The global raiders: nationalism, globalization and the South African brain drain.

• Author: Crush, Jonathan

"The cycle, as I understand it, is that your city doctors go to the States for richer pickings. And then your rural doctors come here (to urban centers) and our doctors go to your rural areas. And we get Cuban doctors." (2)

In 1998, the provincial government of Alberta, Canada, developed a proactive strategy to deal with the growing shortage of family doctors in rural communities of the province. (3) The government's health ministry retained a private immigration agency to recruit South African doctors. The agency launched a recruiting drive in South Africa with lavish dinners and slick presentations for interested physicians. A chartered jet flew 44 physicians and their families to Canada for a weekend at Lake Louise, one of Canada's premier tourist resorts. The physicians then dispersed to spend some time in the communities, where they were feted and offered considerable financial inducements to come. All subsequently decamped to Alberta, along with another 40 who emigrated under the same program without taking advantage of the recruiter's largesse. The estimated cost of training a South African doctor is $150,000. The Alberta government spent a mere $1.2 million on the recruiting scheme, providing a $10.4 million net gain of medical expertise at South African expense. (4) Organized government-sponsored skills raiding of this kind represents one end of a spectrum of public and private-sector international recruiting activity that targets the skill base of developing countries like South Africa. (5)

The South African government has suggested that the movement of health professionals to other countries is primarily the result of organized skills raiding by other countries. The minister of health noted recently in parliament, for example, that the government would "continue to object vigorously whenever developed countries plunder the meager skills resources of developing countries in organized raids. Countries that systematically under-produce skilled workers because it is cheaper to poach them from poorer countries are guilty of exploitation." (6) In April 2001, the president of the South African Medical Research Council, Dr William Makgoba, visited Canada as an emissary of the South African government to protest against the organized poaching of South African health professionals by Canadian provincial governments. (7)

To the chagrin of Makgoba and his government, the charge that Canada was raiding South Africa's skills base was treated with considerable indifference by his hosts. The main charge was openly admitted; but the blame was often displaced onto either the United States or South Africa itself. As long as Canadian-trained health professionals continue to be poached by the United States, Canada had little alternative but to make up its own shortfall from places like South Africa. Alternatively, as the head of the Canadian Medical Association suggested, the South African government should accept responsibility for not retaining its doctors by making conditions more attractive for them at home. (8) While there has been no repetition of the Alberta recruiting junket, only one Canadian province (Nova Scotia) agreed not to recruit doctors actively in South Africa. Meanwhile, Canadian, Australian and British agencies continue to recruit South African professionals aggressively in the medical, education, IT and commercial sectors.

The strategy of replacement recruiting is central to Canadian policy discourse on skilled immigration. In policy terms, as Don DeVoretz puts it, the idea is to use "rest-of-the-world human capital" to substitute for Canadian flows to the United States. (9) Canada now views the world as a global hunting ground for skills that are in increasingly short supply domestically. (10) New immigration legislation aims to streamline and facilitate the permanent import of skills from abroad. There is little in this public policy discourse that acknowledges that there may be serious negative impacts on the source areas of skilled migrants, particularly in the south. (11) Even the academic literature is surprisingly silent on this score. Indeed, the currently fashionable transnationalism thesis sometimes conveys the unfortunate, and no doubt unintended, message that contemporary skills migration between the south and the north is fundamentally symbiotic. (12) New transnational immigrants, with their penchant for keeping a foot in both societies, supposedly ensure that modern immigration is mutually beneficial for both sending and receiving countries.

Globalization, as a number of scholars have pointed out, has fundamental implications for the mobility of people in general and for sldlled persons in particular. (13) As Robyn Iredale suggests, an increased level of mobility is one manifestation of the internationalization of the professions and professional labor markets. (14) Sourcing of skills from outside the boundaries of the nation-state is an increasingly important method of making up for domestic training and experience shortfalls, compensating for brain drains to other jurisdictions and countering the impact of aging populations. (15) The new global marketplace for skills facilitates aggressive transnational recruiting by both governments and the private sector. The ability of some (northern) states to exercise considerable competitive advantage in the skills market is apparent. There are inevitably going to be losers in this game, and the majority of them will be in the south, not the north. Yet to speak in binary terms of a north that gains and a south that loses is clearly much too simplistic in this context. (16) The United States and some European states are clear winners. Canada both gains and loses, as do many other countries. States that cannot join the game will simply be targets of skills raiders to their obvious detriment.

Beyond the negative connotations of the image of the brain drain from the south, there has been very little systematic evaluation and inventory of the actual impacts of skills emigration. (17) The short and long-term damage to the economic and social prospects of a loser country is usually assumed to be so self-evident that it requires no investigation. One obvious response to skills loss, increasingly fine tuned by Canada, is replacement recruiting, either through active state or private sector recruitment campaigns or careful selection in the refugee camps of the world. In most cases, national self-interest seems to demand no less. Many states, including some in the south, certainly have the option of responding in like manner.

South Africa would seem, at face value, to be a major candidate for such a policy approach. The country has an advanced industrial economy and sits at the foot of a continent that is losing skills to non-African countries at an extraordinary rate. (18) There is clearly no shortage on the supply side. South Africa itself is bleeding skilled personnel at an accelerating rate. (19) Yet the country has not joined the global hunt for replacement skills. Is South Africa's studied refusal to take skilled immigrants a principled stand against the idea of raiding countries and economies less privileged than its own? If so, such a self-congratulatory argument lacks real conviction. Rather, South Africa represents in especially acute form the contradictions between globalization and nationalism, particularly when it comes to participation in the global market for skills. Regardless of the reasons, it is apparent that this policy position has driven the country to the brink of a serious skills deficit. The recent response to this perceived crisis starkly illustrates that the forces of globalization may eventually undermine and subvert even the most protectionist and nationalistic immigration policies.

RAIDING SOUTH AFRICAN BRAINS

The collapse of the apartheid system in the 1980s and 1990s sparked a (primarily white) exodus from South Africa. Some of these emigrants are self-styled "refugees from democracy" (privileged whites who, rather than contemplate the redistribution of privilege, have decided to leave for other shores). (20) Others are people with skills that are in high demand elsewhere. South Africa has easily the most advanced higher education sector on the African continent and in many fields (particularly health, IT, engineering and accountancy), the skills produced are readily transferable to, and recognized and valued in, the industrial countries. As such, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States have emerged as the destinations of choice.

Official South African emigration figures are highly misleading and give little concrete indication of the dimensions and likely impacts of the brain drain from the country.

South Africa, for example, recorded that a total of 62,088 people (including 10,140 with professional qualifications) emigrated from South Africa between 1987 and 1997 to the five main destination countries listed above. However, destination-country statistics of immigrant arrivals from South Africa paint a rather different picture: they show 32,296 professionals and 198,393 total immigrants arriving from South Africa during the same time period (Table 1). (21) Official South African emigration statistics therefore undercounted the loss by around two-thirds. (22)

Between 1998 and 2001, a further 39,411 people officially emigrated from South Africa. Arrivals data are not available for this period but assuming a similar rate of undercounting and ratio of total to professional emigration (approx. 6:1), it is reasonable to infer that a further 120,000 people including 20,000 professionals emigrated from South Africa during this time period. Overall, then, between 1987 and 2001, South Africa lost an estimated 310,000 citizens, including 50,000 professionals. This is a significant brain drain by any standards. (23) These estimates undercount the outflow in at least two additional...