Thanks so much for these comments and those on your substack. I do think we need to be careful to assume skilled emigration is always a triple win for movers origin and destination countries and agree strongly we need policies to help ensure that, and you point about the equity benefits of emigration is well taken. But I would make a couple of points on movement of medical professionals (references below). The data for the Philippines suggests that the country has considerably more nurses per capita than you would expect at its income level, with a recent estimate being that the opportunity to migrate encourages nine nurses to train for each one that ends up migrating. And (admittedly two decade old) analysis by Michael Clemens looking at African medical professional migration concluded: “The results presented here fail to detect any negative impact of even massive movements of health professionals out of Africa upon health worker stocks, basic primary health care availability, and public health outcomes in African migrant-sending countries. ”
Thanks so much for these comments and those on your substack. I do think we need to be careful to assume skilled emigration is always a triple win for movers origin and destination countries and agree strongly we need policies to help ensure that, and you point about the equity benefits of emigration is well taken. But I would make a couple of points on movement of medical professionals (references below). The data for the Philippines suggests that the country has considerably more nurses per capita than you would expect at its income level, with a recent estimate being that the opportunity to migrate encourages nine nurses to train for each one that ends up migrating. And (admittedly two decade old) analysis by Michael Clemens looking at African medical professional migration concluded: “The results presented here fail to detect any negative impact of even massive movements of health professionals out of Africa upon health worker stocks, basic primary health care availability, and public health outcomes in African migrant-sending countries. ”
https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/brain-drain-vs-brain-gain-does-international-migration-deplete-poor
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/13123_file_Clemens_Do_visas_kill_3_.pdf