‘Nobody wants to come’: What if the U.S. can no longer attract immigrant physicians?

2025/11/25 2 Comments

Sad that Canada not on the list:

…”This is a real pivotal moment right now where decades of progress could be at risk,” says Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 

She says policies defunding everything from scientific research to public health have damaged the U.S.’s reputation to the point where she hears from hospitals and universities that top international talent are no longer interested in coming to America. “Up until this year, it was a dream — a wish! — that you could get a job and you could come to the U.S. And now nobody wants to come.”

Gralow says, meanwhile, other countries like China, Denmark, Germany and Australia are taking advantage by recruiting international talent away from the U.S. — including American-born doctors and medical researchers — by promising stable grant funding and state-of-the-art facilities abroad.

American patients will feel the rippling impact from that, Gralow says, for generations.

Immigrant physicians have historically found jobs in U.S. communities with serious health care staff shortages to begin with, so those places also stand to see more impact from curtailed international hiring, says Michael Liu, the Boston medical resident. 

He points to his own recent co-authored research in JAMA estimating that 11,000 doctors, or roughly 1% of the country’s physicians, currently have H1B visas. “That might seem like a small number, but this percentage varied widely across geographies,” he said, and they tend to congregate in the least-resourced areas, reaching up to 40% of physicians in some communities….

Source: ‘Nobody wants to come’: What if the U.S. can no longer attract immigrant physicians?

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Will the Trump era reverse Canada’s brain drain problem?

2025/04/07 Leave a comment

Opportunities:

…The imminent arrival of three eminent Ivy League professors and efforts by Canadian universities to attract American researchers, officials hope, herald the reversal of a perennial problem for Canadian universities: the brain drain to the United States.

“Canada has long wrestled with ways to retain our home-grown talent and attract international academics. Given the developments south of the border, there’s certainly an opportunity now for Canada to build on this. But we’re also competing with other countries,” said David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.

“The big obstacle we face is that we’re in a period of serious financial retrenchment in the sector. Inadequate public funding and a sharp drop in international student enrolments due to caps on study visas mean that universities and colleges are suspending enrolments, cutting programmes, freezing new hiring, and even announcing layoffs.

“How to attract new talent when you’re cutting back on people and programmes? We have a climate that is generally supportive of academic freedom, but it’s only one part of the picture of what would make Canada an attractive destination. We also need the federal and provincial governments to urgently address the public funding gap,” said Robinson.

Richard Gold, director of McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and a lawyer, made the same point in an interview with University World News, before adding that to fully benefit from American scientists who come to Canada, Canadian universities and industry will have to drastically step up their game in developing the financial and corporate infrastructure that brings scientific discoveries to market.

“We’ve done really poorly at translating research into companies that make money and stay here. We sell most of our AI intellectual property to Google and others,” he said by way of example. “And then [we] buy it back at a higher price. Now there’s a recognition that we can’t rely on the United States,” he noted.

In 2000, in an effort to fight the brain drain, the Canadian government established the Canada Research Chair programme, which provides funding from an annual budget of CA$311 million (US$217 million) to more than 2,000 university professors.

“Chairholders aim to achieve research excellence in engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences.

“They improve our depth of knowledge and quality of life, strengthen Canada’s international competitiveness, and help train the next generation of highly skilled people through student supervision, teaching, and the coordination of other researchers’ work,” according to the programme’s website.

Keeping an eye out for Americans

Trump’s policies seem to be a genuine boost to Canada’s chances of attracting those “highly skilled people”.

A recent survey published by Nature showed that 75.3% of 1,608 US respondents said they were “considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration.

According to Nature, the day an early-career physician-scientist at a major university learnt his NIH grant had been terminated, “he e-mailed the department chair of colleagues at a Canadian university … He and his wife, who is also a scientist, are now interviewing for jobs in the country [Canada] and hope to move by the end of the year.”

