Labour market performance and migration flows - European ...

Chapter IIThe impact of migration on labour markets in Arab Mediterranean countriesacross skill levels than as the case with most OECD member countries. Egyptian and Lebanesewould-be migrants can be induced to invest more in higher education by the prospect to migrate,and also to adjust the profile of their education to better match labour demand in the countries ofdestination. 96Nassar (2005) observes that half of Egyptian temporary migrants reside in Saudi Arabia, whileLibya, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq host the rest of the temporary migrant population, which, accordingto OIM (2003), represents the prevailing pattern of Egyptian migration. 97 Temporary migrants are,on average, better educated than those who remain in the home country, and the composition of themigration flows has changed producing a larger share of scientists and technicians since 1985, whocurrently represent about 40 percent of the total. For instance, 69.1 percent of Egyptian migrants toYemen are technicians or scientists, while the corresponding figure for the main destination, e.g.Saudi Arabia, stands at 40.5 percent (Nassar, 2005). As Section 5 demonstrated, the temporarycharacter of migration from AMCs to the Gulf is due to the fact that destination countries do notgrant citizenship to immigrants, whose length of stay at destination can actually be long enough tosupport the argument that individual educational decisions in the home country are sensitive to theprospect to migrate.As far as Jordan is concerned, Chatelard (2004) observes that there is still much demand for highlyskilledworkers in the Gulf, while adequate employment prospects at home are limited for younggraduates, as De Bel Air (2008) argues. This means that we can safely assume that migration is away to improve on these low expectations, and to drive up educational investments, which willotherwise be wasted because of the domestic labour market conditions. A similar argument can beadvanced too in the case of Lebanon: the number of young, qualified individuals who wish to get aforeign job has increased, as – after the 2006 war with Israel – “insecurity pushes towards the braindrain” (Hourani and Sensening-Dabbous, 2007), and 35 percent of managerial positions ininternational enterprises located in the Gulf countries are taken up by Lebanese workers(Kasparian, 2008). 98These arguments suggest that the common pattern of emigration rates across educational groupsthat we observe for AMCs could be driven by different factors: while for Mashreq countries thehigher emigration rate for higher-educated individuals may suggest that the conditions for abeneficial brain drain 99 are in place, this is not the case for the Maghreb countries, where thepattern observed in Table 6.1 is likely to be due to the correlation between education and income.Individuals with a better level of education self-select themselves as migrants because they arebetter able to afford migration costs, but this does not lead to any beneficial brain drain dynamics.Still, even as far as Mashreq countries are concerned, we need to remind ourselves that theinfluence of the prospect to migrate on human-capital formation at home is directly related to thelength of individual migration episodes.96 The Egyptian university system has undergone some changes which partly reflect its reaction to the foreign demand fordomestic workers; specifically, to avoid the occurrence of substantial leakages of fiscal resources to the countries ofdestination, it has progressively, albeit indirectly, increased cost-sharing in higher education, though tuition fees still remain apolitical taboo (Vossensteyn, 2004).97 Although immigration-based statistics seem to suggest that OECD countries represent the largest cause of brain drain forEgypt (see Table 6.1 and 6.2), it is actually the Gulf countries and Libya which absorb most Egyptian skilled migrants, asIOM (2003) – quoted in Nassar (2005) – points out.98 A different argument applies to Syrian migrants: the majority of temporary migrants to the Gulf are young professionals(health professionals, engineers, and other qualified workers) who plan to stay for at least five years because this is the timethey need to be able to be entitled not to serve in the military, in exchange for a monetary payment out of the savings theyaccumulated abroad (Kawakibi, 2008).99 Note that this term refers simply to an increase in the human-capital endowment of the migrant-sending country as a resultof the prospect to migrate, but it does not per se mean that this is welfare-improving for the country, as discussed in section3.2.133