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Of Skilled Migrations and Brain Drains

One of the clear present trends in current attempts to ‘manage’ migration are policies to attract increased numbers of skilled migrants, while attempting to limit the numbers of the unskilled. As early as 1967, Canada had introduced a points system as a basis for selecting those with the skills most needed nationally. This system was progressively modified to attract those with higher qualifications, as well as businesspeople and entrepreneurs. By the end of the century, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, among others in Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand and the United States of the traditional countries of immigration had all made greater provision to attract the highly skilled and a global competition for talent had emerged. However, it is not just the developed countries of the West that need skilled labour; the rapidly developing economies of East Asia, as well as nuclei of dynamism throughout the developing world, are rarely self-sufficient in the skills they need. Critical questions revolve around not just the demand for skills but also where the skilled migrants come from and what impact their leaving might have on areas of origin. Despite the amount of research on the topic of skilled migration in recent years, a number of unproven assumptions persist. One of the implicit assumptions in the debate is that the skilled migration system is in some way separate from the unskilled system. The importation of skilled workers will generate a demand for unskilled workers to service them: restaurant workers, office cleaners, couriers, laundry workers and so on. Thus, important linkages exist between skilled and less skilled migration systems and attempts to promote one, while limiting the other, are likely to create policy contradictions that are difficult to resolve. However, the most common assumptions are that most skilled migrants originate from the countries of the ‘South’, and that their poaching by the ‘North’ is prejudicial to the development of southern countries. That is, the classic ‘brain drain’ argument. The question of a ‘brain drain’ being prejudicial to the country of origin emerged in the 1960s, often with respect to the loss of doctors, engineers and scientists from the United Kingdom to the United States. However, the drain of the ‘best and the brightest’ was also noted for the economies of Taiwan and South Korea, where it was estimated that 90 per cent of the students who left did not return. Between one fifth and one quarter of the up to 60,000 emigrants who left Hong Kong every year in the late 1980s and early 1990s were highly skilled migrants. Yet, today, these three economies remain among the most dynamic in the world. Certainly, over the last 10 years, they have suffered fluctuations in growth but these can be related to local structural adjustments and regional and global economic trends rather than any loss of skilled manpower. The evidence of any negative impact of the out-migration of the skilled, in the case of East Asia at least, is hard to sustain.