As soon as the American administration announced cuts to the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and other agencies, Frédéric Bouchard, Doyen de la Faculté des arts et des sciences at Université de Montréal (U de M), told his 35 department chairs “to keep an eye out for Canadians who began their careers in the United States or non-US citizens who had contemplated offers from the United States that may want to revise their plans either for budgetary or for political reasons – and also for Americans who are reconsidering where they can best pursue their careers”.

Despite budgetary restrictions at U de M, Bouchard told University World News that he expects to hire at least 25 professors this year and that there will be an increase “either of American candidates or international candidates who were considering the US market”.

Though he was unable to provide details, Bouchard said that following the announcement of the NIH grant cuts and US cuts to climate research, several long-time donors to U de M’s science programme approached him “to say that if we needed [financial] help to do strategic hiring, to give them a call”.

Donors to science, he added: “are very interested in the science ecosystem, if you will, because they know that science is international. So at some sort of high level, they always keep an eye out on how the international system is going.

“They see that research is being rattled [by the US cuts] and they know that we’re always building. So I was not surprised that they contacted us, but it was a welcome email”.

Beyond Canada

As Bouchard explained, universities around the world are also making plans to hire professors whose research programmes have been closed by the American cuts or because they do not feel comfortable in the United States.

The Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which three years ago saw professors and graduate students leave Ukraine for safety following the Russian full-scale invasion, is among those universities on the lookout.

With funds provided by the Simons Foundation, the mission of which is to support mathematics and basic sciences, KSE is actively looking to hire mathematics and physics professors.

In a posting on X on 29 March, KSE rector Tymofii Brik invited academics who are “feeling uncertain or threatened” to apply to KSE and promised a warm welcome as well as relocation support.

In an interview with University World News, Brik noted that “right now there is a crisis in the United States”, a country he first studied in as a Fulbright Fellow.

“The crisis is political and geopolitical,” he said, noting that Trump’s administration has cut research funds, plans on increasing taxes on endowments, and attacked and cut funds from, among others, Columbia University.

“It seems that a lot of American faculty are frustrated. We hear that Jason Stanley is leaving Yale University because the university is not supporting faculty anymore,” Brik said.

“I think it’s an opportunity for us because despite the war, we are operational,” Brik noted.

“If you really want to be an academic and push science and innovation, Ukraine is about the best place because you have access to data about social activities and demography.

“You have real-time data about how the economy changes during the war. You can have access to data on military issues, so if you are an engineer, you can analyse that.

“Maybe the money is not as great as in the United States. But at least you have a sense of security and academic fulfilment. And you know that you’re fighting for democracy,” he added.

Threats to sovereignty

Dr Marc Ruel, a professor in the department of surgery, and division head and chair of cardiac surgery at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI), earlier this year accepted an offer by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to become the chief of the division of adult cardiothoracic surgery. Last month, he announced he had changed his mind.

Ruel saw himself, he told the CTV Television Network, as “a bit of a Canadian export” – a reference to Canada’s status as a hockey-mad country, which supplies 42% of the players on American National Hockey League teams, almost 150% more players than the next largest group: Americans themselves.

In an email to University World News, Ruel said he has the “greatest admiration for UCSF and their focus on care excellence, research, education, and innovation” and that his decision to remain in Canada should not be taken as “engag[ing] in their [American] internal politics”.

He told the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail the “tipping point” in his decision to stay was Trump’s talk of making Canada America’s 51st state and the threat of crippling tariffs; by coincidence, he informed UCSF of his change of mind on 4 March, the day that Trump announced tariffs of 25% on Canadian imports.

Ruel told the Globe and Mail the threat to Canada’s “sovereignty and our identity . . . changes everything”.

“I can’t go to a jurisdiction that belittles our country,” he said.

In his email to University World News, Ruel set his decision in the context of international scientific exchange.

“In my view, it’s important for international scientific collaboration and exchange that the sovereignty of partaking countries is not something that is up for grabs or threatened by another.

