The departure of skilled workers in the developing world may, contrary to popular belief, do more good than harm. Photo:banoiff (flickr)

When educated professionals depart a developing nation, does greater wealth arrive? Some scholars in the international development community are saying farewell to the notion that the ‘brain drain’ hinders impoverished countries from expanding human capital and increasing the growth rate.

Exit brain drain. Enter brain gain.

The brain drain has long been perceived as a constraint on the progress of developing nations—much-needed doctors, professors, and scientists often abandon their homelands in exchange for better salaries and more comfortable lives in the developed world. However, research indicates that if countries can hit a sweet spot of sending around 20 percent of their talent to other countries, the residual impact of those individual losses will actually spur economic and educational growth at home.

But how? One way is through remittances, cash transfers from an individual in one country to another elsewhere. Take Ghana, for example. Some figures place remittance levels at $400 million per year, on par with the country's two biggest exports, cocoa and gold, which account for 25 percent of the foreign exchange earnings of the nation. To put this figure in perspective, in previous years Ghana has received around $650 million in foreign aid. Compared to other developing nations, that's low—in some, “remittances are more than double the amount of foreign aid,” as reported by Foreign Policy.

Furthermore, remittances can withstand the tests of natural disasters, and political and economic crises. Chances are an economic and political collapse in Egypt would deter foreign investment but encourage a migrant to increase his or her monetary givings to Egyptian relatives. Now those are derivatives Fannie and Freddie should have bet on.

Much of the new economic activity happening in African countries like Ghana are catalyzed by residents who have traveled or lived in developed countries. New York University professor William Easterly refers to this as “brain circulation,” that is, the movement of ideas and investments from educated professionals between their homes and the West.

Often, brain drainers will eventually return to their country of origin or maintain residency both abroad and at home. Not only do these individuals in turn support the economic development of their hometowns, but they also inspire members of the community to invest in education. According to Easterly, most students are motivated by the idea of living abroad, noting that “if this prospect is closed tightly, this may have an effect on the effort levels of students in the system, and therefore the quality of the graduates of the school system.”

Additionally, travel expands capital horizons. Robert Guest notes in Foreign Policy that “countries trade more with countries from which they have received immigrants.” A migrant living in the UK might inform his sister in Somalia that there is demand in his city for a specific talent she may have the skill sets to provide. Diaspora thus encourages a fluidity of ideas, innovations, and supplies and demands between often disconnected parts of the world.

Investing money abroad can be the best way to bring more of it home. Brainpower may work that way, too.

Young Portuguese congregate in a park in Lisbon. Photo: Erik Mandell for MercyCorps

Amid its ongoing financial crisis, Portugal’s prime minister has a surprising message for his country’s struggling residents: leave.

It’s just one example of Portugal looking to emerging markets for relief as power dynamics of international economic relationships change.

Conservative Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho suggested that moving to Portuguese-speaking countries and former colonies such as Brazil and Angola could be an alternative for young Portuguese hit hard by unemployment, according to IPS news. Coelho’s suggestion specifically focused on teachers, saying that other places could provide better job markets for educators. But the Prime Minister’s suggestion is being met with criticism, including from the governments of his imagined receiving countries for Portuguese emigrants.

Brazil and Angola both shot down this suggestion quickly, stating that they had no need for teachers from Portugal, IPS reports. Ana Maria Gomes, a leader of Portugal’s opposition Socialist Party, also criticized Coelho, saying "that is the last thing a prime minister should say... because no matter how complicated things are, we can and must pull out of this.”

Yet given recent economic trends, it makes sense that a struggling European country like Portugal might consider unorthodox solutions.

Brazil, the world’s largest Portuguese-speaking country, recently surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s sixth largest economy, reports The Guardian. Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) described Brazil’s economic rise as part of a larger trend. He told The Guardian that "Brazil has beaten the European countries at soccer for a long time, but beating them at economics is a new phenomenon. Our world economic league table shows how the economic map is changing, with Asian countries and commodity-producing economies climbing up the league while we in Europe fall back."

This global shift of economic power, evident in Brazil’s rapid growth, is seen elsewhere as well. The emerging power of the so-called BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) has been widely recognized for a while now, with trade in manufactured and resource-based commodities fueling the rapid growth. And the global financial and Euro-zone crises have accelerated the divide in growth between emerging economies and traditional economic powers.

