extracted labour from the next while performing the mythology that justified their own earlier sacrifice.
The genius of the system is that it maintains its own propaganda. Those who have invested the most — sold their apartments, liquidated businesses, severed social ties, borrowed against futures they haven’t yet earned — cannot afford to admit the investment was poor. So they don’t. They work twelve, fourteen hours a day and perform success for the people back home, talking about giving their children a chance and their grandchildren a future, always deferring the promised return to a horizon that retreats as they approach it. The social media dispatch from suburban New Jersey, the carefully lit photograph of a car that represents a year of savings — these are not lies, exactly. They are the rational behaviour of people who have burned their return ticket and must make the destination worth the journey. The costs are structural and largely invisible until you are inside them. Health insurance for an American family routinely costs $20,000 or more annually before a single claim is made. A medical emergency without adequate coverage — and adequate coverage is expensive in ways that are difficult to convey to those who have never needed it — can eliminate years of savings in days. University tuition runs to $35,000 per year at private institutions, more than the annual salary of a teacher in many of the countries that supply America with its migrant labour. Childcare in major cities costs as much as rent. The social safety net that people from European and developed Asian countries experience as the baseline of civilised life — universal healthcare, meaningful unemployment insurance, parental leave, subsidised education — simply does not exist in American form. These are not optional extras. They are the hidden price of admission.
The cognitive error that makes all of this tractable is the comparison of nominal salaries. An American salary looks dramatically higher than its equivalent in Warsaw or Bangalore or Guadalajara. It is higher, in nominal terms. In real terms — in purchasing power, in what it actually covers once the structural costs of American life are deducted — the advantage shrinks dramatically and sometimes inverts entirely. A skilled professional in Germany or Scandinavia, earning a smaller nominal figure, may end the year with more disposable income, more security, better health outcomes, and substantially less financial anxiety than their counterpart working harder in Boston or Houston. The pyramid’s productivity depended, for decades, on a continuous inflow of exceptional human capital from abroad. Only around 15% of American engineers are native-born. The innovation ecosystem that produced the technology industry, the pharmaceutical breakthroughs, the scientific prizes — this was not purely American. It was the product of talent recruited globally, processed through American institutions, and captured under intellectual property arrangements that allocated most of the return to capital rather than to the individuals who generated it. Silicon Valley was not a meritocracy. It was a funnel: attract the world’s most ambitious technical minds, extract their most productive years, and if necessary replace them with the next cohort.
