Out of Africa: brain drain or brain gain?

• Author: Howley, Kerry
• Position: Citings - Demand of health care workers

LAST YEAR, AS Congress was wrangling over immigration policy, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) proposed a simple solution to the U.S. nursing shortage: lift the cap on nursing visas. The proposal fizzled, but not before critics charged that such a policy would be cruel and irresponsible. A news story in The New York Times asserted that "the exodus of nurses from poor to rich countries has strained health systems in the developing world," where countries "are already facing severe shortages of their own."

A new study has turned A new study has turned this assumption on its head. To test whether health worker emigration is hurting developing countries, Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development and an expert on international migration, created and analyzed a database of health worker emigrants from Africa. To his surprise, Clemens failed to detect "any negative impact of even massive movements of health professionals out of Africa upon health worker stocks, basic primary health care availability, and...