Including the BRIC countries, 19 of the 30 predicted largest economies by 2050 are currently emerging markets, according to HSBC. And Project Syndicate reports that changing patterns of innovation and research and development will further fuel this shift, pointing out that in 2000 so-called developed countries only accounted for 76 percent of global R&D, down from 95 percent in 1990.

News of the rise of emerging economies isn’t new, but these figures pose a problem for struggling countries like Portugal. And the trend of turning to emerging countries for financial assistance signals a rebalancing of power likely to last.

Coehlo’s suggestion for emigration coincides with news that the Chinese state-owned Three Gorges Corporation bought 21 percent of Portugal’s largest power producer from the debt-burdened government, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The largest-ever Chinese investment in Europe further illustrates Portugal’s precarious situation. As another Chinese state-owned enterprise, China State Grid Corporation, bids on purchasing Lisbon’s national power grid operator, Portugal shows its willingness to sell assets to emerging economies to stay afloat.

“The European economy needs blood, but not in the form of a transfusion,” said Wang Yiming, a senior Chinese economic policymaker. “We need to create new blood by promoting investment.” In other words, China doesn't want to simply loan cash to the West. But it’s willing to invest in concrete assets.

Wang’s statement demonstrates China’s view of itself as an economic savior. If troubled countries have assets to sell, emerging economies are willing and able to buy.

So China is buying shares of Portugal’s utilities, and Brazil doesn’t want its unemployed emigrants. The Portuguese example shows that emerging economies now have more choices when it comes to global economic relationships.

Five hundred years after Portuguese landed in Brazil, have the colonial winds reversed? Maybe not entirely, but emerging economies now have a comparatively better hand to play. And for countries like Portugal, the game of economic power is no longer stacked so strongly in their favor.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

Trujillo, Honduras is currently a quiet backwater town, but the Honduran government has grand visions for its future growth. Photo: Wanaku (flickr)

Picture this: a nearly independent city-state -- a Hong Kong in one of the western hemisphere’s poorest countries. Sound far-fetched? Maybe so, but one country has high hopes for a changing urban future.

According to the Economist, Honduras wants to outsource development of a new city. The idea is to create a ‘charter city:’ a semi-autonomous zone with everything from governance to a separate currency managed independently and overseen by experts outside of the Honduran government. But Honduras faces the question of whether a ‘clean slate’ of separate rules and management can spur economic growth that has been largely elusive in the region.

The political wheels are rolling, but the road to a charter city is long and uncertain.

The national legislature recently legalized the creation of “special development regions,” although the ensuing steps are taking longer than anticipated. In December, Honduran president Porfirio Lobo began appointing a ‘transparency commission’ to oversee the project, despite mixed opinions of the initiative held by other government officials.

Yet charter city supporters remain enthusiastic about the steps taken so far, and optimistic about the direction of the project.

According to Paul Romer, an economics professor at New York University who proposed the concept, charter cities represent a “new type of special reform zone,” building on the idea of a special economic zone by “increasing its size and expanding the scope of its reforms.” His idea is to create internal start-ups, akin to the way that businesses often set up new divisions free to operate outside of old rules. Mr. Romer believes that the clean slate will allow government authorities to experiment with laws and governance. “What types of mechanisms will allow developing countries to copy the rules that work well in the rest of the world?” he asked The Economist.

And people in developing countries like Honduras, Mr. Romer says, will respond to the initiative by embracing opportunities in charter cities. “The worldʼs poor know that better rules prevail elsewhere,” he says, citing the Gallup report that 630 million people would like to move permanently to another country.

Charter cities, Romer claims, should also be of interest to rich countries, such as the United States, struggling with illegal immigration, as they offer an alternative to residents of poorer countries seeking to migrate.

“The new entity’s open door gives the huddled masses an alternative," Romer told The Economist. "Instead of risking their lives on perilous journeys to cross borders illegally, they can move legally to a charter city.”

But many do not agree with Romer’s plan for building cities from scratch in the world’s poorest nations, and outsourcing their design and government to rich countries. Duncan Green of Oxfam has been critical of Romer’s idea for several years, and writes that “the underlying motive seems to be to liberate development from the supposedly dead hand of dysfunctional and corrupt states, transferring it instead into the hands of benign and honest technocrats” in Honduras.

As Green points out, the Trujillo charter city proposal is incomplete at best. Even with significant outside investment and oversight, charter cities would likely suck talent and resources away from their surrounding nation-states. And even with private security forces protecting the land of new development and investment, the presence of a wealthy, employment-generating city could create huge slums outside its borders.

