Global Talent and Economic Success
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- Authors: WILLIAM KERR
- Published: March 3, 2025
Talent and migration: key findings
- Some 5.4 percent of workers with a college education live outside their home countries, compared with 1.8 percent of high school graduates.
- Inventors migrate at twice the college-educated-worker rate; Nobel Prize winners migrate at six times the college-educated-worker rate.
- In many immigrant-receiving countries, an elevated and rising share of the skilled workforce is foreign-born, particularly in science and engineering fields.
- Six US tech centers increased their share of patents from 11.3 percent during 1975–79 to 34.2 percent for 2015–19 (out of more than 300 metropolitan areas).
- By 2010, the stock of female high-skilled migrants in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries had surpassed the male stock.
- Recent public-opinion patterns:
- Gallup surveys show overall support in the US for immigration hit its high-water mark in the early 2020s; support has declined sharply since then but "remains comparable to the level in 2010—and above that of earlier decades."
- A 2024 Echelon Insights poll revealed broad bipartisan support for high-skilled immigration in the US.
- Global talent tends to cluster geographically; clusters expand productivity and attract successive arrivals, reinforcing their appeal for knowledge-oriented work serving global markets.
Points of vulnerability and political economy
- Local tensions can arise within talent clusters due to:
- Rising housing prices and public anger over affordability.
- Overcrowded schools or hospitals and pressure on local public goods.
- Perceptions that migrants are responsible for preexisting bottlenecks (for example, where strict regulations stifle new construction).
- Tension between residents inside clusters (“the elite”) and those outside can amplify skepticism toward global talent (“the foreign elite”).
- Business advocacy for employment-based migration reveals capacity to employ and expand production, but local complementary resources (housing, schools) may be slower to scale.
- Political trade-offs:
- Dispersal strategies (e.g., interest in “heartland visas”) can broaden political support by distributing talent more evenly, though productivity gains may be lower outside top clusters.
- Policy uncertainty undermines long-term investment decisions by prospective migrants and firms.
Policy recommendations for attracting and integrating global talent
- Ensure the “education pathway” is coherent:
- Align school visas, work visas, and permanent residency pathways so that investments in schooling lead to viable work and residency outcomes.
- Recognize that the highest-quality students select schools based on future labor opportunities (work of Takao Kato and Chad Sparber).
- Treat global talent attraction as complementary to local investment:
- Invest in good schools, quality infrastructure, and safe neighborhoods to make locations attractive for long-term human capital decisions.
- Leverage immigrant entrepreneurship to draw upon native workforces and strengthen economic links.
- Build stable policy foundations:
- Reduce policy uncertainty that deters long-term investments by migrants and firms; stable systems help ensure investments will be recognized and rewarded.
- Design flexibility into immigration systems:
- Emulate “immigrant engineering” approaches that permit experimentation and iterative policy recalibration (example: Canada).
- Consider automatic adjustments to visa caps based on easily indexed data, like population growth, to add responsiveness.
- Allocate scarce immigration slots effectively:
- Reassess lotteries and first-come-first-served procedures that may not prioritize truly rare skills; prioritize selection mechanisms that maximize economic impact.
- Incorporate gender realities into policy design:
- Acknowledge that women are increasingly represented in high-skilled migration flows and design destination features that appeal to women.
Strategic implications for countries and sending states
- Access to global talent sets an upper bound on a country’s aspirations for competing in advanced technologies and knowledge-based work.
- Countries that manage complementary investments (housing, schools, infrastructure) and political tensions can extract larger gains from talent inflows.
- Sending-country welfare effects vary:
- Some countries lose out from emigration of talent while others gain through networks and economic engagement with diaspora.
- A significant benefit for sending countries can be greater schooling of young people who aspire to migrate, many of whom ultimately do not migrate.
- Farsighted national strategy should treat talent as a strategic asset:
- Integrate people strategies with economic strategy much as firms elevate “people functions” into strategic discussion.
- Court migrants actively rather than assuming they will simply arrive, particularly for frontier fields like AI.
Source: "Global Talent and Economic Success," William Kerr, F&D Magazine, March 2025.
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