Next week comes the UN's most important meeting on migration and development in seven years. It's a perfect time for fresh thinking, particularly about the role of high-skill migration in development.
As part of the lead-up to the UN meeting, I wrote a new brief for the Migration Policy Institute challenging some traditional ideas about skilled migration. I discuss some of the research on the development benefits of skill mobility, and some of the indirect consequences of efforts to suppress mobility. From that brief: What fraction of Africa's shortfall of physicians would be remedied if, through some draconian policy, half of all African physicians living in the richest countries were suddenly obliged to return home? The answer: just 6%.
The answer to global shortages in human capital does not lie in limiting movement, but in creating structures for skill formation in a mobile world. This vision breaks with conventional wisdom, and we need new ideas.
Manjula Luthria has a great post on this over at the World Bank's blog on the Middle East/North Africa. Her great title is "Three Funerals and a Wedding"-three ideas on skilled migration that we need to move past, and a new vision. Here are the three older ideas that Luthria says it's time to bury, in her words:
[view whole blog post
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