The allure of a Central American Hong Kong may sound appealing to some, but officials must address many questions. After all, Hong Kong was a longtime colonial outpost before becoming a semi-autonomous economic zone. Is that really what Honduras wants? Or can Trujillo skip the colonial stage?

Honduran officials have a long road ahead to bring change to the Caribbean coast. But Mr. Romer’s vision has people talking. And for Honduras, it may just have a promising direction in store.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

Fortified borders, like this one seen from Calexico, Mexico, are part of measures taken to reduce the flow of migrants. Photo: Omar Bárcena (Flickr)

Today is not exactly a great time to be an immigrant. Though over 215 million people worldwide are first-generation migrants, more than ever before, migration is being restricted as many countries have added immigration to the list of economic burdens. Recent experience, however, suggests global migration helps grow economies and spread ideas.

Legislators in Alabama, U.S., recently passed an anti-immigration law (HB56) that prevents any undocumented immigrant from applying for work, penalizes any citizen who hires an undocumented worker, and prevents undocumented immigrants from receiving most state services. Police are able to arrest anyone they suspect to be an undocumented immigrant, a power which resulted in the recent arrest of a German Mercedes-Benz manager, who couldn't produce proper identification when stopped. European governments, grappling with an unprecedented increase in migrant populations, have passed laws restricting religious freedom, while the popularity of anti-immigration political parties is surging. In China, an acclaimed Chinese-American engineer has been jailed on dubious charges that some see as retribution for immigrating from the United States.

Behind all of these laws is a desire to make migration less attractive by making life more difficult for migrant populations. As Alabama State Representative Micky Hammon, a proponent of the anti-immigration initiative, explains, “the goal of the entire bill [is] to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and to discourage those that are here from putting down roots." It's working. Though about 2.5 percent of Alabama’s population is undocumented, according to the Center for American Progress, tens of thousands of workers, documented and undocumented, stopped showing up for work after the law was passed.

Proponents of anti-immigration measures argue that immigrants drain government budgets by using its services without paying taxes, and causing unemployment and wage deflation by willing to work for low pay. Yet the evidence is quite flimsy. As Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis who specializes in migration, writes, “on net, immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity. Consistent with previous research, there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.”

So much for being a drain on the economy. Economists at the University of Alabama have recently predicted that for every 10,000 laborers, legal and illegal, who are discouraged from working in Alabama as a result of the recent law, the state’s economy will contract by $40 million.

Aleksynska Mariya and Ahmed Tritah, economists at the University of Maine in France write that most evidence of a negative immigration effect come from studies that only examine wages and employment levels for natives in the short-run. But Mariya and Tritah remind us that immigration affects the global economy through a wide range of mechanisms. After examining these mechanisms, they conclude that immigration has a positive effect on income, labor productivity, and total factor productivity in the long run. "Studies
which focus uniquely [on] one type of effect, such as impact on employment, overlook other channels through which [the] economy adjusts to immigration."

And immigration helps developing countries as well. As The Economist writes, migrants spread ideas, information, and money while making it easier to do business across borders: “A Chinese trader in Indonesia who spots a gap in the market for cheap umbrellas will alert his cousin in Shenzhen who knows someone who runs an umbrella factory. Kinship ties foster trust, so they can seal the deal and get the umbrellas to Jakarta before the rainy season ends.” In some emerging markets institutions that foster free trade, like private property and the rule of law in general, tend to be relatively inefficient. So trust is essential to creating the confidence necessary for trade. If the government can’t ensure that you are accountable for the money I loan you, I will only do so if I know I can trust you.

Michael Clemens, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development whose research examines migration and development, discusses the effect of remittances from Haitian immigrants at home and abroad in Foreign Policy magazine:

"We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what additional migration could do. Suppose the United States lets in 100,000 Haitian immigrants. First, this would dramatically raise their incomes and raise essentially all of them out of extreme poverty. Second, this would increase the size of the worldwide Haitian diaspora by 10 percent. If the new migrants remit like earlier migrants did, this would mean roughly $150 million to 180 million every year in additional remittances for Haiti... The Guardian reports that the United States has committed a one-time total of $167 million in aid. Remittances recur year after year, and unlike aid, almost the whole amount of remittances goes directly into needy families' pockets."

Migration will not solve all of our problems, and it doubtless creates many. But so do free trade and globalization, which are generally hailed as essential to modern economic growth. Why not free migration as well?

Michael Clemens was a 2011 Global Envision guest lecturer at Mercy Corps' Action Center in Portland, Oregon.

