Immigration Policy and the Search for Skilled Workers Summary of a Workshop (2015) / Chapter Skim
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5 Competing for Students and Entrepreneurs
5 Competing for Students and Entrepreneurs
Pages 61-78
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From page 61... ...
DESIGNER IMMIGRANTS? INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AS POTENTIAL SKILLED MIGRANTS Lesleyanne Hawthorne's talk focused on study-migration pathways in which international students become skilled permanent workers in the country in which they are studying.
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From page 62... ...
OECD countries have been fortunate to attract the majority of international students; the majority of those students have come from Asia. Typically, the policy measures that OECD countries have adopted over the past decade or so have had the effect of expanding the scale at which international students, and particularly STEM students, come to OECD countries, but also to become more flexible about students' right to work and their right to stay in the country after obtaining a degree and seek employment in their fields.
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From page 63... ...
Policy discussions include whether students are opportunists, if they are really backdoor migrants, or if they are "dumbing down" skilled migration pathways. Within 5 years of Australia opening its study-migration pathway, the country was able to select over half of its skilled migrants onshore.
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According to Hawthorne, nobody anticipated the explosion of international students or the number of private colleges that would be interested in guiding people through a skilled migration pathway.
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Physiotherapy: Domestic 93.7% 93.4% International 66.7% 84.4% * Business and Commerce: Domestic 76.4% 91.5% 88.5% International 39.7% 41.4% 68.2% Accounting: Domestic 82.7% 83.3% 94.7% International 35.2% 36.0% 66.7% Information Technology: Domestic 78.0% 85.9% 77.2% International 42.3% 38.6% 74.6% Engineering: Domestic 86.4% 88.2% 86.7% International 43.6% 37.6% 79.3% Education: Domestic 76.0% 83.6% 92.0% International 55.4% 42.1% 71.0% Law: Domestic 83.9% 91.5% 84.9% International 50.3% 41.2% 71.4% Domestic compared to former international student residents in Australia (2009-2011)
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From page 66... ...
The government also introduced a guaranteed right to stay and work after course completions for degree-qualified international students, with lengths of stay ranging from two years for those with Bachelor's degrees to four years for PhD qualifications, in order to give those migrants time to position themselves for sponsorship by gaining work experience or improving their English proficiency, for example. Hawthorne said that the initial decline in international student enrollment was significant, with the private vocational sector experiencing the biggest drop as expected.
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INVESTOR VISAS IN OECD COUNTRIES Discussing recent trends in investor and entrepreneur visas in OECD countries, Jean-Christophe Dumont said that it is not always easy to delineate between these two programs because investor programs often have job creation requirements, which implies that the candidate has some entrepreneurial skills. In his opinion, investor visa programs are the more interesting of the two because these programs are an active area of policy activity in OECD countries and because the number of entrepreneur visas has been fairly small in most countries.
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From page 68... ...
Countries have diverse objectives for their investor visa programs, including economic transformation, job creation, regional development, productivity gains, creating links to international markets, and stimulating local housing markets. The existing programs can be grouped into four categories.
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It may not be costeffective for countries to conduct any cost-benefit analysis of these visas given the small number of visas awarded. There are also other externalities, particularly in the EU where a permanent residence visa provides access to every member country.
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Evidence suggests that the United States does not restrict the number of STEM workers with graduate degrees, given that the proportion of foreign-born STEM PhD holders has doubled (to 50 percent) in two decades and the proportion of master's degree holders has increased 30-40 percent in the same period of time.
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Lindsay Lowell, 2005. Students are a major source of STEM workers, and international student enrollments in STEM subjects are increasing substantially.
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For example, visa rejection rates have a fairly small relative impact on the number of students coming to the United States relative to differentials in economic growth. If immigration policy was an important component in determining which universities foreign students attend, the United States would not have received two-thirds of the world's college educated migrants in 1990 and 2000, and the United States would not be ranked first by a substantial margin in the number of all students and ranked third in the percentage of those students who were pursuing STEM degrees (Figure 5-3)
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FIGURE 5-3 The number of international students in a given country in 2011 (left) and the percentage of international STEM enrollees in 2011 (right)
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From page 74... ...
capacity to be competitive going forward. While wage growth in the United States for STEM workers has been fairly flat over the last 5 to 6 years, STEM wage growth in major competitor countries in Europe has not risen substantially faster over that same time period.
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The growing global supply of STEM workers means that today's competition is for the most talented individuals and that even small nations can and are competing. While immigration policy is not the only factor influencing this competition, it does have an impact and the United States needs to reform its policies in a way that favors neither a "fewer and harder" or "more and easier" approaches, but rather takes a "generous and targeted" approach in terms of numbers and selectivity.
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From page 76... ...
She explained that under Australia's family reunification program, Chinese students started applying in large numbers to sponsor their parents for immigration almost as soon as the students became permanent residents. In response to a question about immigration policies that might address the so-called "skills gap" for STEM workers who are not professors, Dumont said that assessment and recognition of qualifications prior to arrival plays an important role in this regard in both Germany and Australia.
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From page 77... ...
She also noted that when she looked at Australian data, many of the Chinese entrepreneurs entering the country had poor English skills and had difficulty finding a domestic manufacturing partner. As a final comment, Dumont added that OECD data show that while immigrants with entrepreneurial skills and business projects can be successful in developing businesses, the success rate of foreign-born entrepreneurs is less than that for native-born entrepreneurs.
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