“If that happens, it’s rather difficult for trust and collaboration to thrive. Science, research, and clinical leaders generally care about how their country – which has educated and supported them – is viewed by the one with which they will closely collaborate or might even move to in order to provide a new stage for their innovation, clinical care, research, or education platform,” he stated.

Patriotic education

While the Trump administration’s attack on Columbia triggered Stanley’s decision to accept the offer to come to Canada, his analysis of the authoritarian nature of American politics includes a trenchant critique of the laws that states like Florida have brought in banning the teaching of critical race theory in the K-12 system.

The vagueness of these laws, he explained to interviewer Michel Martin on Amanpour & Company, was not a bug in the system but, rather, a feature, designed to keep teachers looking over their shoulders because “your fellow citizens have been empowered to report you” for deviating from the “official state ideology”.

The ‘Dear Colleague’ letter issued by the Department of Education that Martin read serves as ‘Exhibit A’ for Stanley’s analysis.

The letter states “that educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon systemic and structural racism and advanced discriminatory policies and practices, and that proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them, particularly during the last four years under the banner of diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, DEI, smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race consciousness into everyday training, programming and discipline”.

‘Exhibit B’ is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s statement in what she called the “final mission statement of the Department of Education”, which Trump tasked her with dismantling. In that statement, she wrote that the goal of American education is “patriotic education”.

The problem, Stanley underscored, is that the US was “founded and built upon systematic racism and exclusion. It’s part of our founding documents that we wanted to take more indigenous land … The United States is built on slavery. There’s no factual argument about that.

“So when you begin by saying that universities and K-12 schools are not allowed to teach facts, then you’re already on a very problematic playing field.

“And part of the point of these guidelines is to be vague because it allows wide latitude to target professors and to encourage students to report professors for anything that might suggest that the United States was not always the greatest nation on Earth and was essentially free from sin”.

Turning to higher education, Stanley noted: “Universities are not there in a democracy to stroke the egos of the citizens of a country. Just imagine your cartoon vision of an authoritarian country: it’s where the purpose of schools is to tell students to love their country and not question it.

“In a democracy, universities are there to teach the facts. They’re not there to breed patriotism. These documents explicitly tell us the purpose of schools and universities is to create patriotic citizens. That is not the purpose of the university. That’s nationalist education. That is not democratic education.”

Bending to Trump

Stanley is equally critical of American academics and university leaders who, he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, have, in a pre-emptive way, acceded to Trump’s threats.

“Let’s keep our heads down and we won’t be seen; we won’t be a target,” he wrote before characterising Columbia’s “obsequious, embarrassing” response as amounting to: “Oh, hit us again, please. Hit us again.”

The Trump administration’s attack on Columbia – the withdrawal of US$400 million in research grants and pressuring the university to place the Department of Middle Eastern Studies into “academic receivership” because the administration objected to its “ideology” – stems, Stanley explained to Martin, from the Trump administration’s equation of “antisemitism” with “leftism”.

Born, Stanley says, in the hothouse atmosphere of Columbia’s campus during the pro-Palestinian encampment last year, which included “a large number of Jewish students” (but during which both Jewish and Palestinian students felt threatened), the equating of antisemitism with leftism has left little room for Jews like Stanley, who is highly critical of Israel but does not “want to take down the State of Israel”.

Trump’s administration, he underscores in this interview, has divided Jews into “good” and “bad” Jews. “And the good Jews are the ones who support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the bad Jews are the people like me who are highly critical of what is happening and push for Palestinian rights,” he noted.

Worse, Stanley fears that the “history of this era will say that the Jewish people [as defined by Trump] were a sledgehammer for fascism.”

“It’s the first time in my life as an American that I am fearful of our status as equal Americans … because we are suddenly at the centre of politics, of US politics. It’s never good to be in the crosshairs for us; we are being used to destroy democracy,” he told Martin.

Fighting for freedom

Again and again in his essay, in his interview with Martin and on CBC, Stanley stressed his love for the United States.