Ben Osborn is a 2011 graduate of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

On Monday, the world welcomed its 7 billionth person. The implications of population growth are similarly staggering in number, but here are five of the more important things to know about the growing world community.

There might not be 7 billion of us. Yet.

The October 31st date was chosen by the United Nations Population Fund, and it’s somewhat symbolic. "There is a window of uncertainty of at least six months before and six months after the 31 October date for the world population to reach seven billion," UN population estimates chief Gerhard Heilig told the BBC. However, the crux of the matter—the ever-increasing world population and the problems that come with it—stands.

Human being No. 7,000,000,000 is probably poor—and it's likely the parents didn't plan the pregnancy.

The developing world acted as the engine for most of the last decade's population growth. It’s home to the world’s seven fastest-growing cities, according to Foreign Policy. As such, it’s attracting the attention of policymakers and crystal-ball-gazers alike. Many, like the Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman, propose extending access to contraceptives and encouraging smaller family size to curb population-related problems, though a recent Economist article says that this would only have a modest effect in the face of scarce world resources.

Sure, resource scarcity is a problem, but maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Not all commentators are equally pessimistic about continuing population growth. Some of the most basic problems, like access to food and water, might really be problems of efficiency rather than scarcity. Global Envision contributor Ben Osborn recently wrote about a study by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research that showed that given proper integration and storage of water resources, no one would have to go thirsty. On the food front, a scientific study published in Nature showed that proper agricultural reforms “could increase global food availability by 100–180%,” more than enough to meet the needs of our growing population.

The antidote to population could be migration.

Ensuring good quality of life for the earth’s inhabitants goes beyond just food and water. The UN’s State of the World Population 2011 report identifies migration as a trend that can be used to help aid in economic development. Wealthy countries with declining fertility rates could provide job opportunities for workers disenfranchised in their overpopulated home countries. At the same time, migration is a hot-button issue for developed nations that may not be so keen to open their borders. The report also cites increased access to education as a key factor in reducing population growth and providing better opportunities for youth in developing nations.

Maybe we should all just learn to stop worrying and love the population bomb.

Many fear rapid population growth in a world with limited resources, but given the proper policies it might not have to be so scary. Since there’s no “undo” button for world population, perhaps the best question to ask in light of the 7 billion marker is “How can we make the best of it?”

Want to know where you fit into the 7 billion? Check out The BBC’s “What’s Your Number” tool.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Cellphones are transforming the way in which aid workers are tackling the transmission of infectious diseases in Haiti. Photo:ambafranceht (flickr)

In Haiti, aid workers may have saved thousands of lives by tracking the cell phones of displaced citizens.

Following the 2010 earthquake (which claimed the lives of over 200,000), and a deadly cholera outbreak that originated in a U.N refugee camp, public health researchers in the area discovered that they could harness Haiti’s burgeoning cell phone network in a unique way.

Researchers found that not only was it possible to anonymously track (via cellphone SIM cards) the movements of displaced citizens, but that in doing so they could also anticipate the spread of epidemics, NPR reports. This let aid and health workers reach areas of infection more efficiently, curbing the further spread and transmission of disease.

An additional benefit to utilizing the Haitian cell network was that medical workers were able to distribute health advice by way of text and voicemail messages to thousands of Haitians, tips on everything from re-hydration to breastfeeding infected babies.

Though this effort was one of the first of its kind, infectious disease investigators believe that similar techniques for future outbreaks around the globe have the potential to be equally effective. Add "epidemic control" to the consistently growing list of uses for mobile phones. At the pace that cellular and smart phone technology are developing, who knows what’s next?

Immigration policy is intended to protect American workers, but letting more foreigners through checkpoints like this one may create jobs. Photo: scalleja (flickr)

Instead of deporting immigrants with good ideas, the U.S. government is opening its doors a little wider to foreign entrepreneurs in hopes of boosting a weak economy.

Under past immigration policy, in order to obtain a green card, foreign workers had to first secure a job offer at an established company. But a new administrative ruling aimed at boosting America’s weak economy takes a different approach. Rather than finding a job offer, foreign entrepreneurs wishing to live in America need only prove that their business start up “will be in the U.S. national interest,” says the Wall Street Journal.

Alejandro Mayorkas, chief of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, changed the policy after concluding that many people were earning degrees with a U.S. student visa, but starting up companies and creating job opportunities elsewhere due to the lack of work visas available here.

