View article

The British Royal Society is thought to have coined the phrase'brain drain'in the 1950s to describe the flow of scientists from Europe to North America. Since that time, the term has been widely used to refer to the ever-increasing flows of highly skilled migrants from the developing world to the developed world. There has been particular concern about the negative impacts on the countries of the developing world which can often lose out on the knowledge and skills of these highly educated people. Whilst countries such as the UK have benefited from the economic, entrepreneurial and social contribution made by these highly skilled migrants, the impact on development in the countries from which they originate has been less benign. For those who oppose labour migration to the UK and Europe, the potential for brain drain has become a useful political stick with which to beat those who want to see access to the world's most successful labour markets opened up to those who live outside them.

The intellectual and political problem in much of this debate has been the tendency to view migration and its outcomes as straightforward processes with simple positive or negative impacts, and to assume that migration flows per se are the problem rather than the policies put in place by governments across the world in an attempt to control and regulate them. There has also been a tendency to view migration as counter to, or separate to, development processes rather than integral to them. A recent report by the House of Commons International Development Committee examines the important nexus between migration policy and development policy. The …