Returning from the United States in the wake of Barack Obama's election, I was in time to hear the debate on whether it could happen in our own society. The election as president of the son of an academic father who returned to his native Kenya before his child was 3, forces us to look again at how change comes.

While Britain has seen the grandchildren of Jewish refugees in the Cabinet, there is, as yet, little sign of the progeny of other refugees and asylum seekers who have fled here. We have always looked to the US, the immigrant nation, to lead the way in diversity. We have courted and rejected affirmative action, preferring instead to combat the xenophobia and racism that accompany fear of the “other”. It was that fear that many thought would disable Mr Obama's bid for the White House.

Yet a group of remarkable immigrants has broken through both class and prejudice to become integral parts of the weft and weave of achieving Britain. They are the intellectuals who have fled oppression in their own lands and initial rejection in ours. They have escaped the knock on the door in the night, the prison and fear itself to land in an, at times, inhospitable land, eventually to make their lives here and become significant leaders in their academic fields.

In the aftermath of the Beijing Olympics, few will have heard of Ludwig Guttman, a German Jewish doctor, who fled his homeland in 1938. Working at a hospital in Breslau, he had been a neurosurgeon of the highest order who, when the Nazis came to power, was suddenly forbidden from treating “Aryans”. After a struggle to get his wife and two children out, he settled here. Britain in 1938 had its own brand of prejudice that hampered men such as Guttman from playing a full part in British life.

He was lucky that the Council for Assisting Academics (Cara) gave him a grant and introductions to neuroscientists at Oxford. He became director of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, specialising in spinal injuries, and founded the Paralympics. This year's games in Beijing achieved the greatest mainstream international recognition for the Games since Guttman dreamt up the idea in the early 1950s.

I first came across Cara when working as a reporter in the long Eritrean war of independence from Ethiopia. My best and most constant informants were Eritrean refugees settled in universities from Newcastle to London.

When it came to wars in Central America in the early 1980s it was again people from the refugee academic community such as the El Salvador-born Salvador Moncada, then prostaglandin director of research at the Wellcome Foundation and a member of a medical team whose leader won a Nobel prize. He gave me the critical contacts that informed my work in his home country. Amid the media shutdown in Zimbabwe, intellectuals who have fled to Britain are again at the forefront of the struggle to inform the world of what is happening “back home”.

Africa has provided a surprisingly large input into our academic life. Take Nadia “Q” who worked as a science lecturer in a university in Sudan. Through her work she heard about and joined a prohibited political movement campaigning for justice in Darfur. As a result of her involvement, she was detained several times and kept in one of Sudan's notorious “ghost houses”. Finally, with the help of a friend, she fled to the UK. After a few months in the Britain she was given an international scholarship to study for a PhD in science in a leading university. Cara supported her with a grant to meet a shortfall in the scholarship. Her ambition after completing her PhD is to continue her research with a UK pharmaceutical company.

Of the more than 10,000 refugee academics that Cara has helped since Sir William Beveridge founded it in 1933, 16 have won Nobel prizes, 18 have received knighthoods and more than 100 have become fellows of the Royal Society and the British Academy.

The charity has played an unsung role in the rehabilitation of many Iraqi academics. Ahmed “D” held a senior academic post at the University of Baghdad until, under the Saddam regime, his brother was executed for treason. Dr Ahmed was removed from his post. His academic career in shreds, he rebuilt his life under the UN sanction years, working to raise awareness of growing corruption linked to the UN's Oil for Food Programme.

In 2006 he outed an oil-smuggling ring, reporting it to Iraq's recently formed Anti-Corruption Committee, making himself a marked man. He was shot at and wounded, and his father was killed. Last year he and his family made it to Britain and Cara has set up a six-month fellowship for him at a British university. Dr Ahmed is one of dozens of Iraqi academics that Cara has helped, including a professor of politics who is one of my most constant sources of information about what is going on under the surface in Baghdad.

This work is not just a show of altruism. Britain profits hugely from this continuing stream of talent that augments, deepens and boosts our own academic achievement.

It is a side of asylum and immigration that is rarely celebrated. Cara's 75th birthday gives an opportunity to do so. Mr Obama's father might just have come to Britain. He chose the US instead, and the rest is rapidly unfolding history.

Jon Snow, presenter of Channel 4 News, has written the foreword to The Refugee and the Fortress: Britain and the Persecuted 1933-2007 by Jeremy Seabrook which is published today

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