The trouble with the whole success story narrative is that success isn't everything. It's a willingness to contribute to your new country. An immigrant who makes a lot of money, but has zero empathy for the native population is going to end up doing things like this. And no matter how much money he makes, his success ends up hurting the country he has settled in.
Mohammed Zaman was an immigrant success story. Born in Bangladesh, he had arrived with nothing in the United Kingdom at age 15 before working his way up the restaurant business. By the time he turned 50, he was the owner of half a dozen award-winning Indian eateries around North Yorkshire. He sent his kids to private schools and prestigious universities.
And he did it by not remotely caring about the health and safety of his customers.
But the immigrant who had arrived without a penny began cutting corners, employing undocumented workers and swapping ingredients for ersatz imitations, according to prosecutors.
On Monday, that penny-pinching caught up to Zaman when he was convicted of manslaughter in connection to the death of one of his customers.
Zaman, 52, was sentenced to six years in prison for the death of Paul Wilson, a highly allergic bar manager who died in 2014 after eating chicken tikka masala that Zaman's restaurant had promised was peanut-free.
This wasn't even the first time this had happened.
Just three weeks before Wilson's death, a young woman had a severe allergic reaction after eating what she thought was peanut-free food from another one of Zaman's six Indian restaurants.
"My throat started to swell and I started getting very panicky," Ruby Scott told the BBC. "I couldn't really breathe properly. My friend's dad rushed me to [the] hospital and my mum was meeting us there. She didn't recognize me at first because I was covered in hives and purple by this point."
Zaman was told about the incident but kept on using the peanut powder at his restaurants, prosecutors said. The restaurateur was more than $400,000 in debt and trying to cut costs in his kitchens, where he also employed undocumented and under-trained workers.
Of course he didn't. He didn't see the natives as people. Just as wallets with stomachs. He didn't care about their welfare or safety in the least.
This isn't one of those big splashy stories about Islamic terrorism. And yet it conveys something equally pernicious about the lack of investment that Muslim migrants from tribal societies have in the countries that they move to. And it's hard to deny that one can lead into the other.