Nearly 300 million people are said to live outside the country of their birth, but is there anything that aligns these people to one another in terms of their personality or personal characteristics? That’s the question posed by recent research from Kiel University.
“Research to date has reasoned that people emigrate to a different country if they can earn more for their skills there than in their homeland. In the absence of a standardized data basis, up to now specialist literature has equated migrants’ level of education with all their economically useful skills – because these are easy to observe on an international scale from censuses,” the researchers say.
This isn’t a precise picture, however, as it is usually those with higher education that tend to migrate from developing to developed countries, even though they might feasibly expect a higher income gain for their higher education level if they had remained at home.
Exploring the contradiction
To examine this apparent contradiction, the researchers examined the situation raised by migration between Mexico and the United States. Not only is migration between the two countries the largest in the world, representing some 25 million people of Mexican descent currently living in the US, but it’s also migration that has evolved from circular migration, with often male migrants moving to the US for a bit before returning to Mexico, towards a situation whereby whole families migrate and settle permanently.
Similarly, Mexico was among the first countries to survey their workforce to understand the occupational skills across it, while also making the data available for research purposes.
“If you compare the occupational skills of Mexican migrants with those of non-migrants, Mexican migrants to the US tend to have higher manual skills and lower cognitive and communication skills,” the researchers say. “This is because pay for manual skills is comparatively better in America than in Mexico, while the exact reverse is true for cognitive and communication skills.”
Marketable skills
Importantly, what the data shows is that it’s not people with low skill levels that are already working in manual labor in Mexico that are choosing to migrate.
“Compare a Mexican engineer with a Mexican university lecturer, for example – both have a comparably high level of education and high cognitive and communication skills – the engineer is nearly four times more likely to emigrate to the US because he/she has higher manual skills,” the researchers continue.
At pretty much whatever level of education, it’s likely therefore that migrants will have comparatively higher manual skills than those who remain behind. This ensures that migrants work in a wide range of industries upon arrival in the US.
The researchers believe that their work provides valuable insights into the flow of migrants not just across the US/Mexico border but also around the world.
“Our findings strongly indicate that knowledge of the migrants’ level of education alone is not enough to understand migration behavior and predict trends,” the researchers conclude. “Comparable international data on occupational skills offering a better picture of migration patterns is, however, as rare as it has ever been. It is important to collect this data as a building block towards a better understanding of emigration and immigration.”
