Skilled Migration: The Global Competition for Talent

Talent is scarce. Yet many countries spurn it
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2024/08/15/talent-is-scarce-yet-many-countries-spurn-it
There is growing competition for the best and the brightest migrants.

GLOBAL TALENT AND ECONOMIC SUCCESS
https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/Fandd/Article/2025/03/Kerr.ashx
Access to top performers sets an upper bound on a country’s aspirations.

I Went to Dubai, and Caught a Glimpse of the Future by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/dubai-migration-trump.html
In our current age of vituperative anti-immigration politics, Western leaders seem to assume that the best and brightest people from poorer countries will always want to build their lives in the West, no matter how many hoops they need to jump through to be allowed in or how unwelcome they are made to feel on arrival.
But this attitude fails to understand the experiences of people like Fredah, who 15 years ago joined a relatively new tide of educated, middle- and upper middle-class people from Africa, Latin America, Asia and the wider Middle East who have flocked to the Gulf in search of opportunity.
 
Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World by LYDIA POLGREEN
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/opinion/trump-migration-world.html
The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Country after country in the wealthy world is facing a top-heavy future, with millions of retirees and far too few workers to keep their economies and societies afloat. In the not-so-distant future, many countries will have too few people to sustain their current standard of living.
The right’s response to this problem is fantastical: expel the migrants and reproduce the natives. Any short-term economic pain, they contend, must be borne for the sake of safeguarding national identity in the face of the oncoming horde — a version of the racist “great replacement” theory that was once beyond the pale but has become commonplace. But we can see how this approach is playing out, in a laboratory favored by Trump and his ilk.