In this section we discuss the robustness of our results to two other bene…cial brain gain channels (uncertain migration and remittances), to the possibility of amnesties for the illegal and to a multi-country world.
31To see this note that the sign of equation 36 depends only on the term in the nu-merator (all the remaining terms are positive). The cross derivative of the nunu-merator in relation to ,handZ equals 4 .
Start with uncertain migration. In the case analyzed in this paper, when a potential migrant decides to migrate, he does so independently of his legal status, i.e.: when is pro…table to migrate, an individual has no uncertainty about his decision. Suppose, instead, that if a skilled individual does not get a legal visa, he decides with probability qS to not migrate and with probability (1 qS) to migrate regardless of the illegality condition. As expected, the skilled individuals with no legal visa that give up of migrating will contribute for a bene…cial brain gain.
However, this new formulation does not prevent the brain waste risk to arise. Therefore, since the main mechanism in this paper is not a¤ected, results are also not going to be qualitatively altered.
Consider now the case of remittances. Assume that each individual that decides to take education in the origin country receives a remit-tance Rto …nance his education32. This case is somewhat similar to the education policy above. The only di¤erence is that now who pays for the education of the young are not taxes from those that remain in the coun-try, but emigrants’ transfers. As such remittances will also contribute to increase the education incentives of individuals in the origin country.
However, remittances do not eliminate the brain waste risk that skilled individuals face under illegal migration. Therefore, again results from our central case are going to be basically the same.
Next, we look at amnesties for illegal migrants. Imagine that an individual that does not get legal status spends a share 2(0;1)of his working life in the destination country as an illegal and a share (1 ) as a legal, due to amnesties to illegal migrants33. In this case the brain waste risk will be reduced, but not totally eliminated. Therefore once more our results are not going to be changed substantially. Furthermore, politicians in recent years have been more reticent to apply amnesties for illegal migrants. If this tendency continues, the amnesty channel for reducing the brain waste risk will also become weaker34.
Finally, we discuss a multi-country world. Suppose that individuals from the origin country can migrate to i = 1;2; :::; n destination coun-tries. For simplicity we further assume that all destination countries are symmetric in every respect35. Think …rst of a scenario where all
desti-32We do not consider remittances used for other purposes besides education. This would only make a di¤erence if we also introduce credit constrained individuals.
33We can also interpret as the probability of receiving an amnesty.
34Note that the brain waste risk can also a¤ect legal migrants, especially those belonging to some ethnic groups or citizens from certain countries (Mattoo et al., 2008). As such, results in this paper could be extended to more general cases of brain waste, which do not include only illegal migrants.
35Accordingly, migrants tend to prefer countries with higher wages, with more job opportunities, and closer in terms of geographical and cultural distance.
nation countries have the same migration policy (either the open or the selective migration policy). In this case migrants will not have any pref-erence for a particular destination country. However, this can change if destination countries di¤er in the migration policy used. Accordingly, skilled workers will prefer to migrate to countries with open migration policies in order to reduce the brain waste risk. As a result, relatively to a country with a selective migration policy, a country with an open migration policy will be able to attract more skilled workers and there-fore to achieve more easily a positive self-selection36. In addition, the existence of destination countries with open migration policies can also help origin countries to achieve a bene…cial brain gain, given that as we have seen above, open migration policies increase education incentives.
7 Discussion
In this paper we have argued that since migration policies a¤ect mi-grants’ legal status, then, they also a¤ect education incentives, brain drain and self-selection. In particular, more open migration policies tend to create less illegal migration than selective migration policies, given that the latter has more restrictive criteria for admission. In this sense we have compared an open migration policy where all migrants are granted a legal visa, with a selective migration policy where migrants are selected according to skills. Accordingly, under the selective migration policy an individual that does not get a legal visa but decides to migrate becomes an illegal migrant. This is specially penalizing for skilled ille-gal migrants, because they most likely end up working as unskilled (i.e.:
brain waste). In other words, selective migration policies increase the brain waste risk that skilled workers face when migrating.
We then showed that, relatively to the open migration policy, the selective migration policy has several negative e¤ects. For the origin country it reduces the incentives of individuals to acquire education; it weakens the possibility of bene…cial brain gain to arise; and it dampens the success of education policies. For the destination country, in turn, it undermines the chances of a positive self-selection. We have also dis-cussed that these results are robust to other bene…cial brain gain chan-nels than temporary migration (uncertain migration and remittances), to amnesties for illegal migrants and to a multi-country world.
Our model then carries out some interesting policy implications for developed and developing countries. For developed countries the popu-larity of selective migration policies might be misleading. In fact, instead
36In other words, countries with more open migration policies can cancel-out the e¤ects of selective migration policies put in place in other countries.
of attracting more skilled workers, this policy might on the contrary pre-vent a positive self-selection. The rational for this result is that selective migration policies, due to the brain waste risk, can reduce the incentives of skilled workers to migrate. In turn, and now from the perspective of developing countries, education policies cannot be seen independently from the migration policies in developed countries, given that the latter a¤ect the former. Accordingly, since selective migration policies from destination countries can reduce the incentives of individuals to acquire education in the origin countries, they can also cancel out any positive e¤ects from education policies in the latter.
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