Think Again: Brain Drain

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

"Skilled migrants who leave for a rich country never come back."

False. A striking example comes from recent research in the Pacific, which has amongst the highest rates of skilled emigration globally. Consider Tonga, a small island nation with a population of only 100,000, where skilled workers might stereotypically be thought to have little incentive to go back. Even in this case, by age 35, just over a third of the nation's academic brightest who had migrated after high school were already back working in Tonga. And in Papua New Guinea, half of the most academically skilled migrants had returned home by their early 30s.

In the United States, more than 20 percent of foreign students receiving Ph.D.s already have firm commitments to return to their home countries at the time of graduation, and many more will likely return in subsequent years. Of course there is large variation across countries: Migrants are much more likely to return to booming economies with good job prospects, as is seen by the flows of Indian tech workers back to India in the last decade. But even in cases where few migrants return, those that do may be particularly motivated by a desire to help their home country and may return to key leadership positions. One recent calculation finds that since 1950, 46 current and 165 former heads of government received their higher education in the United States.

JUNIE DOCTOR/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS:
 

Michael Clemens is a Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development and an Affiliated Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. David McKenzie is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, a fellow of the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration, and a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action

POLY

3:08 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

1:49 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

 

MAGDALENA

1:45 AM ET

October 23, 2009

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

 

MAGDALENA

4:37 AM ET

October 23, 2009

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

4:29 PM ET

October 23, 2009

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