Migration News: January 2006
The January 2006 issue of Migration News is out. You can check it out on the link below, and suvbscribe electorinically — for free. See below.
MIGRATION NEWS Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2006 Migration News summarizes the most important immigration and integration developments of the preceding quarter. Topics are grouped by region: North America, Europe, Asia and Other. There are two versions of Migration News. The paper edition is about 12,000 words in length, and the email version about 25,000. The purpose of Migration News is to provide a quarterly summary of recent immigration developments that can be read in 60 minutes or less. Many issues also contain summaries and reviews of recent research publications. Distribution is by email. If you wish to subscribe, send your email address to: Migration News migrant@primal.ucdavis.edu> Current and back issues may be accessed via Internet on the Migration News Home Page–http://migration.ucdavis.edu There is no charge for an email subscription to Migration News. Migration News is produced with the support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the University of California-Berkeley Center for German and European Studies.
Editor: Philip Martin
Managing Editor: Cecily Sprouse
Department of Ag and Resource Economics,
One Shields Ave
University of California, Davis
Davis CA 95616
Tel (530) 752-1530
Fax: (530) 758-4928
Email: migrant@primal.ucdavis.edu
Home Page: http://migration.ucdavis.edu ISSN 1081-9916
RESOURCES
______________________________
GEP 2006: Migrants Reduce Poverty
The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects 2006 report, released in November 2005, highlights the potential benefits of migration for migrants and their countries of origin: “The challenge facing policymakers is to fully achieve the potential economic benefits of migration, while managing the associated social and political implications.”
GEP 2006 urges new guest worker programs to benefit migrants and developing countries: “Managed migration programs, including temporary work visas for low-skilled migrants in industrial countries, could help alleviate problems associated with a large stock of irregular migrants, and allow increased movement of temporary workers.”
GEP 2006 estimated global remittances at $232 billion in 2005, including $167 billion to developing countries (a third of the remittances to developing countries may have come from migrants in other developing countries, as from Indonesians in Malaysia). India received the most remittances, $21.7 billion; followed by China, $21.3 billion; Mexico, $18.1 billion; France, $12.7 billion; and the Philippines, $ 11.6 billion, including the $8.5 billion from OFWs and $3.1 billion from Filipinos settled abroad.
Remittances to developing countries have doubled since 2000, with half the increase accounted for by China, India and Mexico. Countries in which remittances are the highest share of GDP include Tonga, 31 percent, Moldova, 27 percent, and Lesotho, 26 percent.
GEP 2006 calls for more efforts to reduce the cost of remitting migrant savings, and opposes government efforts to subsidize or tax remittances. Remittances are private monies, according to the GEP, and should not be considered a substitute for ODA.
Chapter 2 estimates the potential gain from more migration. The labor force of the high-income countries, 481 million in 2001, is projected to decline to 474 million by 2025, while the labor force of developing countries is projected rise from 2.6 billion to 3.6 billion over this period (p30). In 2001, there were 28 million migrant workers from developing counties in high-income countries, including 25 million unskilled and three million unskilled workers.
Using a CGE model, the World Bank estimated the impacts of increasing the number of developing country migrants by 14 million by 2025, bringing the total to 42 million, including 35 million unskilled and 7.4 million skilled migrants. The composition of migrants is assumed to be the same in 2025 as in 2001, for instance, 30 percent of those in the US are Mexican.
The global net gain in economic output from this additional migration from developing to high-income countries is $356 billion, or 0.6 percent of global GDP, or more than the estimated gains from reducing trade restrictions. An early estimate based on 1997 data found that a similar increase in developing to developed country migration would generate a global income gain of $150 billion.
The World Bank model recognizes that adding migrants to the labor force will have impacts on particular groups of workers. However, its model finds that most of the impacts are on migrants similar to the newcomers, so that increasing the number of unskilled migrants lowers primarily the wages of unskilled migrants already in the country, as does increasing the number of skilled migrants. The major beneficiaries of the increased migration are owners of capital- profits and rents rise with more workers.