“They are destroying my country,” he told Martin, referring to the Trump administration. “They are intentionally destroying my country.”

To do this, the destruction of the universities is vital.

“You take down the universities. You tell people that universities are just for job skills.

“They’re not democratic institutions anymore. And then you encourage people not to go to universities. You make student loans more difficult and expensive; privatise them. And then you delegitimise the university,” he stated.

Canada offers him the opportunity to fight the “fascist regime”, he believes, because it is a country “dedicated to freedom, to the values I love”.

Source: Will the Trump era reverse Canada’s brain drain problem?

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Exodus of high net worth Indians economic travesty: Congress on citizenship renunciation data

2024/08/06 Leave a comment

Indian brain drain political debate:

Citing government data of 2.16 lakh Indians renouncing their citizenship in 2023, the Congress on Saturday said the exodus of high-skilled and high net worth Indians is an “economic travesty” that will shrink the country’s tax revenue base over the next few years. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said business personalities are increasingly relocating to places such as Singapore, UAE, the UK and other places renouncing their Indian citizenship. 

In a written response to queries on Indian citizens who have renounced their citizenship, Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh recently told the Rajya Sabha that more than 2.16 lakh Indians renounced their citizenship in 2023. 

Ramesh, the Congress general secretary in-charge communications, said the number was almost double than what it was in 2011, at 123,000.

Many of these Indians who renounced their citizenship are highly skilled and educated, and their leaving the country at a time of a domestic skilled labour supply shortage will “extract a serious toll on our economy,” he said. 

“Many are also financially well-off – earlier this year, a leading global investment migration advisory firm had revealed that over 17,000 millionaires (individuals with total assets greater than $1 million) had left India in the last three years,” Ramesh said. 

This exodus of high-skilled and high net worth Indians could very well have been the result of opaque tax policies and an arbitrary tax administration, quite apart from the overall climate of fear and intimidation surrounding corporate India in the past decade, the Congress leader said. …

Source: Exodus of high net worth Indians economic travesty: Congress on citizenship renunciation data

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ICYMI – Douglas Todd: Canada’s thirst for foreign-trained doctors leads to brain drain from poorer countries

2023/01/03 Leave a comment

Important consideration and a reminder of our largely self-interested immigration program:

It’s frustrating for many Canadians to lack access to a family physician.

And politicians understand the discontent.

That’s why B.C. Premier David Eby, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and others have been announcing they want to address the national health-care “crisis” by smoothing the way for potentially thousands of foreign-trained physicians to work in Canada.

However, while such a push will create some winners in Canada, there will be some losers: The people in countries that the physicians leave behind. Those who end up having to saying goodbye to the homegrown physicians their tax dollars paid to train tend to be in low- and moderate-income countries.

It’s an ethical dilemma, inherent in globalization, that virtually never gets mentioned in Canada.

The self-interest shown by Canadian politicians, and much of the public, in wooing offshore-trained physicians overrides the needs of the citizens of countries that produce them, which tend to have a far lower supply of doctors.

Of course, many internationally trained physicians are hungry for the chance to practise in Canada. One study showed 60 per cent of physicians taught in Pakistan, for instance, want to use their skills in another nation, with most citing how it would be more satisfying and lucrative.

The World Health Organization is trying to address the “geographic maldistribution” of health care workers.

It has developed a global protocol for the international recruiting of health personnel, which attempts to limit the often-detrimental effects of the brain drain. But while the WHO “strongly encourages” all nations to follow the code, it’s voluntary.

In effect, say some, needy countries that lose their health-care workers to places like Canada are providing an inadvertent aid program to richer nations.

It’s a poignant problem, including at a personal level. One of my friends, raised in Zimbabwe, trained as a physician in Africa, immigrated to Canada and had his abilities validated here. He rose high in medical ranks, offering his exceptional care to thousands of Canadians.

Recognizing his good fortune, he frequently returned to Africa to temporarily provide medical aid. Despite that, he was painfully aware he had, in effect, won the immigration lottery, which countless other Africans without adequate health care had not.

