Highly skilled workers : Skills Research Initiative

My assessment, at the turn of the century, based on data from the US Census and the records of UBC’s graduates over the previous seventy years, was that there was some evidence of a levelling off of the decades-long decline in the share of the highly educated Canadian-born living in the United States. [...] One research puzzle is why the scale and nature of flows of the highly skilled from Canada to the United States continue to be the central focus of Canadian studies of the broader topic of skill mobility. [...] In my presentation based on their data (Helliwell 2004c) I. contrasted the Mexican and Canadian presence in the United States in the following terms: the number of Mexican-born living in the United States is 1 For comparison, the number of New Zealand-born living in Australia in the 1990s was estimated to be more than 10% as large as the New Zealand population (Davenport 1999, 625). [...] There are two recent counter-currents, one emphasizing the possible positive spillovers from having a highly skilled diaspora ready to make contacts and send ideas back from the scientific and commercial centres (Meyer and Brown 1999), 3. In the countries selected by Dumont and Lemaître (2004, Table 4), the United States and Germany are the only exceptions to this, in the US case because of the sh [...] At the other end of the scale, the three largest net global skill gainers are the United States, Canada and Australia, in that order if the data are measured in thousands of migrants, but in reverse order if the measurement is done in terms of population shares, with Australia first, Canada second, and the United States third.