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So the other day<\/a> I wrote about the \u201cbrain drain\u201d and vaguer \u201cambition drain\u201d issue that may be impacting places like El Salvador and Haiti, and I wanted to spend some more time thinking about this issue.\u00a0 Of course, to prevent \u201cbrains\u201d from leaving a given country, Berlin Wall-style (because that is what they built the Berlin Wall for, not merely to imprison the population \u2014 it\u2019s my understanding that the elderly were allowed to move to the West, once they were no longer able to productively contribute to the economy), would be a violation of human rights, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that a country\u2019s public policy should encourage it, and its public discourse cheerlead it.<\/p>\n Who does it help, and who does it hurt, that educated, ambitious people from sh**holes are immigrating to wealthier countries?<\/p>\n Obviously it helps the migrants themselves tremendously.\u00a0 And the general consensus is that it benefits the receiving country by providing comparatively cheaper labor for the sorts of jobs they do; it\u2019s also not hard to find immigration supporters who praise high-skilled immigrants as particularly inclined to entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a case to be made that the departure of the educated and ambitious benefits the sending country.\u00a0 The relevant video at Marginal Revolution University<\/a>\u00a0(yes, generally I\u2019m not a fan of videos but this was the best entry point into the issue I could find) proposes the alternate label \u201cbrain gain\u201d and says that the sending country benefits in three ways:<\/p>\n The video \u201cinstructor,\u201d Tyler Cowen, cites the example of India as a case where expatriates from India ultimately used their money, talent, and business connections to build up the local economy.<\/p>\n The video also cites two key sources for further reading, \u201cEconomics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?<\/a>\u201d by\u00a0Michael Clemens, and the results of a google search for \u201cgibson mckenzie brain drain\u201d<\/a>, of which the most promising seems to be \u201cThe Economic Consequences of \u201cBrain Drain\u201d of the Best and Brightest: Microeconomic Evidence from Five Countries<\/a>,\u201d a 47-page analysis.\u00a0 Which (ugh) feels like I\u2019ve just given myself a homework assignment.<\/p>\n Reading (OK, skimming) through these two papers reinforces the content of the Marginal Revolution video:\u00a0 Gibson and McKenzie calculate that the \u201cexternalities\u201d of high-skilled emigrants \u2014 that is, the quantifiable cost to their home countries for their departure \u2014 amounts to 2% of the income gain that these emigrants have in their new home countries.\u00a0 However, some of the claimed benefits, such as the business development in those home countries due to the emigrants\u2019 connections, appear to be minor outside of a few prominent cases (India, China, Taiwan).\u00a0 The Clemens paper, as its title suggests, proclaims that emigration of the highly-skilled is basically just \u201cfree money\u201d in terms of the overall increase in world GDP, and scolds those who would try to measure the benefits of emigration by looking at national gains and losses.\u00a0 Besides, he argues, given, for example, the number of Haitians who have escaped poverty by leaving Haiti, the availability of emigration is a spectacular anti-poverty program for Haitians, as an ethnic group, even if not for Haiti, as a nation.\u00a0 And he disputes the idea that a person of Haitian birth has any greater obligation to serve as a doctor in Haiti, and the failure to fulfill that obligation is any greater a \u201ccost,\u201d than someone born in the United States.<\/p>\n But here are some thoughts, while fully acknowledging that I lack expertise or extensive study of the data:<\/p>\n In the first place, the idea that having the ability to migrate benefits the sending country, because of an increase in the number of people motivated to get an education, seems like it would require a particular situation in the sending country, that higher education is available to all who seek it, rather than being very difficult to acquire.\u00a0 If the number of university slots is fixed in some manner, then emigrants cannot be replaced by remain-ers in expanded university cohorts.\u00a0 At the same time, the idea that it\u2019s to a sending country\u2019s benefit to lose some portion of its skilled workers, only makes sense if there is a surplus of those workers, and nothing productive they can do, so that they\u2019d be stuck ragpicking or the like, absent the ability to leave.