International migration of the highly skilled: Economics, ethics and taxes

Abstract

The analysis of the consequences of highly skilled migration across countries has recently moved into novel economic legal and social areas of intellectual inquiry. However progress in the scientific pursuit of these questions and their possible implications has been handicapped partly by the rigid mental and emotional reflexes of some of the economists who actively participated in the early postwar debate on the consequences of brain drain and who evidently seem to fear that the newly burgeoning interest in the subject somehow breathes life into a public policy issue that they had hoped to have successfully buried. However part of the explanation lies also in the fact that the new developments have resulted almost entirely as a result of advocacy economics in the form of a proposal advanced by the author to tax brain drain in the shape of a supplementary income tax to be paid by the highly skilled migrants from the poor countries on their incomes in the developed countries. This proposal has economic ethical tax-legal human rights sociological and political implications and has therefore proved to be a powerful stimulus in opening up afresh what was until recently a rather moribund field of inquiry. But it has also correspondingly tended to provoke more heat than light. (excerpt)