Rehashing the old 'expat-ofw debate' (with due apologies to my friend Dave)

  Note: I was doing research about Pinoy migration in Europe as preparation for a coming conference in Amsterdam on Nov. 2 when I chanced upon this NYT article. This reminds me about the debate I had with my friend Dave Llorito in his blog dated Sept. 9 with the title "From OFW to Filipino Expat: Analyzing the Malu Fernandez brouhaha". 

Rising Breed of Migrant Worker: Skilled, Salaried and Welcome

(from the New York Times.com)

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August 20, 2007

Border Crossings

By JASON DePARLE

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — In this country where foreigners do most of the work, there are migrant maids and migrant masons, migrant tea boys and migrant typists, all doing what most migrant laborers do, menial tasks for meager wages.

Then there is Peter Mitias, the migrant professor.

An economist with a Louisiana doctorate and a Mississippi drawl, he shocked his friends when he left a tenured job in Virginia for the American University of Sharjah, a school conjured from nothing by a sheik in the suburbs of Dubai. But when he lists the benefits of working abroad, Mr. Mitias crows.

He has free housing and utilities. (“Sweet!”) He has international experience on his résumé. (“Huge!”) He has cheap household help, good schools for his children and a BMW and a Mercedes he was able to buy by paying no income tax. Not to mention plenty of American fast food.

“Papa John’s delivers to my house,” he said. “It’s all here!”

This is migrant work, Ph.D.-style — a lesson about labor, a comment on class, a window onto globalization and a phenomenon on the rise.

Legions of common workers across the globe face new barriers to migration, as destination countries tighten their borders and toughen their talk. But professionals like Mr. Mitias, 39, find ever more welcome mats. Even countries wary of migrant brawn are bullish on migrant brains, and many offer tax breaks and streamlined visas to compete in the global marketplace.

“Everybody wants smart people in their country,” Mr. Mitias said.

While most migrants remain unskilled, and many are desperately poor, the global demographics are shifting.

The number of college-educated migrants in rich Western countries rose 69 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to a World Bank analysis prepared for The New York Times. By contrast, the number of less-educated migrants rose 31 percent.

The analysis, by Caglar Ozden, an economist at the bank, measured movement to 20 nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia and most of Western Europe, and included people who went to college after migrating as children. Of 52 million migrant workers in those countries, 36 percent had some college education, up from 31 percent a decade before.

Of those migrants leaving one rich country for jobs in another, the number with some college education rose 30 percent. The parallel movement of less-skilled workers fell 8 percent.

“My sense is these trends have gotten much stronger since 2000,” Mr. Ozden said. “Educated people are becoming more mobile.”

As a small country filled with hired hands, the United Arab Emirates offers students of migration a uniquely rich habitat. About 85 percent of the work force comes from abroad. There are crowds of Indian construction workers, hammering and hauling in the sun, and solitary maids from Southeast Asia scrubbing behind locked doors.

Most are forced to come alone and spend years without seeing their children. But there are also pockets of prospering professionals, families in tow: Indian doctors, British bankers and American lawyers. Ski Dubai, the famous indoor slope, has Russian ski instructors.

“We’re stuck in the paradigm of thinking that migration is only about poor people moving to rich countries,” said Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a London research group. “But lots of people move among rich countries, and people from rich countries increasingly move all over the world.”

“Migration is a two-way street,” he said.

The American University of Sharjah is one of many hiring halls here for the highly educated. A passion of the Sharjah ruler, Sheik Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qassimi, it opened in 1997 with deep pockets and hopes of building East-West ties. The school now has about 4,000 international students and 300 professors, about half from North America.

The professors work on long-term contracts, with no route to citizenship, and live in free campus housing, with up to $82,400 of earnings free from American income tax. There is no local income tax.

Some come for the money. Some come for adventure. Some come to revive stalled careers. Some come to have regrets.

“I feel like I’ve put my life on hold,” said Tina Richardson, 46, who teaches mass communications at the university and leads the faculty senate.