\u00a0 It also implies that, if unable to leave, there is no way that those workers could contribute to the country through entrepreneurial activities \u2014 that the country is dependent on foreign capital or foreign expertise to create jobs, and in the meantime can only passively wait for those jobs to be created.\u00a0 And, finally, there\u2019s the question of whether the cash in circulation due to those remittances is put to use productively.\u00a0 (I recall reading about the effects of emigration on Italy<\/a> in the late 19th\/early 20th century\u2013I may be wholly misremembering, but it seems to me that the workers generally sent money home, or returned home with the money they\u2019d earned, but part of the trouble was that everyone was chasing the purchase of land, and just driving up its price.)<\/p>\n So the Philippines, for instance, sends out a great many housekeepers to the oil-rich Arab countries, but also sends out nurses to the U.S. and I recall an article in which Switzerland was particularly happy to recruit them.\u00a0 If the Philippines has built up its nursing school infrastructure, basing it of high levels of education in general, so that \u201cnurses\u201d has become an export industry, and it can educate its nurses efficiently enough that the remittances it gains by sending them abroad more than make up for the cost of their education, this idealized model would work very well.<\/p>\n As it happens, they rank 99th in the world<\/a> in terms of the number of doctors per 1,000, and 155th in terms of hospital beds per capita<\/a>.\u00a0 (There seemed to be no such ranking for the number of nurses.)\u00a0 But at least one article claims<\/a>\u00a0(as of 2011)\u00a0that there is a very extensively built-up infrastructure of nursing schools, producing numbers of nurses that far exceed local demand.\u00a0 This differs from a 2002 article<\/a> that worries that they\u2019re aren\u2019t enough nurses to keep hospitals running, because they\u2019re all being recruited abroad, which suggests that during the 2000s, the Philippines indeed built up its nursing school capacity.\u00a0 Wikipedia reports<\/a>, however, that, although the increases in nursing schools increased the total number of nurses, it is still the case that the most skilled and experienced nurses leave the country and the Philippines is left with the less skilled and less experienced nurses to staff its hospitals, and still experiences shortages in rural areas.\u00a0 In other words, building out nursing school capacity can only go so far in providing more of the beneficial and fewer of the harmful effects, since the more and the less talented nurses are not leaving in the same proportion.\u00a0 The Wikipedia article (which has a stronger opinion orientation than usual and cites sources dating from the mid- to late-2000s) concludes this section as follows:<\/p>\n In summary, the emigration of Filipino nurses has encouraged doctors to switch to nursing, created a shortage of skilled specialized and experienced nurses, affected the education system, and distorted health care delivery and attention to medical issues in rural areas. While remittances, return migration, and the transfer of knowledge support the Philippines, they fail to fully compensate the loss of health workers, which disrupts the Filipino health and education sectors.<\/p>\n Dr. Jaime-Galvez Tan, the former Philippine Secretary of Health, warns that if the U.S. passes legislation allowing for freer immigration of nurses the health service of the Philippines could collapse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So does that mean that the emigration of Filipino nurses has been a disaster?\u00a0 No, of course not.\u00a0 Nursing shortages in the Philippines have to be balanced against the possibility that, were nurses unable to leave the country, its unemployment rate would be higher, with large numbers of women who are now nurses abroad, living at home but unable to support their families.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m not persuaded by my brief look at the data that emigration of high-skill, high-ambition individuals is an unmitigated good.\u00a0 And\u00a0my concern is more a matter of intangible factors that can\u2019t easily be quantified in a mathematical model.\u00a0 If a country is to overcome its sh**holeness, it needs dynamism, it needs young people with energy and ambition, and intelligence and high degrees of education, and I am not persuaded from those articles that the available evidence points to a net gain, as hypothesized, in those characteristics, from an increase in motivated\/educated people that exceeds the net number who go abroad, at least in the poorest and most brain-drainy countries.<\/p>\n\n