A Global Skill Partnership is one of the many innovations that we will need for a “safe, orderly, and regular” migration to happen. The said partnership is a bilateral agreement outlined to reasonably share the benefits and costs of skilled migration between the migrant-destination and migrant-origin countries.
The world is in pressing need for more effective methods to manage international migration, however few can agree on how to make those tools that are needed. With many individuals moving across Libya, Myanmar, Mexico and elsewhere, migration has impacted the world’s most influential elections and alliances. The United Nations (UN) are also in discussion for a new Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration – due in 2018. However, this cannot happen without innovation: new kinds of legal migration.
There has been an observed upward trend in migration as we are now anticipating 800 million new working adults in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050. The figure is 24 times the size of today’s total labour market in the United Kingdom. This trend coupled with aging and possibly shrinking workforce in many advanced economies, fundamentally warrants heightening migrant pressure. The question is not whether more migration will happen but whether it will happen on terms that unleash the potential of those young people, or waste it.
The global compact is an isolated opportunity to come to an agreement that benefits everyone. A Global Skill Partnership is one of the many innovations that we will need for a “safe, orderly, and regular” migration to happen. The said partnership is a bilateral agreement outlined to reasonably share the benefits and costs of skilled migration between the migrant-destination and migrant-origin countries. Employers and governments in migrant-destination countries grant technical training for migrants in their home countries, before they move, with cross-subsidies to train non-migrants.
This partnership if done right, will not only benefit young people in search for jobs across the globe set to gain numerous opportunities for themselves and their families. The countries of origin are also able to acquire migrants with the exact skills required to contribute the most and integrate fast. In addition, they will receive finance and technology transfer to support the training of both migrants and non-migrants – an engine of finance and human capital creation, not a drain.
Some elements of this innovation have been experimented within industries. The public-sector framework includes the Australia-Pacific Technical College and Germany’s trendsetting efforts on overseas training of nurses; while the private-sector framework includes the Porsche Training and Recruitment Center Asia. Workers will be trained in hospitality, health, mechatronics and other fields for between a few months and two years. In these programmes, destination-country governments or firms will support training for future migrants in their home countries. They have put together various pronounced logistical impediments of such a global enterprise.
As such, the Global Skill Partnerships may prove to provide a new kind of migration in response to the prevalent, legitimate concerns about some of the existing migration.
Source: World Economic Forum