A major Canadian study of hundreds of foreign-trained physicians bluntly concludes: The “brain drain has obvious negative consequences” on low-income and middle-income countries.

The often-struggling nations not only lose crucial health-care workers, many of the migrating physicians themselves end up victims of so-called “brain waste,” according to the report led by the University of Toronto’s Aisha Lofters and others.

Since many foreign-trained doctors have run into far more barriers to actually practising medicine in Canada than they expected, they began to lose their skills and, when they returned to their homelands, were not as effective in providing health care.

While the survey was conducted before B.C. and Ontario promised this year to streamline the approval protocol, they authors of it warned “high-income countries like Canada need to ensure that the immigration process clearly outlines the relatively low likelihood of obtaining a career in medicine after immigration.”

The ideal, according to the World Health Organization, would be for all countries, rich and poor, to educate their own physicians and medical workers to meet their nation’s own needs. While the WHO doesn’t call for a ban on recruiting foreign-trained doctors, at the least it wants the process to be less misleading.

The issue of foreign-trained physicians ties into the larger challenge of the brain drain, which University of Oxford economist Paul Collier spells out in his book, Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World.

A specialist on Africa and other developing regions, Collier understands the complexities involved when rich nations welcome the most-educated inhabitants of poorer countries.

He starts with some upsides. One is that people who emigrate to a richer country often send money back home. Their remittances can be a huge benefit to left-behind families. That’s the case despite studies showing the wealthiest emigrants send home the least money.

In addition, says Collier, successful emigrants “become role models to emulate.” They encourage more people in their country of origin to aspire to an education. Since some of those newly educated people don’t end up departing their homelands, it can improve local economies.

A disturbing side-effect, however, is that when too many trained people leave poorer countries, it can cause governments to put less money into public schooling, Collier says. In an extreme case, Haiti, 85 per cent of the educated class have already departed, many for Quebec and Ontario.

Overall, the brain drain from poorer countries causes Collier to conclude the global case for compassion does not lean so much to Canadian citizens ending up, in large part because of population growth, without a family physician

The strongest moral onus, in many cases, is on rich countries to do more to educate people in poor countries who will stay home.

There are ways that could be done, separate from countries restricting how many people can leave. Delanyo Dovlo, the WHO’s representative to Rwanda, suggests all countries contribute to incentives, such as improved working conditions, to encourage health-care workers to practise in their home countries.

The WHO also emphasizes training more people to provide health care in rural areas, because they are less likely to migrate away. Lisa Nguyen, of the University of Washington’s medical school, maintains financial encouragement should be offered to expatriate physicians to return home.

In general, WHO offers the common sense advice that nations, including the likes of Canada, should “strive to meet their health personnel needs with their own human resources, as far as possible.”

Such national self-reliance might not be the cheapest route for governments, which will have to educate more doctors, but it points to a long-term solution.

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada’s thirst for foreign-trained doctors leads to brain drain from poorer countries

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Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages

2022/01/25 Leave a comment

The costs to source countries:

There are few nurses in the Zambian capital with the skills and experience of Alex Mulumba, who works in the operating room at a critical care hospital. But he has recently learned, through a barrage of social media posts and LinkedIn solicitations, that many faraway places are eager for his expertise, too — and will pay him far more than the $415 per month (including an $8 health risk bonus) he earns now.

Mr. Mulumba, 31, is considering those options, particularly Canada, where friends of his have immigrated and quickly found work. “You have to build something with your life,” he said.

Canada is among numerous wealthy nations, including the United States and United Kingdom, that are aggressively recruitingmedical workers from the developing world to replenish a health care work force drastically depleted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The urgency and strong pull from high-income nations — including countries like Germany and Finland, which had not previously recruited health workers from abroad — has upended migration patterns and raised new questions about the ethics of recruitment from countries with weak health systems during a pandemic.