The relaxation of requirements could shift immigration policy away from only allowing in the highly educated and well off, opening the doors to anyone, regardless of background—as long as they have a business plan.

A family looks north over the Mexican border near Tijuana. Photo: Nathan Gibbs (flickr)

Is Mexico on its way to becoming the new Land of Opportunity?

Illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States has plummeted, leaving experts scrambling for explanations. Recent statistics are showing an unprecedented drop in illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States, Douglas Massey of Princeton's Mexican Migration Project told the New York Times.

For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and probably is a little bit negative.

The findings bring an unexpected twist to the heated illegal immigration debate of the past decade.

Life for illegal immigrants in the United States has unarguably become harder in recent years. Government crackdowns on businesses make finding employment without papers a daunting task, and the United States’ current economic situation significantly decreases the financial incentive for prospective immigrants.

However a recent article from the New York Times gave a surprising explanation for the decline. It’s not that the United States is getting worse. It’s that Mexico is getting better. Rapidly improving social and economic prospects in Mexico have made staying home more attractive than immigrating to the United States.

Long-term research indicates several related factors within Mexico that may explain the immigration decline: birth control and education. Birth control efforts have dramatically decreased the fertility rate in Mexico from 6.8 children per woman in 1970 to just two today. Furthermore, government initiatives seem to be having a positive impact on education. “Around half the students now move on to higher schooling, up from 30 percent a decade ago,” according to the New York Times. Fewer workers with more schooling indicates a promising, prosperous future for Mexico, depending on which statistics you rely on.

The findings invite significant debate — many economists diverge over official indicators of Mexico’s economy. Whatever the true figures, though, only time will tell what the full impact of this new trend in immigration will be. A study by the World Bank indicates that Mexico will need to be prepared to compensate for factors linked to immigration such as decreased remittance incomes, or portions of migrant workers' wages sent home to assist their families, that currently account for up to 15 percent of gross state product in the poorer states of Mexico and have a range of positive influences on economic development.

In the meantime, the evidence suggests that for many Mexicans, the grass is no longer greener on the other side.

Soldiers, the traditional actors in a war, patrol in remote Afghanistan. Not shown here are those that provide comforts on the U.S. bases nearby. Photo: The U.S. Army (flickr)

At the end of a movie, the credits run for cast and crew. At the end of a war, soldiers receive Purple Hearts and well-earned pensions. But when is the production crew of a war recognized?

Lacking in grandiosity, working at a McDonald's inside a U.S. military base isn’t going to win you any medals. And yet, you face the same mortar attacks, the same war zone threats, as soldiers.

In a recent article from The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman reveals the rampant deception involved in recruiting these laborers from the developing world and the slavery-like conditions that prevent them from returning home.

The expansion of private-security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is well known. But armed security personnel account for only about sixteen per cent of the over-all contracting force. The vast majority—more than sixty per cent of the total in Iraq—aren’t hired guns but hired hands. These workers, primarily from South Asia and Africa, often live in barbed-wire compounds on U.S. bases, eat at meagre chow halls… A large number are employed by fly-by-night subcontractors who are financed by the American taxpayer but who often operate outside the law.

In recent years, federal officials have been spurred into action. The Department of Defense (DoD) initiated an investigation in 2006 following several such grievances. According to the Pentagon-issued directive, FRAGO 06-188 [Trafficking in Persons], (pdf) which went into effect later that same year, “an inspection of contracting activities supporting DoD in Iraq revealed evidence of illegal confiscation of worker (Third Country National) passports by contractors/subcontractors; deceptive hiring practices and excessive recruiting fees, substandard worker living conditions at some sites, circumvention of Iraqi immigration procedures by contractors/subcontractors and lack of mandatory trafficking in persons awareness training.”

Based on a yearlong investigation, Stillman discloses that despite the directive against human trafficking and the Department of Defense's efforts to increase subcontractor accountability, poor workers are still being manipulated, swindled, and robbed.

A typical manpower agency charges applicants between two thousand and four thousand dollars, a small fortune in the countries where subcontractors recruit. To raise the money, workers may pawn heirlooms, sell their wedding rings or land or livestock, and take out high-interest loans... Many learned [upon arrival] that they were to earn as little as two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month as cooks and servers for U.S. soldiers—a fraction of what they’d been promised, and a tiny sliver of what U.S. taxpayers are billed for their labor.

