This article delves into the multifaceted phenomenon of highly skilled migration from the Arab region, examining its drivers, impacts, and policy implications. It draws upon a selection of papers prepared for meetings held in Florence, Dakar, and Beirut, within the framework of a research program on highly skilled migration in the Arab region and Sub-Saharan Africa. The information has been updated to include new statistical data, legislation, policies, and debates, especially considering the Arab uprisings and associated developments.
Map of the Arab World
The Rising Trend of Highly Skilled Migration
Several factors explain a worldwide emerging trend of highly skilled migration. We mention some here:
- Tertiary education has risen everywhere and numbers of migration-prone graduates are booming.
- Inequalities of income between countries have not receded, and this applies to highly skilled, as well as to low-skilled workers.
- Information on employment conditions abroad circulates more than ever, to such an extent, indeed, that the labour market is becoming truly global in certain sectors.
- Gaps in education between countries are continuously diminishing, so that skills acquired in one country can be employed in another.
One out of four Arab migrants in the West has a university education. As elsewhere around the globe, those who leave Arab countries are typically more educated than those who stay. Education raises individuals’ expectations and, at the same time, creates opportunities in distant labour markets. This makes education a powerful migration driver.
Brain Drain or Brain Flight?
International highly skilled migration has become more controversial as it has become more frequent. Mainstream policy makers and development specialists in origin countries tend to see migration as brain drain or as brain flight, according to whether they explain migration in terms of the pull effect of the destination countries or the free choice of migrants.
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Those denouncing brain drain see developing countries as victims of more advanced predator economies, while those blaming brain flight point to collective interests being sacrificed to private ambitions. These schematic visions, however, do not fully reflect a more nuanced reality and interests that may be less conflictual than they, at first, seem.
Confronted with the challenge of fostering development, most countries in the global south have expended considerable efforts promoting and spreading primary, then secondary and tertiary education. However, educating the young costs less than creating jobs for the tertiary-educated. Certainly, the kind of education provided by universities does not always correspond to the skills that local employers are looking for.
As a result, specific shortages in highly skilled labour can coexist with generalised graduate unemployment. The drop in status of university education and the consequent frustration, explains, in part, why so many young graduates leave their country. The deficit in governance, which is in part responsible for the underor unemployment of local skills, operates against the backdrop of states’ disengagement from the social economy and wealth redistribution.
This disengagement is usually the result of structural adjustment programmes adopted under IMF pressure in the 1980s and 1990s.
Migrants, in fact, often represent a small, non-detrimental, percentage of the total number of graduates in countries where there are large numbers of graduates: e.g. Egypt where 1.5 per cent of graduates aged 25-34, in 2006, have emigrated. However, migrants represent, instead, a high percentage in countries where emigration is both intense and highly skilled: e.g. 10.5 per cent in Lebanon. And they represent an even higher percentage in countries where university education is not yet widespread: 16.8 per cent in Morocco and 44.1 per cent in Syria.
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There is a threshold below which the emigration of highly educated people cannot be regarded as brain-drain. Moreover, in any calculations the place where tertiary education was acquired matters: was the MENA graduate educated at home at his or her country’s expense or in the destination country?
What Is Brain Drain And Its Impact On Developing Countries? - The Geography Atlas
Policy Responses and Engagement with Expatriates
In sharp contrast with their often strongly critical discourses against brain drain, Arab states have barely implemented tools to adapt to, or to take advantage of, the emigration of their graduates. While all countries have put in place institutions to liaise with expatriates, these institutions have mostly worked along two lines simultaneously: attracting migrants’ financial remittances; and reviving Arab and Muslim identity, especially among the sons and daughters of migrants established in nonArab, non-Muslim countries.
No specific action was taken to attract the knowledge of highly skilled migrants thereby fostering what has been called ‘social’ or ‘ideational’ remittances. Indeed, relations between Arab states and their expatriate elites have more often than not been marked by mutual distrust. Arab communities in the West have traditionally included political opponents to long-established regimes at home. Arriving in destination countries as students or professionals, voluntarily or in exile, some played a role in the revolutions and uprisings that broke out in 2011, particularly in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Three broad survey chapters review the characteristics of all highly skilled immigrants in the destination countries; their geography, their role in the sending countries and their political role overall.
They found that selective destination policies and labour market needs matter more than origin factors in explaining Arab educational profiles abroad and its change over the last generation. Unemployment and low returns on education at home…
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Table: Proportion of Highly Skilled Migrants from Selected Arab Countries to OECD Countries
This table shows the proportion of highly skilled migrants from selected Arab countries to OECD countries by origin, destination, and generation around 2005.
| Origin Country | Destination Country | Proportion of Highly Skilled Migrants |
|---|---|---|
| Egypt | OECD Countries | [Specific Percentage Data] |
| Lebanon | OECD Countries | [Specific Percentage Data] |
| Morocco | OECD Countries | [Specific Percentage Data] |
| Syria | OECD Countries | [Specific Percentage Data] |
Note: Specific percentage data would be inserted here if available in the original document.
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