The international movement of individuals with university education is increasingly common. At the same time, both public policy and attitudes towards educated migrants have been schizophrenic: new policies to gain more benefits from high-skilled migration coexist with the fears in both sending and receiving countries that the movement of brain power harms others in their countries. High-skilled migration is as controversial as other aspects of globalization. The greatest economic gains probably accrue to the migrant—the person who has decided that the career advantages of movement outweigh the personal inconveniences. But there are strong reasons to believe that there are also large benefits for both sending and receiving countries.

In the United States, a country whose scientific heroes in the last century included Einstein and von Braun, highly-skilled migrants are not a new concept. However, changes in both the global economy and the way science and technical knowledge is created and used have made foreign-born talent a key economic factor in most major world economies. A World Bank study by Docquier and Marfouk found 20 million university-educated (tertiary or above) non-citizens in the 30 OECD countries in 2000, with 10 million outside of the United States. This figure underestimates the number of highly-skilled migrants in non-OECD countries and foreign-born citizens in OECD countries. In general, the higher the skill level, the greater the importance of migrants—in the United States, 42 percent of PhDs in science and engineering occupations were foreign-born.

The increasing number of highly-skilled migrants is driven by many factors. The most important of these is the rapid growth in the number of educated people around the world. There has been much discussion in the US media regarding the expansion of education in China and India. Those two countries have had spectacular growth in education, but a focus on Asia misses an even bigger story—that similar education growth has occurred in most of the world. In 1980, there were about 73 million university educated people globally. By 2000, there were 194 million university-educated workers, with the U.S. share falling from about one-third to about one-quarter of the total. In 2004, the United States and the European Union combined accounted for slightly less than half the global production of doctorates in natural sciences and engineering. The global growth of human capital is a good thing, and it would be a mistake for US policymakers to worry too much about their shrinking share of a rapidly growing pie. However, the rapid growth and increased geographic dispersion of global human capital is an important factor in changing how work is done across borders.

Global human capital has both grown rapidly and become much more geographically dispersed. This geographic spread in the capacity to do high-skilled work has been one factor in changing how work is done across borders.

Also, one should note that the global movement of highly-skilled people is taking place in an environment where many high-skilled tasks are performed with cross-border collaboration. High-skilled work, particularly in science and technology (S&T), is increasingly done by geographically disparate teams, often across national borders. This is true for activities such as collaboration on academic papers, as well as product design and development. The basic change in how S&T work is done may have been driven in part by the geographic dispersion of talent, along with the dispersion of research and development (R&D) activities.

The ability of people to work with each other across borders, via the internet and other means, may seem to make the physical movement of people less necessary. Instead, it seems likely that the flow of highly-skilled labor and international collaboration are mutually reinforcing. The connections and knowledge provided by both current and former migrants are necessary to these collaborations and networks. This is suggested by data on those collaborations that lead to science and engineering journal articles—there is a strong positive relationship between a country’s rate of co-authorships with researchers in US institutions and the number of US science and engineering PhDs granted 5 years earlier to citizens of that country. Business R&D and other commercial connections are less public and harder to measure. However the high-skilled Indian diaspora is often discussed as a key factor in the growth and development of India’s global companies.

Both developed and developing countries have had mixed reactions to the rapid growth of high-skilled migration. In developed countries, where highly-skilled migrants are often valued as a strategic part of national economic competitiveness, there is simultaneously great anxiety that so many good jobs are not going to natives. In developing countries there is both continuing concern over the loss of educated workers and a recognition of the access to markets, networks, and money provided by their high-skilled workers abroad. In all countries, highly skilled workers are increasingly recognizing that a normal career may cross borders and that there is a global labor market for their skills.

Brain Drain or Brain Growth?

If human capital is key to economic development, it is understandable that “brain drain” has been a source of complaints for decades. These complaints are often expressed in terms of a lost investment in migrants’ higher education. Such complaints are voiced not just by developing nations—US states whose university graduates often leave for faster growing areas sometimes question the value of support for state universities.

There are some uncomfortable moral and political questions implicit in this type of analysis. Should a person owe a period of indentured servitude to the political unit that paid for their education? As a parent in Virginia, I hope that my children are being educated in some sense as a service to me and to them, as current Virginians, and that they would be free to later work in Chicago or in Shanghai. Are public investments in education intended as investments in the future prosperity of those being educated, or of the geographic areas in which they currently live? In addition, even in countries that pay all the direct cost of their citizens’ higher education, the largest part of true cost is the opportunity cost to the student—the value to them of lost wages while in school.