General introduction (2)

Abstract

The emergence and success of the notion of talent and talent management in organizations is a signature of the globalization of highly-skilled labor markets, under the triple influence of the rise in the level of training of the workforce in the densely-populated countries of the Indian continent and South-East Asia, which are still "net exporters of talent", the transformation of large corporations and their global presence, and the factors driving workforce mobility (decreasing cost of physical mobility, facilitation of dematerialized and geographically dis-anchored services, equipping individuals and organizations with information search tools and benchmarking technologies, undisputed use of English as a lingua franca).

The use of the vocabulary of talent is part of the activation of technologies for globalized hierarchization and the selective mobility of workers and students. The usual national framework for measuring the quality of people, based on the combination of occupation and level of qualification, is ill-suited to situations of global mobility and the embedding of highly-skilled jobs in globalized markets. The national framework is in fact the one in which all training systems have been built, and in which a hierarchy of training and a hierarchy of jobs have been mapped out. Yet training systems differ widely, despite the existence of dominant standards for the hierarchization of degree levels (LMD, college graduation, PhD). What's more, degree level provides very uneven information on the potential or proven value of individuals in higher occupations.

To understand why the vocabulary of talent is replacing a vocabulary that simply indexes the value of individuals to their level of initial training, we examine what may appear to be a rare identifiable operational definition of talent, the legal and administrative definition that organizes migratory selectivity.

We look at two examples of "talent passports" or specific visas. Talent is defined by three characteristics: initial higher education, professional or sectoral specialization (we invariably find the Saintsimonian triad - artists, scientists, entrepreneurs - in the definition of talent) and notoriety. These criteria can be combined or substituted for one another, under certain conditions.

The U.S. policy of selective migration allows for more in-depth analyses, because the flows of temporary immigration targeted at talent are much greater, the system has been fairly stable for a long time, and the data corresponding in particular to the H-1B visa [2] have been well analyzed in a series of recent works, which we present here.

The association between a level of qualification and a set of professions and sectors of activity makes it possible to speak indiscriminately of talents or high-skilled workers, as does a recent review article [3], but the selectivity of these controlled and targeted temporary immigration programs, the qualities expected of candidates for immigration, and their contribution to the country's economy should make this high-skilled immigration more complementary than a substitute for the local highly-skilled workforce, and make it possible to justify it as a positive-sum regulation, rather than as unfair competition applied to a segment of the workforce generally very little exposed to the risk of social dumping.

To clarify this hypothesis, we present a set of data from the OECD. Since the 1960s, around 3% of the world's population has been living in a country other than the one in which they were born, but more than their volume, it is the characteristics of these migratory movements that have changed.

The correlations between the scale of migratory flows and the size and wealth of host countries are much stronger for the highly skilled than for other categories of migrants. This brain drain and talent drain mechanism therefore provides information on the asymmetry of opportunities for individuals (and their families) to make the most of their qualities and obtain a return on their investment in higher education, depending on the country of residence and the range of jobs available in that country. But it also reveals the asymmetrical consequences of this polarization of migration.

Migrant talent is a value that is assessed very differently, depending on the perspective adopted. In the case of a highly unbalanced migratory balance for high-skilled workers, talent mobility can be seen as predatory behavior on the part of countries that lose out on the benefits of public and private investment in the training of high-skilled workers, as well as on the contribution these workers make to the growth and development of their country of origin. The net loss must, however, be estimated by taking all the accounts into account, and in particular by reintroducing into the cost-benefit balance the income transfers to the country of origin and all the links (economic, social, family) maintained between migrants and their country of origin. Taking into account actual return movements, we must also consider the repatriation of tangible and intangible capital (knowledge, experience, relational capital) accumulated by migrants and reinvested, in the event of return, in their country of origin. Available data on the return of highly-skilled migrants to their country of origin suggests an inverted U-shaped distribution of return probabilities as a function of degree level. Highly-skilled migrant workers are inclined to re-emigrate, with the exception of those with the highest levels of training and qualification (PhDs) and who have positions and salaries linked to very high levels of productivity: for example, 79% of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) PhDs from India and 89% of Chinese STEM PhDs remain in the USA on a long-term basis [4].

This migratory mobility of talent is akin to an international equalization of opportunities to realize one's potential, from the point of view of highly-skilled workers: these are, moreover, trained throughout the world according to educational technologies that are all the more similar, from one country to another, the higher the level of study and the higher the hierarchy of educational establishments. In some respects, higher education resembles a vast multinational community of organizations equipped with standards, benchmarking, rankings, international alliances and partnerships, and academic staff, due to the very migratory movements described here. Highly-skilled migrants are all the more likely to adhere to a meritocratic conception of success through migration when they move 1) to countries with higher salaries (possibly several magnitudes higher) than their qualifications and employment opportunities in their country of origin, and 2) to countries with low or "competitive" tax rates and progressivity, in other words, countries in which their personal success is congruent with their adherence to a social and economic philosophy of growth that bases the priority of wealth creation on a distributive principle (to each according to his aptitudes, qualifications and efforts) and subordinates to it the principle of redistribution to correct and compensate for the inequalities engendered by the polarization of jobs and wages.

From the point of view of the countries receiving flows of immigrant talent and the companies employing them, the net gain from talent brain is high when highly-skilled employment develops, and the recruitment of immigrant talent complements rather than substitutes for local skilled labor. In this case, an endogenous growth mechanism is sustained by the arrival of highly qualified workers who are more enterprising, more motivated and more productive than the average native "talent", because they are endowed with skills that are in high demand ( computer scientists, for example), and a willingness and adaptability to mobility that are particularly sought-after by multinational companies. All in all, the gain for the countries receiving this skilled immigration is all the greater as immigrant talent is more likely to have both sides of the talent coin - skills and commitment to effort - especially as the interaction of these factors has multiplicative effects, as shown by studies on the educational success of the children of migrants to the United States, particularly from Asia.

References

[2] This U.S. visa, granted for three years and renewable once, is forspecialty occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of highly specialized knowledge, acquired through higher education equivalent to or higher than a bachelor's degree, and which fall within one of the target sectors - architecture, engineering, mathematics and physics, telecommunications, life sciences, medicine, education, management, law, accountancy, the clergy, the arts, or modeling in the fashion industry, provided the models are of "eminent merit and ability". The number of new visas awarded in this way in 2014 was around 162,000.

[3] Sari Pekkala Kerr, William Kerr, Çag˘lar Özden and Christopher Parsons, "Global talent flows", Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 4, 2016, pp. 83-106.

[4] John Bound, Murat Demirci, Gaurav Khanna and Sarah Turner, "Finishing degrees and finding jobs: US higher education and the flow of foreign IT workers", Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 27-72.