Taking advantage of the least advantaged is despicable enough, but these workers not only lose money and freedom but sometimes their lives. Stillman writes that "for the first time in American history, private-contractor losses are now on a par with those of U.S. troops in both war zones [Iraq and Afghanistan], amounting to fifty-three per cent of reported fatalities in the first six months of 2010." Yes, that is more than half of the total fatalities—and, she notes, the true number is probably higher. The official number is based solely on what the private contracting companies report.

According to the Trafficking in Persons Report 2011, the United States is ranked in Tier 1. This means that the U.S. government has identified human trafficking as a problem and is implementing preventative and remedial laws and programs. After reading Stillman's article, you might question the United States' rating.

The Developing Worlds Educated face Tough Choices after Graduation. Photo: Farhad Zalmai for Mercy Corps

“Brain drain” has long bothered policymakers in poor countries says The Economist. But recent migration studies and a touch of classical economics suggest the better phrase is “brain gain."

A country that sends its most skilled workers abroad has three key advantages:

Remittances (money sent home from abroad) go up. In 2010, workers remitted $325 billion, equaling the GDP of Switzerland, largely from developed to developing countries. According to The Economist, skilled workers often find better job opportunities abroad in richer countries, multiplying their income several fold and creating the potential for additional remittances.

Émigrés return with more marketable skills. Increasing numbers of skilled migrants eventually return home with new skills, new contacts, and a pot of savings to invest after several years abroad. In one Romanian study, returning migrants earned 12 to 14 percent more than similar people who stayed home.

There is a higher incentive for education and skill development. Research from Fiji and the Cape Verde Islands show that the general level of education in a population often rises when workers see potential for immigration to “greener pastures”. People have an increased incentive to pick up skills which remain useful if they decide not to migrate after all.

Of course, emigrating tends to benefit the migrants themselves. Otherwise, they would be less likely to leave home.

"Brain gain" parallels English political economist David Ricardo’s law of “comparative advantage” -- stating that two countries with advantages in different areas are better off trading. Richer countries offer more quality employment opportunities for skilled labor while, according to two North African studies, skilled laborers remaining in developing countries often face underemployment or unemployment. Migration across borders -- swapping workers for revenue -- balances these two forces. Some studies claim the world would add $39 trillion to global growth over 25 years if labor became truly mobile.

A skilled immigrant moving from the developing to developed world could actually benefit both nations:

• The destination-country adds a skilled worker, boosting output.
• The worker's annual income rises -- say, from $10,000 (at home) to $50,000 (abroad).
• If the worker remits only 25 percent of his or her income, then losing that worker abroad actually raised the individuals contribution to GDP from $10,000 to $12,500.

Migration does create winners and losers says The Economist. The emotional toll on families continually forced to relocate can be high, though lessening with new technology. And some skilled workers (educated and trained at the expense of cash-strapped governments) do not return much to their poorer homelands.

However, the benefits of brain gain are increasingly thought of as outweighing the costs of brain drain. The Economist aptly sums it up: "Letting educated people go where they want, looks like the brainy option."

A foreign domestic worker looks after her elderly client. Photo: Jerry Wong (flickr)

Developing-world mothers, too poor to feed their families, are increasingly finding work abroad and sending the fruits of their labor to the children they will not raise.

Their payments, called remittances, are a significant part of an unofficial global aid network worth $325 billion last year. That’s three times the size of official foreign development aid spending, according to an article in the New York Times.

The women who choose this life aren't just redefining the foreign aid landscape. They are also redefining motherhood, says the Times.

Across the world, millions of mothers have made this sacrifice for their children — forgoing a life with them in hope of ensuring a better life for them. These women venture far, often into the uncertain world of undocumented domestic work that in effect keeps them hostage in their host countries.

And yet, in spite of the hefty financial contribution and personal toll, remittances — and remitters — remain a relative blind spot on the global development map. But their invisibility may not last long. Remittance flows worldwide keep swelling: The World Bank project they will reach $374 in 2012, or nearly $50 billion more than last year’s total.

India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines are the world’s top four remittance recipients, says the New York Times and in a number of smaller developing countries, remittances make up more than 20 percent of GDP and provide the largest source of foreign exchange.

Striking though these figures may be, it’s clear that remittances alone cannot fuel development. They may funnel developed world-sized wages into the developing world. But most of these micro-transfers are themselves not sufficient and, more importantly, not coordinated enough to support the large-scale projects that aid and development institutions traditionally take on. In short, remittances may enable the children left behind by migrant mothers to get an education or access health care. But unless they are strategically pooled and channelled, they probably won’t create jobs or fund the construction of schools and hospitals.

