Chasing sunshine and jobs
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 37,00.html

Bernard Salt, demographer | August 23, 2007

WELCOME to the 21st century, where population flows swill and sway in response to economic opportunity provided by mostly liberal democracies, or by other equally open economies.

How different this world is from the cold-war decades of the 20th century, when movement of people was constrained by a socialist regime paranoid of being seen to "lose out" to the West.

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the 1991 dissolution of the United Soviet Socialist Republic opened the way for migration flows that had not been possible for the previous half century.

According to UN-published data over the five years to December 2005, former USSR constituent Republic of Moldova, a community no more populous than Queensland, had a net migration loss of 250,000 residents or the equivalent of 6per cent of its population.

But the human exodus from former Soviet states does not end there.

Over the same period, Georgia and Tajikistan each conceded 5 per cent of their population bases to other nations through net migration losses.

Indeed, migration outflows characterised many former Soviet states in the 90s but things have risen to a new level since the recent enlargement of the European Union.

Austria, Finland and Sweden were admitted to the EU in 1995, but this did not lead to migration flows from new to established states because there was no perceived difference in economic opportunity for residents.

But the May 2004 enlargement of the EU was a different matter because economic prosperity had stagnated in former Soviet states that had become part of the EU.

Residents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia were suddenly presented with the opportunity to migrate from one EU state to another and that's precisely what happened.

The outflow from Poland and Lithuania alone, as measured by the UN over the five years and including just 18 months of these country's membership of the EU, totalled 500,000.

Although the UN database does not track where migrants flowed to, anecdotally it seems many Poles, for example, made a beeline for Ireland.

But the biggest and most sustained migration flows have nothing to do with the lure of an expanding EU or with the demise of the former USSR.

Excluding one-off mass migrations resulting from war, the largest sustained movement of people in our time has been from Mexico to the US.

Over the five years to June 2005, the US welcomed 6.9 million "legal" immigrants and in that time four million officially emigrated from Mexico. (UN figures do not capture illegal migrants.)

Poles, Lithuanians, Moldovans and Mexicans are propelled from their homeland by the same motivating force: the hope of economic prosperity.

This force applies closer to home.

The equivalent of more than 5 per cent of the population of several Pacific Island nations emigrated in the first half of this decade from such places as Micronesia, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji.

Just as Mexicans move to the US and residents of several former Soviet states gravitate to the EU, Pacific Islanders find their way to Australia and New Zealand.

Other migration flows could be described as purely pragmatic.

The official migration to the US in the first half of this decade is equivalent to 2per cent of that nation's current population, and net migration to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in the same period equates to somewhere between 10 per cent and 16 per cent of these nation's population.

The UAE has 4.1 million residents, attracting about 60,000 overseas residents/workers each year.

Some of these migrants are skilled workers from Australia, specifically from the property industry, but others are unskilled workers, which the UAE requires, as does the US, the EU and even Australia.

Such is the demand for labour that skilled and unskilled workers are pursued in an almost "Kanaka-esque" manner.

Excluding one-off refugee flows, Spain is second to the US in attracting migrants.

About 2.8 million people migrated to Spain in the five years to December 2005.

To some extent the same factors that draw Poles to Ireland, Mexicans to the US and Fijians to New Zealand would apply also to Spain: it offers access to a prosperous society.

But it also offers the sun to cold and miserable EU residents.

The sea-change shift, which in many ways defines our settlement of Australia, is not possible in Britain.

Brighton has its charm, but only the Costa Brava can offer the Mediterranean sun.

Many of these international flows are underpinned by relatively new developments. The Costa Brava has always existed but what was required to trigger millions of sea-changing Britons to move there was cheap airfares, the opening of the Channel and rising British prosperity.

All these factors had materialised by the late 1990s, when Spain became, and I suspect will remain, the place to be in the development of lifestyle property.

Also important to these flows have been ideological shifts.

The demise of the Soviet world triggered the release of latent capitalists.

Similarly, as the world shifts from a US-Soviet towards a Christian-Islamic divide, there will be a need for a safe haven in the Middle East.

Places such as Dubai in the UAE are moving into a strategic role not dissimilar to the role played by Switzerland over the past 200 years of European conflict.

It could be argued that Hong Kong plays a similar role in Asia.

And so for these reasons I think there will be an acceleration of international migration in coming decades.

These flows will be from economically weak to strong nations, from cold to warm places, from oppression to freedom and, particularly relevant to Australia, from the bland and the provincial to the creative and the metropolitan.

It is this flow that attracts the best and brightest talent out of Australia to London and, in the property world at least, to places such as Dubai.

To some extent, these flows are as natural as they are unstoppable.

My concern, however, is that I am not convinced Australia will necessarily always win out in a world where skilled labour, in particular, is increasingly enticed to stronger northern-hemisphere economies.

Perhaps we need to start thinking about how to attract and retain labour, youth and energy in this nation.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner

bsalt@kpmg.com.au