Skilled Immigration Today Prospects, Problems, and Policies

Skilled immigration into rich countries and competition for talent and professional skills are of major concern among nations today. Comprehensive immigration reform addressed to illegal immigration predictably foundered in Congress last year. This revived the question of skilled immigrationand was hastily added to the proposed reform agenda in the hope that it would bring more pro-immigration troops into battle. Immigration reform still failed but it will not die. The specific issue of skilled immigration, and how to redesign it, will remain one of the central issues before the worldcommunity as well. How important is this phenomenon? How do the legal-immigration systems of rich countries address this need? How do professional associations that may find such inflows a threat to their members' earnings seek to curtail these flows? What are the implications on the sending countries, which aregenerally less developed, when rich countries admit skilled professionals from them? Is it correct to object that the rich countries are depriving the poor ones of badly needed professionals (especially in Africa)? What should our immigration policies be in this regard? How should tax policy, forexample, be changed in light of the growing phenomenon of skilled migrant flows? These and a host of related policy questions are addressed uniquely in Skilled Immigration Today. Bhagwati and Hanson present an informed awareness of the rich historical analysis of the phenomenon and several policyinitiatives already attempted with sophisticated theoretical analysis. The essays, with an overview that ties them together, are written by today's foremost immigration experts.

Jagdish Bhagwati University Professor, Economics and Law, at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been uniquely celebrated with six festschrifts in his honor. His latest book, In Defense of Globalization (Oxford, 2004), a huge success worldwide, has just been reissued with an Afterword. He has received several honorary degrees and awards, among them the Freedom Prize (Switzerland), the Bernhard Harms Prize (Germany) and recently the Thomas Schelling Award (Kennedy School, Harvard).
Gordon H. Hanson is the Director of the Center on Pacific Economies and Professor of Economics at UCSD, where he holds faculty positions in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. Professor Hanson is co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior research fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development.