“We have absolutely seen an increase in international migration,” said Howard Catton, the chief executive of the International Council of Nurses. But, he added, “The high, high risk is that you are recruiting nurses from countries that can least afford to lose their nurses.”

About 1,000 nurses are arriving in the United States each month from African nations, the Philippines and the Caribbean, said Sinead Carbery, president of O’Grady Peyton International, an international recruiting firm. While the United States has long drawn nurses from abroad, she said demand from American health care facilities is the highest she’s seen in three decades. There are an estimated 10,000 foreign nurses with U.S. job offers on waiting lists for interviews at American embassies around the world for the required visas.

Since the middle of 2020, the number of international nurses registering to practice in the United Kingdom has swelled, “pointing toward this year being the highest in the last 30 years in terms of numbers,” said James Buchan, a senior fellow with the Health Foundation, a British charity, who advises the World Health Organization and national governments on health worker mobility.

“There are 15 nurses in my unit and half have an application in process to work abroad,” said Mike Noveda, a senior neonatal nurse in the Philippines who has been temporarily reassigned to run Covid wards in a major hospital in Manila. “In six months, they will have left.”

As the pandemic enters its third year and infections from the Omicron variant surge around the world, the shortage of health workers is a growing concern just about everywhere. As many as 180,000 have died of Covid, according to the W.H.O. Others have burned out or quit in frustration over factors such as a lack of personal protective equipment. About 20 percent in the United States have left their jobs during the pandemic. The W.H.O. has recorded strikes and other labor action by health workers in more than 80 countries in the past year — the amount that would normally be seen in a decade. In both developing countries and wealthy ones, the depletion of the health work force has come at a cost to patient care.

European and North American countries have created dedicated immigration fast-tracks for health care workers, and have expedited processes to recognize foreign qualifications.

The British government introduced a “health and care visa”program in 2020, which targets and fast tracks foreign health care workers to fill staffing vacancies. The program includes benefits such as reduced visa costs and quicker processing.

Canada has eased language requirements for residency and has expedited the process of recognizing the qualifications of foreign-trained nurses. Japan is offering a pathway to residency for temporary aged-care workers. Germany is allowing foreign-trained doctors to move directly into assistant physician positions.

In 2010, the member states of the W.H.O. adopted a Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, driven in part by an exodus of nurses and doctors from nations in sub-Saharan Africa ravaged by AIDS. African governments expressed frustration that their universities were producing doctors and nurses educated with public funds who were being lured away to the United States and Britain as soon as they were fully trained, for salaries their home countries could never hope to match.

The code recognizes the right of individuals to migrate but calls for wealthy nations to recruit through bilateral agreements, with the involvement of the health ministry in the country of origin.

In exchange for an organized recruitment of health workers, the destination country should supply support for health care initiatives designated by the source country. Destination countries are also supposed to offer “learn and return” in which health workers with new skills return home after a period of time.

But Mr. Catton, of the international nurses organization, said that was not the current pattern. “For nurses who are recruited, there is no intention for them to go back, often quite the opposite: They want to establish themselves in another country and bring their families to join them,” he said.

Zambia has an excess of nurses, on paper — thousands of graduates of nursing schools are unemployed, although a new government has pledged to hire 11,200 health workers this year. But it is veteran nurses such as Lillian Mwape, the director of nursing at the hospital where Mr. Mulumba works, who are most sought by recruiters.

“People are leaving constantly,” said Ms. Mwape, whose inbox is flooded with emails from recruiters letting her know how quickly she can get a visa to the United States.

The net effect, she said, “is that we are handicapped.”

“It is the most-skilled nurses that we lose and you can’t replace them,” Ms. Mwape said. “Now in the I.C.U. we might have four or five trained critical-care nurses, where we should have 20. The rest are general nurses, and they can’t handle the burden of Covid.”

