How Can a Country with the Highest Share of Foreign-Born Residents Also Be the Wealthiest in Europe?

 I already mentioned Luxembourg in article, Luxembourg: How Multicultural Principles Became the Foundation of the World’s Richest Country, and here is other example of an economic model in Luxembourg... 

 Luxembourg 

 offers a striking paradox in the European migration debate: more than half of its population was born abroad, yet the country has some of the highest wages and living standards in Europe.

This challenges the simple assumption that high immigration necessarily leads to economic problems, greater pressure on public services, or a decline in living standards. Luxembourg’s experience is more complicated — and potentially more instructive.

According to the latest Eurostat data, in 2025 Luxembourg was the only EU country where more than half of the population aged 15–74 had been born abroad — specifically, 56.1%.

The picture becomes even more interesting when we look at newcomers. In 2024, 85.5% of immigrants arriving in Luxembourg came from another EU country, the highest share in the entire EU.

Luxembourg City

Luxembourg is also a country with exceptionally high wages by EU standards. In 2024, the average annual full-time adjusted salary was €83,000, the highest among all EU member states. By comparison, the figure was approximately €59,600 in Belgium, €53,800 in Germany, €43,800 in France and €24,000 in Czechia.

And this is not simply about the average wage.

As of 1 June 2026, Luxembourg’s minimum wage for an unskilled worker is €2,771.33 gross per month, while the minimum wage for a skilled worker reaches €3,325.59.

Luxembourg also represents an economic model in which the “economy” is not about trying to force people living on the margins or on social benefits to survive on minimum incomes while facing living costs.

Immigrants are not merely a cost. They are also part of the economy.

That may be the most important point of the Luxembourg example.

An immigrant is not simply someone who uses public services. They are also a worker, consumer, tenant, entrepreneur, taxpayer, and someone who contributes to economic output.

In Luxembourg, this mechanism is visible almost textbook-style.

Foreign workers enable companies to fill positions that the country’s small domestic population would not be able to cover on its own.

And cross-border workers even allow Luxembourg to attract labour without requiring all of these people to live in the country.

Imagine source: Luxembourg Times

The result is an economy that is exceptionally open to foreign labour.

Luxembourg therefore offers an interesting counterexample to the simplistic assumption:

more migrants = less wealth.

Reality can be structured in precisely the opposite way.

If an economy is able to genuinely integrate foreign workers into the labour market, if there is strong demand for labour, functioning institutions, high productivity and employment, and if the state is able to generate sufficient public revenue from economic activity, foreign labour can become part of a mechanism that supports a high standard of living.

Luxembourg may seem like an extreme case: it has one of the highest rates of immigration in the European Union — and at the same time the highest average wages. It has an enormous share of foreign workers — and at the same time one of the strongest economies in the EU.

The Luxembourg experience suggests that a much more important question than “How many migrants does a country have?” may be:

“How is a country able to integrate their potential into its economy?”

And that is precisely what makes Luxembourg one of the most interesting cases in Europe.