I'm glad we have data to back this up now, since anecdotes supporting this concept are everywhere. Even within the USA, the brain drain of the smartest, most talented, and most driven people from...
I'm glad we have data to back this up now, since anecdotes supporting this concept are everywhere. Even within the USA, the brain drain of the smartest, most talented, and most driven people from low opportunity areas to high opportunity areas is clear. It definitely benefits the USA and EU to continue to receive the cream of the crop from the entire world, but it's not great for all the places they leave behind. Perhaps there'll come another tipping point with rising quality of life where it's not worth the cost and effort of migrating to the first world? Where domestic opportunities feel worthwhile, and people decide they can improve their home town rather than needing to move to succeed?
My theory is that the human lifespan is shorter than the time it takes to make huge amounts of change, and so if we generally lack the inclination to plant trees in which we’ll never enjoy the...
My theory is that the human lifespan is shorter than the time it takes to make huge amounts of change, and so if we generally lack the inclination to plant trees in which we’ll never enjoy the shade of, moving to where the trees are already is the logical thing to do.
If I want flying cars I don’t progressively evolve my 3rd world country through all of the pre requisite Industrial Revolution needed, I just move to where we’ve already figured out the supply chain foundations needed to make flying cars feasible.
This is treating migration as roughly zero-sum and I don’t think it’s necessarily so? Immigrants can help themselves, help the country they move to, and also help their home country. Often people...
This is treating migration as roughly zero-sum and I don’t think it’s necessarily so? Immigrants can help themselves, help the country they move to, and also help their home country. Often people send money to their families or return home after a while.
More people moving back and forth means more cultural exchange and builds ties between countries.
In new research (Clemens and Mendola 2024), we use unprecedented worldwide data to challenge the textbook model of migration choice and the conventional wisdom in development policy. We measure the relationship between income and migration from data on nationally representative survey interviews with 653,613 adults in 99 developing countries.
This global survey, conducted by the Gallup Organisation, does not merely ask about the hypothetical wish to migrate. It proceeds to ask respondents whether they are planning to migrate in the next year - and if so, if they have taken costly steps to imminently migrate, like paying for passage. Evidence shows that reported migration planning or preparation, not just abstract wishes, correlates tightly with actual migration behaviour (Tjaden et al. 2019).
In Figure 1 we show that, in country after country, the fraction of people who are wishing, planning, and also preparing to migrate (in blue) generally rises across the income distribution (orange). This remarkably robust relationship is observed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
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If we focus only on selection of migrants to rich-country destinations, like US/Europe/Australia, selection on income becomes much more positive. This is consistent with the idea that migrating to these countries is costlier among other factors and features of these destination markets.
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The finding of generally positive selection is often greeted by savvy development practitioners, quite reasonably, with disbelief. If one interviews migrants from developing countries, they frequently report lack of economic opportunity as a central motive to migrate (e.g. Garver-Affeldt 2021). How, then, could greater opportunity at home fail to reduce migration? This reasoning can be deceptive: Those too poor to migrate do not become migrants, and thus are not interviewed. Rising incomes might have deterred some interviewed migrants from migrating; but rising incomes can also turn those unable to migrate today into people able to migrate tomorrow. The latter effect is ignored if we rely on evidence gathered from migrants, a textbook case of selecting on the dependent variable (here the choice to migrate).
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Figure 5 uses our data to provide a snapshot of Simpson’s Paradox in the real world. Across all developing countries collectively, income and emigration correlate negatively within education groups, but income also shifts people into groups with higher education and higher emigration. The net effect is that for poor countries, rising aggregate incomes go hand-in-hand with rising aggregate emigration (Clemens 2020).
I'm glad we have data to back this up now, since anecdotes supporting this concept are everywhere. Even within the USA, the brain drain of the smartest, most talented, and most driven people from low opportunity areas to high opportunity areas is clear. It definitely benefits the USA and EU to continue to receive the cream of the crop from the entire world, but it's not great for all the places they leave behind. Perhaps there'll come another tipping point with rising quality of life where it's not worth the cost and effort of migrating to the first world? Where domestic opportunities feel worthwhile, and people decide they can improve their home town rather than needing to move to succeed?
My theory is that the human lifespan is shorter than the time it takes to make huge amounts of change, and so if we generally lack the inclination to plant trees in which we’ll never enjoy the shade of, moving to where the trees are already is the logical thing to do.
If I want flying cars I don’t progressively evolve my 3rd world country through all of the pre requisite Industrial Revolution needed, I just move to where we’ve already figured out the supply chain foundations needed to make flying cars feasible.
This is treating migration as roughly zero-sum and I don’t think it’s necessarily so? Immigrants can help themselves, help the country they move to, and also help their home country. Often people send money to their families or return home after a while.
More people moving back and forth means more cultural exchange and builds ties between countries.
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