Three categories of migrant workers are growing fastest: highly skilled workers, students and seasonal unskilled workers. Industrial countries have made it easiest for highly skilled workers to move, and many IT specialists and health care workers have moved to industrial countries. Their exit may slow growth in their countries of origin, but the World Bank notes that the typically small and island countries with the highest rates of emigration have only a small share of the global population, and often cannot employ their skilled professionals.
The greatest gains from migration involve low-skilled workers, where wage gaps are largest. In countries of emigration, the wages of remaining unskilled workers should rise as migrants leave, but this did not happen in Albania, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Furthermore, since most migrants are not from the ranks of the poorest of the sending countries, migration can narrow the gap between those in the middle-income ranks and the rich, while widening the gaps between the poor who do and do not benefit from remittances.
GEP 2006 adds another voice calling for more guest worker programs to accelerate poverty reduction in developing countries. It notes that over two-thirds of the increase in migrants in industrial countries over the past two decades occurred in just two countries, the US and Germany. They have 40 percent of the population in high-income countries, and their migration policy decisions could affect how fast the number of migrants occurs.
Moving migrants from rural to urban areas should have similar economic impacts, as migrants move from lower to higher wage areas.
World Bank. 2005. Global Economic Prospects. The Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration. www.worldbank.org/prospects/gep2006.
______________________________
World Bank: Brain Drain, Migrants
Brain Drain. Small to medium-size developing countries have the highest percentage of their college-educated citizens abroad, often a third or more. Skilled worker emigration may limit their development, even if the migrants send remittances to families who stay behind and some of these remittances are spent on education and health care.
The United States, Britain, Canada and Australia attract the most doctors from Africa and the Caribbean, with countries such as Ghana reporting that 30 percent of their doctors have emigrated. The US has 22,000 first-year residency slots to fill each year, but only about 17,000 medical school graduates, with international medical graduates (US citizens and foreigners trained abroad) filling the gap.
More young people in Africa want to go to university, but classes are often overfilled. At Makerere University in Uganda, once known as the Harvard of Africa, professors often strike to get their wages and students to get their scholarships; enrollment rose from 5,000 in 1984 to 40,000 in 2004. Many African leaders educate their children abroad and worry that educating local youth could lead to protests and calls for reform.
Best and Brightest. Kapur and McHale outline four channels through which the emigration of skilled workers can affect their countries of origin. The prospect channel refers to the fact that the opportunity to go abroad may encourage Filipino youth to become nurses to earn higher wages abroad. The absence channel examines the effects of emigration on those remaining behind. The Diaspora channel refers to links between those abroad and at home, such as remittances, and the fourth channel, returns, examines the effects of having residents who spent significant time abroad.
Kapur and McHale argue that skilled migrants will move in larger numbers to developed countries because business wants the world’s best and brightest, because aging increases the demand for care givers, and as globalization allows trade and highly skilled migration to rise together. They outline “C-channels” for responding to more global migration of professionals: control in sending and receiving countries, compensation from receiving to sending countries, creation of more professionals in receiving countries, and connections to increase the circulation of professionals.
Author Perkins worked for Boston-based Chas. T. Main, whose 2,000 employees allegedly helped ensure that loans made to promote development benefited primarily US firms. Perkins argues that poor countries are often “tricked” into taking on excessive debt by overly optimistic projections of the payoffs from infrastructure projects, which gives US lenders clout to unlock their natural resources in order to repay the debt.
Perkins alleged that Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian president who died in a plane crash, was killed because he wanted the Japanese to build a sea-level canal that would not involve Bechtel Corp, whose president George Schultz became President Reagan’s Secretary of State and whose general counsel was Casper Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense.
Emily Wax, “Underfunded and Overrun, ‘Harvard of Africa’ Struggles to Teach,” Washington Post, October 29, 2005. Schiff, Maurice and Caglar Ozden. Eds. 2005. International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain. World Bank. Kapur, Devesh and John McHale. 2005. Give Us Your Best and Brightest. Center for Global Development. www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/4473/ Perkins, John. 2004. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kapur, Devesh and John McHale. 2005. Give Us Your Best and Brightest. Center for Global Development. www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/4415
KJ