Highly Skilled Migrants Seek New Destinations as Global Growth Shifts to Emerging Economies
The emerging economies of Asia and Latin America continued to gain steam in 2011, fueled in large part by regional powerhouses China, India, and Brazil. Developing nations that were once primarily migrant-sending states are now experiencing a boom that is beginning to increase their attractiveness for highly educated and highly skilled migrants and beckoning their diaspora members home.
Substantial Investments to Court Diaspora Entrepreneurs for Development Gains
As the world economy continues to struggle to regain its footing following the 2007-09 global recession and contend with the fiscal crisis that has engulfed most wealthy states, it has become clearer that the road to recovery will be a long and winding one for many. Migrants and their descendants play a role in that recovery, whether by sending remittances, taking part in volunteer and philanthropic efforts in home countries, or creating jobs by initiating or supporting entrepreneurial efforts.
Long-Prized Tech Visas Lose Cachet.A visa program designed to supply skilled foreign workers to companies in the U.S. has slowed sharply, attracting about 50% fewer petitions so far this year than last year, and 80% fewer than in 2009.
Several factors have contributed to the decline in H-1B visas, including the lackluster pace of the U.S. recovery, more opportunities for skilled workers in their home nations and higher visa fees, which appear to have spurred Indian companies operating in the U.S. to seek fewer visas. Attacks on the program by congressional foes of U.S. immigration policies have also cast a shadow over it.
World Bank's Remittance Price Worldwide.
This website provides data on the cost of sending and receiving small amounts of money from one country to another. Called remittances, these international transfers are often initiated by migrant workers. The aggregate cash flows and the number of participants are enormous. In fact, the World Bank estimates that remittances totaled $440 billion in 2010, of which $325 billion went to developing countries, involving some 192 million migrants or 3.0% of world population. The money received is an important source of family (and national) income in many developing economies, representing in some cases a very relevant percentage of the GDP of the receiving countries. The site covers 200 "country corridors" worldwide. The corridors studied flow from 29 major remittance sending countries to 86 receiving countries, representing more than 60% of total remittances to developing countries.
For those interested in the causes and consequences of remittances, this should be an awesome data source. Here are examples of tables and figures you can create based on its monthly data.
Global Migration Maps. This is the first time I actually saw migration visualized, most likely due to data limitations.
Migrations of people have existed for millennia and occur at a range of scales and time-periods (from small-scale journeys to work through to intercontinental resettlement). As a geographer I have long been interested in these and thought it was about time I mapped them! Using data from the Global Migrant Origin Database (thanks Adam for the tip) and R, my favourite stats software, I have produced the maps you see here (click on them for higher resolution). Each line shows the origins and destinations of at least 4000 people in a given year (2000 in this case). The more red the line the more people it represents. I have used great circle distance to plot them onto the Earth. The map below shows the same magnitude of flows but just for Europe. The Earth has been flattened for this one so the flows are represented by arbitrary arcs.
Some caveats though.
Firstly they are based on a dataset where many of the movements are best guesses rather than measured data. You can read more about this here. It would also be great to have actual flows rather than inferred flows based on the number of migrants in each country. If I made these maps again I might draw lines between capital cities or population centres to avoid the impression that the majority of migrations to/ from Russia start/end in Siberia for example.
Today's TechCrunch article points to visa restrictions as the cause of high skill return migration in the Silicon Valley.
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last month to meet immigrant entrepreneurs. At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them. More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries. That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had. Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon. Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.
FP article today mentioned that:
China is getting a major boost from the return home of Western-educated, skilled workers. They are returning because of frustrations with U.S. visa policies that make it extremely difficult for skilled workers from high-population countries to obtain permanent-resident visas; because of opportunities back home; and because the Chinese government is offering huge incentives to engineers and scientists. These returnees are teaching locals how to build world-class companies and how to innovate. In almost every high-growth tech company in China, you find returnees in senior management positions. In scientific research, top research labs have returnees in lead positions. And these scientists are beginning to make breakthroughs.
In short, the article suggests that these migrants return because of (frustrating) US naturalization policies, job market incentives back home, and active government recruiting policies.
KATE BALDWIN and JOHN D. HUBER (2010). Economic versus Cultural Differences: Forms of Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision. American Political Science Review, 104, pp 644-662.
Arguments about how ethnic diversity affects governance typically posit that groups differ from each other in substantively important ways and that these differences make effective governance more difficult. But existing cross-national empirical tests typically use measures of ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) that have no information about substantive differences between groups. This article examines two important ways that groups differ from each other—culturally and economically—and assesses how such differences affect public goods provision. Across 46 countries, the analysis compares existing measures of cultural differences with a new measure that captures economic differences between groups: between-group inequality (BGI). We show that ELF, cultural fractionalization (CF), and BGI measure different things, and that the choice between them has an important impact on our understanding of which countries are most ethnically diverse. Furthermore, empirical tests reveal that BGI has a large, robust, and negative relationship with public goods provision, whereas CF, ELF, and overall inequality do not.
A new RAND study of captured documents from Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) reveals some interesting facts about the organization. It found that “AQI was a hierarchical organization with decentralized decision making; AQI in Anbar was profitable enough to send substantial revenues out of the province in 2006; AQI relied on extortion, theft, and black market sales to fund its operations in Anbar; AQI needed large, regular revenue sources to fund its operations, but its administrative leaders did not hold much cash on hand.” Significantly, the study found that “disrupting AQI’s financial flows could disrupt the pace of their attacks.”
HT: Freakonomics
Guessing North Korea's dangerous game. An interesting article applying Thomas Schelling's "rationality of irrationality" to recent North Korean moves.
Actually, Pyongyang seems to be following a familiar playbook in great-power politics. Its hardliners appear to have learned Thomas Schelling's teachings on the rationality of irrationality. Schelling saw the manipulation of shared risks as one of the best strategies to get one's way in international politics. Imagine, he suggested, a game in which you're walking on the edge of a cliff chained by the ankle to someone else. The first to cry uncle loses. What do you do?