Nonetheless, "women migrants have become a formidable force for development,” says the New York Times. "When permitted, migration is a major economic equilibrating mechanism" and an important instrument for poverty alleviation, according to the World Bank.

While there is relatively little formal data on remittances, anecdotal accounts abound. Recent analyses of these sources are revealing interesting trends, particularly about the special role and behavior of female remitters. Women, who constitute 51 percent of developed countries’ migrant worker population, generally earn and therefore remit less than men, yet the fraction they send home tends to be higher and more consistent, even during crises, according to the New York Times article. Women usually channel their incomes to necessities such as food, health care and education, while men tend to spend more of their wages on recreation.

There is another reason remittances should be acknowledged as promising contributors to development, emphasizes the New York Times: they work.

By cutting out institutions and (often corrupt) governments, remittances more nimbly [address] needs like raising birthweight or lowering [the] number of school drop-outs. They [are] also a powerful cushion in times of conflict or natural disaster, when remittances tend to increase, driven by an empathetic diaspora.

The world’s remitters care for their own by leaving them for strenuous lives in far-away places. And they are also thinking bigger, forming associations and networks to pool the aid they send home and to create space for solidarity and cultural expression with other women who tell the same story. Their efforts have been unexpectedly effective and significant, if not (yet) widely appreciated as powerful agents of development and aid.

This has been reposted from the Mercy Corps blog.

On March 1, I entered Libya from Egypt with the Mercy Corps emergency response team. The situation at the border was chaotic. Thousands of foreign migrant workers were trying to cross into Egypt to escape the violence in Libya. Many of them were stranded in the no-man’s land area between the two countries, waiting for transportation and permission to enter Egypt.

The customs house, the duty free shop — literally every building at the border — had become temporary shelter for the thousands of people who were stuck there. More were camped out on the sidewalks and parking lots. Most of them had only the belongings they could carry by hand and very little money or resources to cope. Fortunately, the majority of the people were Egyptians and so they did not have to travel too far to reach home and the Egyptian government was assisting their people in getting back there.

Since the unrest and violence began in Libya there is the refugee crisis as the migrant foreign workers try to flee the violence. More 170,000 people have fled from Libya — thousands are still stuck in the border of Tunisia without adequate financial resources, shelter or food.

The situation on the Tunisia border, where Mercy Corps has another emergency team deployed for this ongoing regional crisis, is much worse than on the Egyptian side. The people fleeing into Tunisia are also largely Egyptian, but they have to get transportation on planes or boats to get home. The numbers are massive and they are forced to wait several days for transport. There are also reports that, as they come through Libya, they being harassed by pro-Gaddafi forces and some have been forced to pay bribes and give away the few possessions they brought as bribes to pass.

The United States and other governments have sent planes and boats to help the people evacuate, and the border situation has improved in the last day — but thousands are still waiting.

There is also concern if there is an increase in airstrikes and violence in the west of Libya that more people will try to cross the borders to escape. If this happens, the crisis could spiral out of control.

The situation here in Libya is changing by the minute as the opposition advances from the East and then is beaten back by Gaddafi forces, and then advances again. Airstrikes are ongoing and we are preparing for the worst, but hoping for a quick end to this terrible violence.

Some of the thousands stuck at the Salloum border between Libya and Egypt. The situation on the Tunisian border is much worse. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

Entrepreneurs like this New York City business owner drive job creation. Photo: Franklin Abreu (flickr)

Would easing visa requirements for immigrant entrepreneurs give the U.S. economy a much-needed boost?

A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece suggests it might. Immigrants are almost 30 percent more likely to start a business than non-immigrants, explains the article, and new businesses account for the most jobs added to the economy every year.

“For years, academics have noted the connection between immigration, entrepreneurship, and job creation,” explains a recent Slate article. The article cites a recent report by the National Foundation for American Policy that estimates 10,000 entrepreneur visas could create 100,000 jobs.

Right now the requirements for getting an investor visa make it nearly impossible for most immigrants who want to start a business, argues the Wall Street Journal article.

The U.S. created an immigrant investor visa category (EB-5) in 1990, but steep minimum capital requirements put it out of reach for most potential recipients. The average start-up company in the U.S. begins with about $31,000. Yet to become eligible for an EB-5 visa, an individual must invest at least $500,000. It's no wonder that fewer than 3,700 people received EB-5 visas last year—including spouses and children—and most of them went to immigrant investors looking to expand existing U.S. ventures, not create new businesses.

Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar have introduced legislation that proposes issuing a conditional green card for anyone who receives at least $250,000 from a U.S. venture capitalist, and extending permanent residence if the business does well. But The Wall Street Journal article suggests that these changes would still falls short, given that the average start-up cost to businesses are much lower than this plan outlines.

"The U.S. would do better to discard capital requirements and welcome any foreign national who can present a business plan that passes muster with the Small Business Administration," said Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy, tells the Wall Street Journal article. "As with the EB-5 visa, the individual would receive a green card only if the business created a certain number of jobs for U.S. workers within a set period of time."

Let's hope politicians heed this advice — the economy could certainly use the jobs.

In the early 1990s Saddam Hussein drained what biblical scholars believe to be the Garden of Eden. With the water went the people, known as the Ma’dan, and their way of life. Now, Iraqi-American hydraulic engineer Dr. Azzam Alwash and his organization Nature Iraq, are working with the Ma’dan to restore the marshes of southern Iraq, in a project Alwash calls “Eden Again." He hopes the exiled people will come back as water and wildlife return to what had been turned into a desert, according to a segment on the PBS show, Nature.

For thousands of years the Ma’dan called the marshes home. They lived on floating islands made of reeds that grew in the marshes. They caught fish, hunted birds, and kept water buffalo, says an article from Spiegel Online. Without water this life wasn’t possible and the Ma’dan people either migrated to the city or suffered in poverty.

Alwash returned to the marshes in 2003 after Hussein fled from power. He found that those that had remained in the area had already begun to dig through the man-made embankments that diverted the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers away from the marshes, he explained in a recent NPR interview. Flash forward seven years and the Ma’dan have destroyed up to 98 percent of the embankments, Alwash tells the Guardian. Their motivations more economic, than anything else.

Not because they are tree-huggers or bird-lovers, but because it's a source of economic income to them, because they can harvest reeds and sell them. They can fish and feed a family or sell them to earn extra income.

Hundreds of thousands of Ma’dan people who have been living in urban exile are now used to many aspects of modern life, Alwash explains in another article in the Guardian. They’ve become familiar with electricity, television, air-conditioning and wifi. But Alwash sees no reason why comforts such as these can’t be incorporated into the traditional Ma’dan way of life. Once services are in place Alwash anticipates a flood of “reverse migration.”

Right now, the biggest stressors to the marshes are ongoing drought and hydro-dams in Iraq's northern neighbor, Turkey. In the NPR interview Alwash explains that the drought has reduced the marshes to about 35 percent of their former size. But Alwash is confident that 75 percent of the marshes can be restored despite the drought and dams in Turkey.

When Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in the early 1990s he attempted to turn a paradise into a desert and wipe one of the oldest civilizations on earth off the face of the earth itself. He nearly succeeded. But with the help of Dr. Azzam Alwash and Nature Iraq, the Ma’dan have proved the resilient force that nature and humanity are, as a desert becomes Eden again.

Iraqi photographer Sate Al Abbasi's beautiful shots of Ma'dan people at home in the marshes can be viewed in the slideshow below.

South Africa is struggling to absorb incoming refugees from neighboring countries like Zimbabwe. Photo: DFID - UK Department for International Development (flickr)

While the Arizona immigration law continues to cause a great deal of controversy within the United States, the failing global economy is causing problems for immigrants across the world, according to a report in the Christian Science Monitor. Countries, developing and developed alike, are struggling to deal with an increased anti-immigration backlash.

According to the UNDP, only about one-third of immigrants move from a developing country to a developed one. And yet, it is developed countries that have a stronger ability to adapt to new people and integrate them into the workforce. Intolerance toward immigrants is particularly high in developing countries like South Africa that struggle to absorb the additional labor, according to the Christian Science Monitor story.

The source of this resentment in developing countries is much the same as in developed ones: immigrants increase competition for scarce resources like housing and most importantly, jobs. In South Africa, a country where about a quarter of the population is unemployed, South Africans are more concerned for their own wellbeing than accommodating the floods of refugees and immigrants entering their country. "In South Africa, you have high unemployment, high poverty rates, and people want houses, but they don't get them," says Miriam Altman, director of a South African think tank mentioned in the Christian Science Monitor article. "So then they see outsiders coming in and moving next door" and view them as rivals rather than neighbors.

A global "anti-immigration" sentiment, however, might only serve to shuffle migrants -- who often come from the world's poorest populations -- from one country to the next. This constant movement could prevent these people from finding the permanent work they need to break out of poverty.