Dear Editor,

Last year it was reasoned in a Jamaica Observer editorial that migration was necessary for doctors because the country couldn’t afford to pay all the doctors it was producing and space had to be made for new ones coming up.

This kind of situation is not unique to doctors; however, in many professions, such as teaching, we have a surplus of new graduates every year and a lack of jobs available for them, not to mention well-paying jobs. It is, therefore, time we embraced the inevitability of migration and started intentionally using it as a tool to grow our economy.

Migration, to the extent that it results in brain drain is nothing new in Jamaica. In a 2013 The Gleaner article entitled ‘A look at Jamaica’s brain drain’, published on May 29, 2013, economist and lecturer Dr André Haughton mentioned a World Bank study which found that about 85 per cent of Jamaica’s tertiary graduates migrated, and the country had the second-highest incidence of brain drain in the world. The same was detailed years earlier in a 2006 International Monetary Fund working paper entitled ‘Emigration and Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean’, using data from as far back as the 1970s.

So the issue has been a long-standing one. Why exactly is it a problem? The basic idea is that people who are educated or skilled leave the country with their education and skills and use them to contribute to the economy of another country instead of their home country. So the country loses human capital.

Further, if taxes were spent on educating these people — for example, by subsidising their tuition — but then they migrate, the country does not get to benefit from the training and education in which it invested. So to summarise, the country doesn’t get to benefit from the knowledge and expertise of those who migrate and loses the money it spent on training those individuals.

But migration is not completely a bad thing. A 2006 discussion paper by economist Frédéric Docquier entitled ‘Brain Drain and Inequality Across Nations’ highlights some of the positive benefits that migration can have for the home country. One obvious way is through remittances — when those who migrate send money back home, usually to their relatives. In 2020, in the heat of the novel coronavirus pandemic, remittances made up a whopping 22 per cent of Jamaica’s gross domestic product.

I would like to propose that in dealing with the issue of migration and brain drain we start to think about more ways that we could turn it into a positive thing for the country.

Cuba has shown us one way that it can be done through the way they export their doctors, nurses, and other health-care professionals. Cuba trains much more medical professionals than the country needs but with the idea to export them to other countries. They seek out countries who have shortages of medical personnel and send their professionals to work overseas in exchange for some of the payment coming back to Cuba. The receiving country gets to supply a shortage, the medical professionals get paid much more than they would by working in Cuba, and Cuba gets to benefit from it as well.

A 2018 Time article entitled ‘How Doctors Became Cuba’s Biggest Export’ mentions how leasing health-care professionals to foreign countries brought in more than US$11 billion to Cuba each year, making the country even more money than tourism. We don’t have to adopt their exact model, but we can certainly learn from it and modify certain aspects to best fit Jamaica.

Consider the case here in Jamaica, where at The University of the West Indies some 80 per cent of the cost to operate the university is subsidised by the Government. The data shows the majority of those who graduate are going to migrate anyway. The reasons for this migration are well known and cannot be fixed overnight. Instead of focusing on red herrings, like patriotism, or chastising those who chose to do so, shouldn’t we try to create a system from which we can still benefit, even though people are migrating?

And this doesn’t have to be limited to doctors and nurses and other health-care professionals. Why not export teachers to countries having teacher shortages? Why not engineers, IT specialists, technicians, and other skilled labourers? If we can start to do that in a sustainable way and use the money from that to grow our local economy we’ll be even closer to addressing issues such as crime, corruption, lack of jobs paying a livable wage, and a lack of opportunities for growth in various fields. And we just might find that less people will want to migrate in the long run as Jamaica will have become a better place to live, work, and raise families.

MD

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