Rationale. There’s a nationalism that’s self destructive. Foreigners should be eligible and welcome to participate if they’re willing. In some cases, that’s actually what’s best.
Quick correction first, since it matters for your question: there were two Brunels, and they’re often conflated.
Marc Isambard Brunel (1769–1849) — the actual Frenchman — was born in Normandy, served in the French navy, and was a royalist. He was a Royalist sympathiser, as were most of the inhabitants of Normandy, and when the Terror escalated in 1793 he fled — first to the United States, where he held the post of chief engineer of New York City. Marc Brunel remained in the United States for six years, sailing for England in February 1799 — not to build bridges, but to sell the Royal Navy a machine he’d invented for mass-producing ships’ pulley blocks. He married an Englishwoman, Sophia Kingdom, settled permanently, and later built the Thames Tunnel, the first underwater tunnel ever completed, for which he was knighted in 1841.
His son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), is the one you’re probably thinking of for bridges — Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Great Western Railway, the ships Great Britain and Great Eastern. He was born in Portsmouth, England. Not French at all — though ironically his father sent him to apprentice in France under a watchmaker as part of his training.
Did the father become English, and did he return to France? In practice, yes to the first — he married English, lived out his life there, was knighted (a mark of being treated as British). No clear return to live in France; he was a political exile from a regime that would have executed him.
Why him, and not “enough” English engineers? It wasn’t a competence gap — Britain had Telford, Rennie, Smeaton, and later Stephenson, all first-rate. Three things converged instead:
- Political push: the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars drove waves of French royalist elites — including technical talent — into Britain, which absorbed them as refuge.
- Specific, not general, value: Marc Brunel wasn’t hired to be “an engineer in general” — he brought one very particular, patentable innovation (block-manufacturing machinery) that Britain’s navy specifically needed and didn’t have.
- Industrial-era demand outstripping supply: Britain in this period was building canals, docks, tunnels, railways faster than any economy in history — the market for engineering solutions was hungry enough that origin mattered less than usefulness.
Comparable cases of countries deliberately or opportunistically importing foreign expertise:
- Meiji Japan’s oyatoi gaikokujin (“hired foreigners”) — the most directly relevant precedent for you. After 1868, Japan systematically imported thousands of foreign railway engineers, legal scholars, doctors, and military advisors (British, German, French, American, Dutch), paid them premium salaries, and built in an explicit sunset clause: train local replacements, then send the foreigners home. It was a deliberate, time-bound transfer strategy, not permanent dependency.
- Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg — recruited Dutch, German, Scottish, and Italian architects and shipwrights (e.g., Domenico Trezzini) to build a Western-style capital from scratch.
- Singapore — Dutch economist Albert Winsemius served as chief economic advisor to Singapore’s government for over two decades from 1961, effectively co-authoring its industrialization blueprint.
- Muhammad Ali’s Egypt — imported French military and technical advisors after Napoleon’s expedition to modernize the army and state industries.
- Suez Canal — built in Egypt under French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, financed largely with French and Egyptian capital.
- Brooklyn Bridge — designed by John Roebling, a German-born immigrant engineer, in the United States.
- South Korea under Park Chung-hee — leaned on West German technical assistance and loans during its early industrialization push.
For your purposes — the pattern worth borrowing isn’t the ad hoc Marc Brunel case (an individual refugee who happened to bring value), it’s the Japan/Singapore model: a host government with a clear blueprint, hiring foreign expertise for named gaps, with explicit terms for knowledge transfer and eventual localization, rather than open-ended dependency on the outsider.