Author(s)
William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden, Christopher Robert Parsons and Sari Pekkala Kerr
Source
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 83-106, 2016
Summary
The mobility of skilled workers around the globe is important to enhancing productivity and promoting innovation worldwide. Increasingly, high-skilled migrants move to a few countries to seek education and job opportunities.
Policy Relevance
Most evidence suggests that immigration drives growth of productivity and innovation. Countries compete to attract skilled migrants.
Main Points
- Member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) host two thirds of high-skilled migrants (those with at least one year of tertiary education) worldwide; low-skilled migration mostly offsets the decline in low-skilled populations.
- High-skilled migrants are coming from a broader range of countries and moving to a narrower range of countries.
- 70 percent move to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
- Historically, the United States has hosted about half of high-skilled migrants to OECD countries.
- Within host countries, destinations are skewed.
- Southern California, Silicon Valley, and New York City host around one eighth of all science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) employment in the United States.
- 56 percent of STEM workers in Silicon Valley in 2013 were foreign-born.
- The supply of high-skilled female immigrants has outstripped the supply of males, with Africa and Asia experiencing the largest growth of high-skilled female outward migration; gender inequality drives flows of female immigration.
- High-skilled occupations show agglomeration effects; that is, an individual worker’s productivity grows in proximity to other skilled workers in similar jobs; a surge of high-skilled migration increases incentives for more high-skilled workers to come to the same area.
- High-skilled migrants often come with little more than raw skill or ambition, seeking educational opportunities in the host country; the four top destination countries host 69 of the top 100 universities worldwide.
- Native workers compete with immigrant workers for jobs, but benefit from growth opportunities created by talent clusters; most evidence suggests that, overall, migrants boost innovation and productivity and have a positive net impact.
- For sending countries, loss of high-skilled workers raises concerns about brain drain, but also creates connections to sources of capital and knowledge in other parts of the globe.
- About 20 to 50 percent of immigrants return home.
- High-skilled migrants are sometimes more likely to return home, but not always.
- Canada and Australia admit skilled migrants through a points-based system, awarding points for educational degrees and work experience; by contrast, the United States uses a mechanism linked to employment, the H-1B visa program.
- A drawback of the point system is that migrants might not be what employers are looking for, so a physicist might end up driving a taxi.
- Under the H-1B program, many employers quickly use up the available visas, which means they cannot obtain needed workers.