Think Again: Brain Drain

"Allowing skilled emigration is stealing human capital from poor countries."

No. Many of the same countries courted by the United States through aid and trade deals complain bitterly of the "brain drain" of their doctors, scientists, and engineers to the United States and other rich countries. If correct, these complaints would mean that current immigration policy amounts to counterproductive foreign policy. Thankfully, however, the flow of skilled emigrants from poor to rich parties can actually benefit both parties.

This common idea that skilled emigration amounts to "stealing" requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled workers, a stock depleted by one for every departure. In fact, people respond to the incentives created by migration: Enormous numbers of skilled workers from developing countries have been induced to acquire their skills by the opportunity of high earnings abroad. This is why the Philippines, which sends more nurses abroad than any other developing country, still has more nurses per capita at home than Britain does. Recent research has also shown that a sudden, large increase in skilled emigration from a developing country to a skill-selective destination can cause a corresponding sudden increase in skill acquisition in the source country.

Second, believing that skilled emigration amounts to theft from the poor requires us to assume that skilled workers themselves are not poor. In Zambia, a nurse has to get by on less than $1,500 per year -- measured at U.S. prices, not Zambian ones -- and a doctor must make ends meet with less than $5,500 per year, again at U.S. prices. If these were your annual wages, facing U.S. price levels, you would likely consider yourself destitute. Third, believing that a person's choice to emigrate constitutes "stealing" requires problematic assumptions about that person's rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all people have an unqualified right to leave any country. Skilled migrants are not "owned" by their home countries, and should have the same rights to freedom of movement as professionals in rich countries.

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POLY

4:08 PM ET

October 22, 2009

wonderful!

GREAT article!

i live in brazil and have considered leaving for a masters degree in europe and have been oftentimes discriminated for this because people think i'm going to "flee yet again" my home country...

your article inspired me to write a post :-)

http://polyanabrasil.blogspot.com/2009/10/skilled-migrants-good-or-bad.html

MAGDALENA

2:49 AM ET

October 23, 2009

unbelievable

Studying, reaearch stays, or an exchange of creative ideas between nations is not emigration. Go to Europe or the U.S. and study hard, instead of listening to idiots

2:45 AM ET

INFANTILE, KNOW-NOTHING ECONOMISTS

OR SOMEONE PAYS YOU GENEROUSLY FOR WRITING SUCH STUFF.
Of course, emigration is beneficial for both parties at PRIVATE level, but this tends not to be true/manifestly wrong as regards the public dimension of education. I take into account highly-skilled workers, not necssarily workers who are "easily reproduced", such as nurses

5:37 AM ET

corrigendum

of course, I meant the public dimension of emigration (the effects thereof at public level), not edu. Maybe my post is elliptic, too ; in particular, I meant "this tends not to be true or is manifestly wrong (depending on the countries concerned and their specific eco and so problems and the quantitative and qualitative aspects of emigration). Just study this subject a little bit more and then write an article (in this order!). Otherwise, you may devote your time to writing immigration brochures for the European Commission. They’d be delighted. Sorry for sarcasm, but I couldn’t resist

MICHAEL_CLEMENS

5:29 PM ET

Think again... again.

@Magdalena, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm afraid I'm a little too old and wrinkled to be "infantile". It is common for people to assert, as you do, that skilled worker migration causes large public harm of various kinds. Note what this implies, however: That stopping skilled worker migration --- per se, all else equal --- would by itself produce large public benefit. It's the same statement in reverse.

And that is where the argument runs into trouble. Migration is a choice, a choice of location, so stopping migration is abrogating the choice of location --- that is, forcing people to be in a location that (by revealed preference) they do not want to be in. So the claim that we can cause large public benefit by stopping migration per se is equivalent to claiming that we can cause large public benefit by forcing skilled workers to live somewhere they don't want to live.

What would you think of forcing skilled, talented people who grew up in poor neighborhoods of the United States to live in those neighborhoods, even if they wished to leave, because their presence there would bring public benefits to the neighborhood? Most people would be profoundly uncomfortable with that, as intuitively we sense that it would be both ineffective and unethical. But many of the same people have no trouble believing that forcing skilled workers to live in poor countries they grew up in would be both ethical and effective, and I'm not sure where that belief comes from.

If you would agree that it would take more than just forcing skilled workers to stay in the places they come from in order to realize the benefit, then you're accepting that migration itself is not the underlying cause of the public harm from their loss, just as the fact that the departure of many talented youths from ghettos is not the underlying cause of the problems of those neighborhoods.

These are issues we need to think through carefully, and I invite you and others to ponder not just the fact that skilled workers are leaving developing countries, but *why* they are leaving --- that is, I invite everyone to focus on the underlying causes of the problems of which skilled workers' departure is an easily-seen symptom.

PER KUROWSKI

11:26 AM ET

November 6, 2009

Brains? Hah! Foremost it is about keeping the hearts

This article proves what I have been arguing for years, namely that the debate on migration has been focused too much on discussing the wrong organ.

Yes brain drain or brain gain matters but, at the end of the day, it is really whether there is heart drain or heart gain that is going to be the truly important issue.

http://theamericanunion.blogspot.com/2006/07/scaling-up-imagination-about.html

The movement of skilled workers from poor countries to rich ones is nothing to fear. In the long run, it will benefit both.

BY MICHAEL A. CLEMENS, DAVID MCKENZIE | OCTOBER 22, 2009

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