And Canada thought it had a brain drain? Eight of every 10 Haitians and Jamaicans with college or university degrees live outside the country of their birth, the World Bank says in a new report. In five African countries, more than 50 per cent of skilled workers have left. (The figures aren't precise; they include those who emigrated as children and went on to university in their new homeland.) Now that's a brain drain
加拿大从来就认为自己有人才流失问题？世界银行一份最新报告指出，每10名接受过大专或大学教育的海地和牙买加人中就有8人不在自己的祖国居住。在五个非洲国家中，超过50%的技术工人离开自己国家。（这些数字并不精确；这些人包括了那些早年移民国外的儿童并在所移民的国家继续大学教育的人）。这才叫真正的人才流失。
Canada has no overall brain drain. Its net gain of those with postsecondary education was 2.25 million people in 2000, up from 1.5 million 10 years earlier, the World Bank says. The bank says Canada and the West are draining poor countries of their best minds. By giving hope and opportunity to individuals, this country and other rich countries deprive entire nations of those qualities. Countries fail when their institutions are weak; strong institutions need smart, trained people. "When a Humpty Dumpty falls and cracks, just who is going to put it together?" ask John McHale, a Queen's University economist, and Devesh Kapur, a development expert at the University of Texas, in their recent book Give Us Your Best and Brightest.
总体来说，加拿大并没有人才流失。世界银行称，加国2000年接受高等教育的净人数从十年前的150万增加到225万。世界银行还指出，是加拿大和西方国家将贫穷国家最优秀的人才给挖走了。通过向个人提供希望和机会，加拿大和其他富裕国家使所有贫困国家完全丧失了那些人才。当一个国家的政府和企业机构不能起作用时，这个国家就没有希望；强有力的政府和企业机构需要聪明、训练有素的人才。加拿大皇后大学的经济学家John McHale和美国德克萨斯大学的经济发展专家Devesh Kapur在他们新近出版的《Give Us Your Best and Brightest》一书中就问到：“当一个懦夫跌倒和摔伤，靠谁去帮助他？”
The question is what, if anything, rich countries should do about it. One answer, say Professors McHale and Kapur, is not to recruit doctors and nurses from poor African countries where those people are desperately needed for the fight against AIDS. That seems reasonable enough.
Other options are to bar educated people from leaving, impose exit taxes on them, make them pay taxes to their homeland once they begin earning money in their new country, and have their new country set aside a share of immigrant taxes to compensate their countries of origin. These suggestions range from the impractical to the offensive. The right to leave one's homeland is basic; the world needs no more Berlin Walls, whether of bricks or exit taxes. The idea that a Canadian citizen such as Ottawa software engineer Maher Arar would need to pay his birthplace of Syria a portion of his income earned in this country (or that Canada would have to pay part of its take from him) seems bizarre. Freedom of movement implies the right to shed obligations to the nation in which, through no fault of the migrant, he was born.
It is hard to see where Canada offers unfair inducements to educated people in poor countries. Immigration Minister Joseph Volpe announced pilot projects in the spring to entice more international students, but the decision to stay or return home is the student's. The streets, alas, are not paved with gold. Immigrants need to cover great distances, learn new languages and survive in a climate or social setting that may be very different from the ones they are accustomed to. Only a powerful inner need could take them that far. It is the same need -- the yearning to be free from war, or corruption, or poverty, or hopelessness -- that has driven the movement of peoples throughout history. (Roughly 175 million people now live outside the country of their birth, about twice the number of 25 years ago, but that's still only about 3 per cent of the world's population.) More and more, it is the middle classes rather than the huddled masses who are moving. But they, like the poor, have the right to build better lives for themselves and their families.
The First World is not feasting on the misery of the Third. It is, slowly, realizing that discriminatory barriers only hurt itself in the growing international competition for skilled labour. It is a happy coincidence that an end to discrimination is in the West's interest. But there are costs to absorbing immigrants (language training, housing, security) and benefits to countries of origin (immigrants worldwide sent back remittances of $225-billion in 2005). Educated people do not rush to leave prosperous, safe democracies in which their skills can be put to work. The loss of talent, say Professors McHale and Kapur, is a wake-up call to poorer countries. The West's obligation is to help those countries build the infrastructure they need to prosper.
