Countries Must “Future-Proof” Their Immigrant Selection Systems to Stay Competitive in a Changing World of Work

• ƒAdvanced skills, which will experience unprecedented demand, remain difficult forselection systems to assess. Labor-market analyses suggest there is likely to be a premium placed on identifying people with more advanced technical skills in areas such as data science and software development, and with the soft skills valued by the knowledge economy. The latter skillset ranges from strong social and interpersonal skills (including the ability to work collaboratively), to creativity and communication skills, to higher-level cognitive capabilities (including abstract and systems thinking). Because such traits can be applied across occupations, they can help equip workers to navigate fast-paced labor-market changes. However, evaluating advanced expertise and even more so, intangible qualities, poses a conundrum for selection systems that are used to assessing formal education and work experience (and which can even struggle with that task). Moreover, systems that rely on points to select economic immigrants may be able to prioritize these more intangible qualities, but they can ultimately only pick from the available pool of applicants—which limits the search for the “best” to the “best available.”
• As jobs increasingly become decoupled from physical locations, demand for some skills-based mobility may change. Remote work and digital collaboration are reducing the importance of physical location to work, especially in sectors such as technology, giving firms more flexibility to decide where to create jobs. But location will remain important in many sectors, especially when it comes to business clusters and cities, and their “soft” infrastructure (such as universities and cultural activities), which provides the intellectual backbone ofinnovation.  At a lower-wage level, robotics may facilitate outsourcing, as cheaper workers abroad will be able to operate robots performing routine tasks in the high-income world, such as using drones to clean hotel rooms. While these trends could ultimately reduce some skills- based mobility, a more immediate result will be greater interdependence between immigration policies and firm location decisions; barriers to bringing people into the country could encourage companies to outsource jobs or open offices in other countries.
• ƒIncreased freelancing and “gig” work at all skill levels may make the traditional employer sponsorship model less suitable for some forms of economic migration. The growth ofmore flexible and informal types of work points to a world where fewer people hold full-time, permanent contracts and instead work on a more short-term basis, potentially for more than one employer at a time (and even for employers in multiple countries). Immigration, employment, tax, and social security systems are not well-adapted to such non-traditionalworkers. Some countries are experimenting with ways to admit people on a more flexible basis, for example for short-term employment assignments or for freelance work. But moving away from systems built around the traditional employer-employee relationship would require a rethinking of how to enforce compliance with immigration rules, tax obligations, and employment standards, and how to evaluate the skills and experience of applicants in the absence of an employer sponsor.
• As global competition for skilled workers heats up, countries will need to think strategically about how to attract and retain talent. Traditional destination countries arelikely to face growing competition for skilled workers from emerging economies and other new destinations, some of which have introduced their own points-based admission systems inspired by those of traditional immigrant destinations. For example, China introduced a new selection system for economic migrants in 2017 that uses a points system to evaluate candidates with a job offer, drawing on the experiences of Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, andothers, while South Korea introduced a similar “hybrid” program in 2017 to select skilled workers for the manufacturing, agriculture, and fishing industries. Emerging economies such as Chile, India, Mexico, and Taiwan are actively recruiting foreign entrepreneurs either with start-up visas or supportive infrastructure such as investment incentives, incubators, andaccelerators. And many large companies are establishing outposts in flourishing new tech clusters. In India, for instance, Gurgaon near New Delhi is a hub for Google, Facebook, booking. com, and TripAdvisor; and Pune near Mumbai is becoming an emerging fintech hub, with Western Union and the Technology Engineering Centre. Against this backdrop, governments will need to think carefully about how their selection policies and the rights they afford to immigrants will give their country the “edge” in both selecting and retaining immigrants.
• Economic migration channels are just one piece of the broader immigration-policy puzzle. Ongoing mixed migration in many regions has reshaped the broader context for reforms to economic migration channels. Policymakers will need to balance efforts to bring in new skilled workers with continued investments in these recent arrivals. For many destination countries, especially in Europe, spontaneous mixed migration has transformed the conversation around immigration policy, fostering increasing skepticism among publics about the merits of immigration writ large and making dialogue over labor migration and selection (especially at the low-skilled level) increasingly complex.