Developing Lands Hit Hardest by 'Brain Drain'

NYT reported Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering portions of their college-educated workers to wealthy democracies, according to a World Bank study released yesterday. The study's findings document a troubling pattern of "brain drain," the flight of skilled middle-class workers who could help lift their countries out of poverty, some analysts say. And while the exact effects are still little understood, there is a growing sense among economists that such migration plays a crucial role in a country's development. The findings are based on an extensive survey of census and other data from the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most of the world's richest nations.

The study found that from a quarter to almost half of the collegeeducated citizens of poor countries like Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and El Salvador lived abroad in an O.E.C.D. country - a fraction that rises to more than 80 percent for Haiti and Jamaica. In contrast, less than 5 percent of the skilled citizens of the powerhouses of the developing world, like India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, live abroad in an O.E.C.D. country.

Are you saying we should not allow students from poor countries to study here, because they might like it and want to stay but that we should educate students from developing countries, who will take that knowledge and go home and create companies that will entice our businesses to let them do jobs that americans have been doing? If we are going to discriminate, it would seem it would be in our interests to do just the opposite.

These patterns suggest that an extensive flight of educated people is damaging many small to medium-size poor countries, while the largest developing countries are better able to weather relatively smaller losses of talent, and even benefit from them when their skilled workers return or invest in their native lands, said Frédéric Docquier, a lead researcher for the bank and an economist at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

"For a country with a third of its graduates missing, one has to worry," said Alan Winters, director of the World Bank's development research group. The World Bank study, published yesterdayin a book, "International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain," also presents an analysis of the effect of the money that migrants from Guatemala, Mexico and the Philippines sent home, typically to their families. Those payments, known as remittances, helped reduce poverty in those countries and were a major source of foreign exchange, but the broader implications were complex.

It explains why Mexico not only will not help us keep our border closed, but why their military is actually helping the illegals invade our country.

In Guatemala, for example, rural families receiving the money spent more on education and less on consumption. But in Mexico, children in migrant families actually got less education than those of nonmigrants, possibly because their families believed that they would eventually migrate to the United States for unskilled jobs that did not reward higher levels of learning.

So we should close our borders so that they would educate their children so they could prosper in their own country?

Some of the bank's data on brain drain have brought debate. Mark Rosenzweig, a Yale University economist, argues that the bank's measurement is inflated because it does not exclude immigrants who moved to a rich country as children, or who got their college educations there.