More countries are seeing the benefits of international students

Talented tech workers have more options than ever
The battle for high-skilled workers has been a mainstay of immigration policy in developed countries for many years said Dumont.
“Tech is the next frontier where countries are competing for talent, so in the last four or five years some have been very active in this area,” he added.
French president Emmanuel Macron announced a new tech visa for start-up founders, employees and investors shortly after taking office last year. Similar schemes exist in South Korea, Chile, Canada and the Netherlands, according to Dumont.
Most such programs require evidence of financial backing, but some governments are so committed to the talent race that they are offering money to help immigrants develop their ideas. South Korea gives selected new arrivals between €25,000 ($29,000) and €100,000 ($116,000) for their venture, and France offers €45,000 as well as space in an incubator to winners of a competition for would-be migrants.
Beyond tech-specific immigration routes, many countries, including Austria and Canada, have loosened requirements for other high-skilled work programs.
The challenge for countries trying to attract start-ups, Dumont suggested, is aligning immigration rules with other policy. As with students, broader social dynamics affect whether would-be immigrants think they will be welcome in a country.
Potential founders also look at economic policy affecting how likely their venture is to succeed, not just how simple visa processes are. “The question is whether these countries are capable of not only attracting these businesses," Dumont said, "but whether they provide an enabling environment where they can grow.” — Fergus Peace
(Picture credit: Flickr/Heisenberg Media)
International statistics allow us to identify three broad channels of entry for international migrants. Individuals can relocate abroad to work, to join/move together with family members or to escape persecution in their country of origin. As labour mobility is free within the European Union, the OECD data collected for EU member countries contain also information on the stock of foreign nationals coming from other EU members. The same holds for Australia and New Zealand, two countries which have a free labour mobility agreement. Table 1 provides a broad overview of the patterns of settlement in 2010 for the countries we have included in our study.
A few striking stylized facts emerge. First, family reunification appears to be the main channel of entry for foreign nationals. On average, 44 percent of the migrants residing in the OECD have been admitted either to be rejoined to family members already living in the destination country (family), or as tied movers (i.e. accompanying family of workers). The importance of the family channel would increase further if we were to focus our discussion on individuals that cannot benefit from free mobility within the EU (the share would increase to 55 percent of the total). Work is the second most important channel of entry, representing 21 percent of the total admissions, whereas admissions under the humanitarian channel represent only about 7 percent of the total. Importantly, in 2010 about 20 percent of the foreign residents in OECD countries were admitted under the EU free movement arrangement, suggesting that intra-European migration is becoming more important.
The average figures conceal substantial heterogeneity among individual countries. In each of the traditional non European destinations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States) family reunification covers more than one half of the total arrivals: the figure is a stunning 74 percent for the United States, sixty percent for Australia, 59 percent for Canada and 58 percent for New Zealand. In countries that have received large immigration flows only recently – like Spain or Italy – the relevance of the family reunification channel is much smaller, as it covers respectively only 19 and 28 percent of the total number of inflows. At the same time, for more recent destinations the labour market channel plays a much more important role: 40 percent of the foreign nationals admitted in Italy in 2010 came to the country to work, and in the case of Spain the corresponding figure was 30 percent. At the same time only 6 percent of the permanent inflows in the United States in that year was represented by individual who came to work, and even for countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand, that have made skilled migration the capstone of their immigration policy, the labour market channel does not cover more than 27 percent of the admissions.
Thus, while assessing the role that skill-selective immigration policies can play in shaping the composition of the foreign born population, it is always important to keep in mind that regulating immigration is a complex task and that basic human rights considerations do constrain the set of policies that can be actually implemented in Western democracies.