ShareThisMEXICO CITY - Canadians who leave for the United States are more than twice as likely to hold a university degree as are immigrants to Canada, according to a report from Statistics Canada, quoted by Richard Shillington of Straight Talk.
However, going south of the border from Canada doesn't cause a brain drain.
"Because of the overall greater number of immigrants, there are four times as many university graduates entering Canada, from the rest of the world, as there are university degree holders of all levels leaving Canada for the United States," the report says.
The U.S., likewise, benefits from Mexico's higher education system. Mexico's Public Education Secretariat reports that one in 10 of its students with a bachelor's degrees lives in the United States. One in six with a master's degree and one in five with doctorates do so.
Jonas Prising, president of Manpower Group America, refers to the need for global educational standards and structures to evolve further to maintain competitiveness.
The migrating educated populations illustrate why this is a good time to revisit the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation to create a more fluid flow of technical skills, knowledge and standards to benefit North America. The NAALC is a supplement to the North American Free Trade Agreement that began operating 18 years ago.
The NAALC has been mostly perceived as affecting blue collar and union workers, but there's no reason not to adapt it to migrating professional workers.
The change is needed because some think-tank scholars promote wholesale immigration measures without first taking into account that North America also has a population reserve to draw upon. It is true that too many foreign students already in the United States are sent home soon after they graduate and others are restricted from coming to the U.S. to study. The restrictions benefit their home countries because the educated students return home. This started mostly because of U.S. attitudes that took hold following 9/11.
Now part of the easing could consider a new look at all higher education, giving North American populations new access that advances and upgrades knowledge. Here is an opportunity for U.S. policymakers to step beyond the very guarded way they have approached NAFTA and grow the North American knowledge base for smart jobs.
When NAFTA came into practice in 1994, separate accords on labor and the environment were reached at the insistence of critics. Yet, ever since that time, NAFTA's severest critics have been groups that have largely focused on how jobs move out, less so on how jobs are created through knowledge and innovation.
Among the severest critics have been unions, contending jobs are moving abroad. But the main culprit has been ignored altogether.
Critics mostly track NAFTA like a sporting event in which the visitors are gaining. In this zero-sum approach each gain by someone else is considered a loss for the home team. You get the impression that others only advance at our expense. This keeps us off track from focusing on what really makes a difference in growing an economy -- speeding up knowledge.
How information is turned into knowledge and its application needs to be speeded up. That means lightening up, letting go of the old border bugaboos and considering that learning is not something that moves glacially but, instead, at the speed of imagination.
Unfortunately, this reorientation was not in place in 1994 when the underlying assumption was that through NAFTA the United States was taking the lead as a productive powerhouse in research, innovation, design and development. Greater growth would come from a population continually educating itself and adopting new ways.
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)
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