In the past, people from developing countries flocked to developed nations mostly to find greener pastures. Such flow of migration caused controversial social issues as the mythical “brain drain”, “immigration restrictions” and etc..
As pointed out before, this trend seems to be in reversal.
From Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, (bold highlights added) [hat tip Sovereign Man]
It is a telling little indication of how the world is being subtly turned on its head, amid the rolling crises. During the past five decades, if anybody has been packing their bags to travel overseas to send remittances home, it has typically been the Brazilians, or other “emerging markets” peoples, not the developed Europeans. In recent years, Spain and Portugal have been pulling in vast quantities of migrant workers, both skilled and unskilled, as Poles and other eastern European workers have flooded to places such as the UK and Ireland. America has sucked even larger numbers of migrants, not just from Brazil but from other parts of South America. A couple of months ago, for example, the Pew Hispanic Center (PHC) in America released a fascinating report which calculated that 12 million immigrants have moved from Mexico to the US in the past four decades alone, to seek jobs and cash. “The US today has more immigrants from Mexico alone – 12.0 million – than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world,” the PHC report observed, noting that in absolute terms “no country has ever seen as many of its people immigrate to this country as Mexico has in the past four decades.”
Yet these days the most fascinating detail of the PHC report, which echoes that Boston lunch, is that a change is afoot. Last year “the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed,” it says, for the first time since records began.
Part of the explanation is “the weakened US job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations,” along with “the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings and the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates”. But another issue is the improved “broader economic conditions in Mexico”. Life south of the border, in other words, is no longer quite as grim as it was before, or not relative to the risks of moving to the US.
Sadly, there is surprisingly little comparable data for other immigration flows. As Ian Goldin, an Oxford academic, has long lamented, the world lacks any centralised system to track migration flows in a timely way, let alone devise policies. Thus we do not really know how many young Portuguese or Spanish are seeking jobs in Latin America now (although Reuters reports that around 328,000 Portuguese hold work permits for Brazil, 50,000 more than last year, it is unclear whether these have been exercised). Nor is it clear how many Poles are returning to their homeland from the UK or Ireland, as austerity bites there; or how many young Irish may now be seeking their fortunes overseas (yet again). While I have recently heard plenty of anecdotes at American dinner parties and conferences about how young American graduates are becoming so disillusioned with their jobs markets that they are moving “temporarily” to Brazil or India, tracking data on that American flux – if it exists – is hard.
The other unmentioned factors are the repressive measures undertaken by governments of developed economies to forcibly wring out resources from the private sector, only to transfer them to crony or pet industries of the political class, that has led to sharp deterioration in investments and thus reduced employment opportunities.
Such is aside from the explicit policies of currency devaluation (or inflationism) by developed nations, that has caused boom bust cycles and thus reduced their respective standards of living. Example, the net worth of US families fell by almost 40% between 2007-2010
A reversal of the poor to rich global migration trend are manifestations of the wealth convergence dynamic.
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