Still A Rough Flight

Everyone’s talking about the world becoming smaller. We live in a time when geographical boundaries have blurred to an extent and phrases like the “global village” have found their way into our lexicon. This NY Times article points out that “global demographics are shifting” with international migrants becoming more skilled and educated than they have been traditionally.

The number of college-educated migrants in rich Western countries rose 69 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to a World Bank analysis prepared for The New York Times. By contrast, the number of less-educated migrants rose 31 percent.

The article also talks about how it has becoming easier for the educated to be mobile and treat the world as their playground—or in this case, workplace. Unlike unskilled migrants, they are welcomed and feted because every country wants brainy people working in it—and for it.

Better economic prospects, improved lifestyle, different choices, and the opportunity to see an alternative culture are some of the factors that drive immigrants but moving to another country also involves huge scale disruption and displacement. While skilled workers can fall back on various social and material perks to cheer themselves up, unskilled migrants get the unbuttered side of the bread. And yet, it’s dangerous to ignore them as history has proven time and again.

Migration is a complex subject because of the many economic and social implications attached to it—brain drain, remittances, integration—and governments need to take it very seriously. Some things have been happening on this front. In 2005, the European Union came up with a framework for the integration of immigrants, which is available here. Last year, the United Nations recommended that a global consultative forum be formed to promote inter-governmental dialogue on migration. The first meeting of this forum was held in Brussels last month. They came up with a comprehensive list of recommendations including easier remittance transfer mechanisms, flexibility in visas and residential status of skilled migrants so that they can return periodically and contribute to home country development, and recognition of domestic work as ‘work’. Read the full report here.

Despite the world getting flatter, as Thomas Friedman so famously put it, rich countries still guard their territorial borders rather zealously. Particularly, unskilled migrants are often viewed with suspicion or as inferior citizens. British economist Philippe Legrain makes a compelling case for welcoming more immigrants into richer countries—even the unskilled ones—in his book “Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them”.

Over the next twenty years, the supply of potential migrants in poor countries is likely to continue rising. While rich countries’ baby-boom generation are nearing retirement age, poor countries’ much younger baby-boomers are just starting to enter the labour market. Many of these young people will be tempted by the prospect of a better life in North America, Europe or Australia, especially since moving to a foreign land seems less daunting now that there are established immigrant communities in most rich countries. At the same time, the demand for migrants in rich countries is set to rise, as ageing populations and shrinking workforces put a strain on businesses, economies and government finances. With more old people around, the demand for services such as nursing care will soar. With more rich people around, the demand for services such as cleaning and restaurant work will also grow fast. Since people in rich countries increasingly turn their noses up at such jobs, the demand for immigrants to fill them will inevitably rise. Demand for skilled immigrants is also likely to increase, as companies, cities and countries compete for an advantage in the global marketplace by trying to hire the most talented people, most of whom will increasingly come from poor countries, where the number of university graduates is rising fast.

Read the entire excerpt here.

The NY Times has an interesting snapshot of global migration on its site, which records that about 3 per cent of the world’s population lived outside their country of birth in 2005. Predictably, the US had the largest share of the world’s migrant population and the second highest was in Germany. India, Mexico and China are the countries where migrants send home the most money. Dilip Ratha, a Senior Economist in the World Bank and Task Manager of the Global Economic Prospects 2006, has also spoken about how remittances can reduce poverty in this paper.

Remittances provide a convenient angle for approaching the complex migration agenda. They play an effective role in reducing poverty. Since remittances are personal flows from migrants to their friends and families, they tend to be well targeted to the needs of the recipients. And these flows typically do not suffer from the governance problems that may be associated with official flows.

There are many arguments for governments accepting international migration and putting into place policies to smoothen the ride, rather than making it more arduous. How far they go in actually implementing measures towards this is something that remains to be seen.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under The Global Village. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.