Mexico & Nafta
A raft of recently published statistics show that Mexico is in danger of losing even more of its brightest and best young people to the US. One statistic showed that 89% of all science students with scholarships provided by the Mexican government to study in the US did not come home. Furthermore, 30% of all Mexican PhDs now live in the US.
There is more than anecdotal evidence to suggest that the brain drain has picked up. US Census numbers show that between 1995 and 2002, the number of foreign-born Mexicans earning between US$50,000 and US$75,000 in the US increased nearly 10-fold. The Census numbers also showed that the number of Mexican-born people who were earning over US$75,000 increased 12-fold in the same period.
It is not only right at the top of the income scale that Mexicans are moving to the US. We have noted on several occasions that studies of undocumented Mexican migrants to the US show that they tend to be better educated than the average Mexican, at least in terms of years of completed schooling. A recent article in World Policy Journal by Christian Stracke showed that at least 1.2m Mexican migrants to the US had completed some education after high school. As Mexico has only 5.2m people with any post-school qualifications, the figure means that 20% of its stock of highly-trained people prefer to live in the US.