Dr. Brian Sampa, a general practitioner in Lusaka, recently began the language testing that is the first step to emigrate to the United Kingdom. He is the head of a doctor’s union and vividly aware of how valuable physicians are in Zambia. There are fewer than 2,000 doctors working in the public sector — on which the vast majority of people are reliant — and 5,000 doctors in the entire country, he said. That works out to one doctor per 12,000 people; the W.H.O. recommends a minimum of one per 1,000.

Twenty Zambian doctors have died of Covid. In Dr. Sampa’s last job, he was the sole doctor in a district with 80,000 people, and he often spent close to 24 hours at a time in the operating theater doing emergency surgeries, he said.

The pandemic has left him dispirited about Zambia’s health system. He described days treating critically ill Covid patients when he searched a whole hospital to find only a single C-clamp needed to run oxygenation equipment. He earns slightly less than $1000 a month.

“Obviously, there are more pros to leaving than staying,” Dr. Sampa said. “So for those of us who are staying, it is just because there are things holding us, but not because we are comfortable where we are.”

The migration of health care workers — often from low-income nations to high-income ones — was growing well before the pandemic; it had increased 60 percent in the decade to 2016, said Dr. Giorgio Cometto, an expert on health work force issues who works with the W.H.O.

The Philippines and India have deliberately overproduced nurses for years with the intention of sending them abroad to earn and send remittances; nurses from these two countries make up almost the entire work force of some Persian Gulf States. But now the Philippines is reporting shortages domestically. Mr. Noveda, the nurse in Manila, said his colleagues, exhausted by pandemic demands that have required frequent 24-hour shifts, were applying to leave in record numbers.

Yet movement across borders has been more complicated during the pandemic, and immigration processes have slowed significantly, leaving many workers, and prospective employers, in limbo.

While some countries are sincere about bilateral agreements, that isn’t the only level at which recruitment happens. “What we hear time and time again is that recruitment agencies pitch up in-country and talk directly to the nurses offering very attractive packages,” Mr. Catton said.

The United Kingdom has a “red list” of countries with fragile health systems from which it won’t recruit for its National Health Service. But some health workers get around that by entering Britain first with a placement through an agency that staffs private nursing homes, for example. Then, once they are established in Britain, they move over to the N.H.S., which pays better.

Michael Clemens, an expert on international migration from developing countries at the Center for Global Development in Washington, said the growing alarm about outflows of health workers from developing countries risks ignoring the rights of individuals.

“Offering someone a life-changing career opportunity for themselves, something that can make a huge difference to their kids, is not an ethical crime,” he said. “It is an action with complex consequences.”

The United Kingdom went into the pandemic with one in 10 nurse jobs vacant. Mr. Catton said it some countries are making overseas recruitment a core part of their staffing strategies, and not just using it as a pandemic stopgap. If that’s the plan, he said, then recruiting countries must more assiduously monitor the impact on the source country and calculate the cost being borne by the country that trains those nurses.

Alex Mulumba, the Zambian operating room nurse, says that if he goes to Canada, he won’t stay permanently, just five or six years to save up some money. He won’t bring his family with him, because he wants to keep his ties to home.

“This is my country, and I have to try to do something about it,” he said.

Source: Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages

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How Canada is fighting the war on talent

2020/12/09 Leave a comment

Good analysis:

Some might look at Noubar Afeyan’s career as a frustrating example of a talented Canadian scientist who got away. The chairman and co-founder of Boston-based Moderna, one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers, was born in Lebanon, immigrated to Canada with his family in the 1970s and did his undergraduate studies at McGill University.

Then we lost him. Mr. Afeyan left to get his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, eventually becoming a star scientist and entrepreneur. He has founded several successful U.S. biotech startups and registered more than 100 patents.

The good news is that Canada’s technology landscape has dramatically changed in the past three-plus decades.

Yes, like Mr. Afeyan, many Canadians are still drawn south by the reputations of U.S. colleges and tech giants. But the evidence suggests Canada has largely reversed its brain drain. This country’s fast-growing technology sector is more than holding its own in the global race for talent, even after the deep economic shock of the pandemic, according to an analysis of employment data contained in a new report for the Innovation Economy Council.

