Human Capital and Induced and Forced Migration

Many kinds of individuals migrate for many reasons. This paper is focused on a particular group of individuals and a set of fairly specific reasons. The analysis presented here is focused on individuals who possess human capital and are induced to migrate. An individual possesses human capital if he or she is educated or trained to the level of professional or skilled performance. For example, such people include doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, scholars, electricians, graphic and industrial designers, and computer technicians.

Induced migration occurs in one of two basic ways. An individual is induced to migrate if he or she is “pushed” out of his or her home country and/or is “pulled” toward a target country for any combination of environmental, political, economic, religious, or social reasons. The extreme form of induced migration is forced migration. An individual is forced to migrate if remaining in the home country is not an option. Forced migration due to environmental change was the primary concern of the Wengen-2001 Workshop on Environmental Change and Population Migrations. Environmentally forced migration is a particular form of forced migration wherein the option of remaining in the home country is not available due to environmental change. This paper presents models of induced and forced migration, and derives results of relevance to both individuals facing the migration decision and the governments of the countries involved in those decisions.

This paper presents a basic model of the economic migration decision problem. The model permits the analysis of the kinds of policies that generate the push and pull forces of relevance to the resolution of the migration decision. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the sequential migration decision problem with the possibility of returning to the home country. This model is sufficiently rich to permit an analysis of the push and pull forces that operate on an individual who possesses human capital. The model is also sufficiently flexible to support an analysis of forced migration. Section 3 presents an analysis of forced migration. Section 4 presents some concluding remarks. Section 5 discusses some extensions and limitations of the model.