It would seem as no news for us to hear people from developing nations yearn to emigrate to developed nations mostly to seek greener pastures.
For instance, the Philippines has been a major exporter of labor or manpower (OFWs), thus the popular desire by locals to work or move permanently abroad has been embedded into my expectations.
Yet recent surveys appear to contradict this—only about 1 in 10 Filipinos, according to ABS-CBN, say that they would like to migrate to another country. This has been significantly down from about 3 in 10 in 2006. The apparent optimism has been reportedly associated with high expectations on the political economy from the new political administration.
But what surprised me most was this poll from Gallup which reported that in UK, 1 in 3 Britons wanted to migrate to another country. (see below chart from Gallup)
Gallup says that this hasn’t been related to the recent crisis, where “high level of desire to migrate permanently cannot be attributed to the recent global economic crisis or the country's own recession”
And it’s not just the UK, although she ranks the highest, but also among major European contemporaries, as Germany (21%), France (23%), Sweden (19%), Netherlands (18%) and others, all of which registered high levels of desire to migrate.
For Britons, the target places for relocation are Australia, Spain, US and Canada.
While the local survey may not square with Gallup’s survey, enough for me to make a strong conclusion, I suspect that such developments appear to be indicative of a twist: people from developed nations could likely help deepen the globalization of labor or population mobility worldwide.
Importantly, this shows how people’s reaction could be fickle and can’t be aggregated and that meaningful changes could be happening at the fringes.
Nonetheless, it’s a development worth monitoring.
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