In the spring of 1970, a group of US soldiers stationed in Saigon organized something unusual: an exhibition of custom Ford Mustangs, shipped halfway around the world to boost morale in a war that was going badly. For most Vietnamese, it was a curiosity. For one small boy, it was a revelation, and led eventually to a future focused on impact investing for the refugee economy.

Hau Thai-Tang was 5 years old when he pressed through the crowd and saw the car for the first time—the long hood, the muscular haunches, the suggestion of speed even standing still. He didn’t have the words for what he felt, but he understood something instinctively: This object carried meaning. It stood, he would say decades later, for freedom.

Five years after that encounter, Saigon fell. The Thai-Tang family fled the chaos of April 1975, boarding a US military aircraft with thousands of other refugees, carrying little more than what they could hold. They passed through Guam and Camp Pendleton in California, before landing in New York City—strangers in a country that was itself deeply ambivalent about their arrival. Polls at the time showed that a majority of Americans opposed admitting Vietnamese refugees. Congress debated whether the cost was worth it.

Hau Thai-Tang went on to study mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, joined Ford straight out of college, and in 2005 became the chief engineer of the Ford Mustang redesign—the man most responsible for reimagining one of the most iconic American cars ever built. The generation of Mustang he led has since generated an estimated $60-80 billion in revenue for Ford Motor Company. He would eventually become Ford’s chief product development and purchasing officer, overseeing more than $100 billion in annual spending.

His is not a story about exceptional genius triumphing over adversity, though it is certainly that. It is a story about what happens when a society chooses to open a door. About what becomes possible—economically, culturally, humanly—when it creates an infrastructure of welcome. About the compounding returns, measured across decades and in ways no spreadsheet could fully capture, of belonging.

Read the full article about investing in the refugee economy by John Kluge Jr. and Christine Mahoney at Stanford Social Innovation Review.