She arrived from Oregon four years ago, looking for a place to raise her son and a way out of debt. But the teaching has been less rewarding than she hoped, the cost of living has been higher, and cross-cultural friendships harder to establish, especially as a single mother in an Islamic society. After an early trip to the campus pool left her feeling ogled, she did not return.

“I get attention that I don’t want as a single, blond woman—attention I don’t do anything to solicit other than exist in my body,” she said. While the setting has been good for her teenage son, “it’s been a disaster for me personally.”

Elites have long sought their fortunes abroad, but today’s mobility is marked by its spread to more middle classes. A study that Mr. Sriskandarajah helped to write found nearly one in 10 British citizens living in a foreign country, including retirees. “There’s been a democratization of the ability to move,” he said.

Middle-class mobility seems likely to grow. As foreign trade and investment expand, more workers have reason to follow. E-mail and cellphones bridge distances. And since the tech boom of the late 1990s, more governments have opened their doors.

Some countries want migrants to stay. Canada long ago pioneered a point system that promises a work visa and a path to citizenship to any worker with the right qualifications. Now the list of places with similar programs includes Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Hong Kong and the Czech Republic. But much of the recent growth has been in temporary plans. The United States, Britain, Ireland and France are among those with time-limited visas for the skilled. Sweden and Denmark have courted foreigners with tax breaks. Several countries, most notably Australia, try to capture migrants early, by encouraging foreign students to remain.

For all the global stress on brains, many economies need low-skilled migrants, too. A legion of foreign-born nannies keeps educated Americans on the job. Still, poor foreigners often raise fears of crime and cultural conflict and are more likely to cross borders illegally. Many countries are narrowing — or threatening to narrow — their ability to get in.

“Governments give a green light to high-skilled migrants, but put speed bumps in front of others,” said Jeanne Batalova, a demographer at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “There’s a stark contrast.”

Though educated migrants are often called “elites,” some analysts say the term disguises the problems they face. Some are reluctant travelers with displaced families, struggling to find housing, health care and schools amid the isolation of a foreign land. A nascent academic literature is exploring such problems as workplace discrimination and the frustration of spouses without jobs.

“It’s difficult to make this kind of lifestyle work,” said Adrian Favell, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There are hidden costs.”

Ms. Richardson, the communications teacher, has struggled at home and abroad. After difficulties that included time on food stamps, she spent nearly four years working to support her son while getting a master’s degree from the University of Oregon, only to be rejected by Ph.D. programs. Sharjah offered an escape and tax-free pay. “I was leaving something, rather than going to something,” she said. “What I had wasn’t working.”

More frustrations followed. Without a doctorate, Ms. Richardson started at a lower salary than colleagues, $33,000, and had to work two extra campus jobs. She has spent most of her time teaching English composition to nonnative speakers, far from her interest in women’s literature. And despite her hopes of contributing to an East-West dialogue, Ms. Richardson was unsettled to find herself feeling pulled toward her American identity.

“Culture is just a lot more powerful than I had ever anticipated,” she said. “I found that I really belong to this one culture — American — that I’ve been very critical of.”

By contrast, Mr. Mitias, a football-loving, squirrel-hunting, anything-but-alienated graduate of Louisiana State, has found himself the accidental internationalist, thrilling to possibilities he had not previously glimpsed.

He describes life abroad as a successive discovery of freedoms: freedom from taxes, freedom from mortgages, freedom from crime, freedom from the sex and violence his daughters would see on American television. He and his wife have taken them to places as different as London and Vietnam, and to Thailand three times. “The world’s at your fingertips,” he said.

Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, where he used to teach, is more than two centuries old; Sharjah was waiting to be molded. He has helped created two new graduate programs and guide the business school to American accreditation. With Ivy League colleges starting programs in Dubai, he laughs about colleagues who warned that a foreign job was professional suicide. “Harvard is here,” he said.

While Ms. Richardson talks of missing Oregon glades and big trees, Mr. Mitias’s favorite metaphor is a spinning globe. “I could go to Europe. I could go to Asia. I could go to South America,” he said. “That’s the difference between me and the unskilled workers — I’ve got choices.”