Despite the terrible toll of the pandemic, Canada has become more competitive because there are more opportunities here than ever for people to learn, to build companies and to thrive. And that’s making the market for technology jobs remarkably resilient.

Indeed, there are nearly 100,000 more jobs now in so-called STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and math – in this country than there were before the pandemic. There is still a gaping hole in Canada’s job market, but not for these people. For the most part, Canadian startups and technology companies absorbed the shock, moved to remote work and in some cases have expanded aggressively.

The resilience of tech employment in these uncertain times is a testament to the Canadian sector’s core strengths – an immigration system that welcomes talented foreigners, a growing crop of promising homegrown STEM graduates and a thriving ecosystem of companies.

It’s a tale of two economies, of course. While there was a net gain of 98,500 STEM jobs, Canada had 431,000 fewer non-STEM jobs in October than it had in February, in sectors such as retail, tourism and airlines.

And there is a cautionary note about the STEM jobs. The number of job postings for these workers is down roughly 50 per cent since February, according to an analysis of data from the Labour Market Information Council. This suggests that companies are still hiring, but perhaps not as enthusiastically as they were before the pandemic.

Another consequence of COVID-19 is that it has accelerated the shift to distributed work forces in the tech industry – teams of employees scattered across different cities and countries. Companies have learned that it’s no longer essential to bring people to them. They can just as easily go where the talent is.

Tech giants – including Google, Facebook and Amazon – have set up large Canadian research and development operations in recent years. A growing number of foreign startups are doing the same. They are moving here to tap our plentiful and affordable supply of programmers, engineers, artificial-intelligence experts and scientists.

Talent flows both ways. Thousands of Canadians continue to pursue careers and education in the U.S. despite four years of anti-immigration rhetoric by outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump threatened to tighten H-1B visas, but it turns out Canadian STEM workers are still successfully applying for them – more Canadians were issued H-1Bs in 2019 than in 2018.

Still, that exodus is significantly smaller than the inflow of foreign students, workers and entrepreneurs. Most of our departing STEM workers go to the United States – IEC research shows that more than 10,000 Canadians went south in 2019 with H-1B visas and green cards. But Canada gained nearly 23,000 global STEM workers through permanent residency and temporary foreign worker visas that year.

These newcomers are more likely than Canadians born here to work and study in STEM disciplines. It’s proof that Canada is a place where talented foreigners want to live, work and start companies.

There is also some evidence that the combination of U.S. political strife and China’s democracy crackdown in Hong Kong may be drawing Canadian expats home. As many as 300,000 of the roughly three million Canadian passport holders living outside the country may have returned home since COVID-19 hit, many for good.

But without opportunity, none of that would happen.

Today, it’s tempting to imagine a different a different life story for Moderna’s Noubar Afeyan. Instead of leaving, he stays in Montreal and goes on to found a biotech company that develops a Canadian-made COVID-19 vaccine that the rest of the world desperately wants. His company is worth more than $60-billion and employs thousands of Canadian scientists.

The resilience of Canada’s STEM work force through the pandemic suggests this kind of homegrown-hero story is not so far-fetched.

Canadians will always leave to find their way in the world. This week’s sale of highly touted Montreal startup Element AI to a California software company marked an unfortunate loss of both intellectual property and talent. Canada isn’t the world’s biggest pond and we’ll never retain all of our companies and people. But we’ve shown that we can win the war for talent.

The Trump presidency peddled its anti-immigration messaging, eroding the false narrative that the best and brightest were always welcome in America. Canada countered with policies and public-relations efforts aimed at attracting talent, such as the highly successful Global Talent Stream program and Communitech’s “We Want You” campaign. It has worked.

But the talent war isn’t over. The key is to continue to create – and promote – opportunities and incentives for the best and brightest here in Canada. If we’ve learned anything from the past few years, it’s that narratives matter. And Canada has a good story to tell.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-how-canada-is-fighting-the-war-on-talent/

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