Human capital, migration strategy, and brain drain

This research was motivated by the increasing number of foreign students and scientists who are in the United States on temporary visas and who are able to change their status to permanent immigrant. Origin countries, among them industrialized western European nations, are concerned about losing many of their best-educated and most talented citizens. This article modifies and extends a theoretical model of optimal human capital investment before and after migration to shed new light on the emigration/immigration of the highly skilled, and explores some possible implications for the study of the so-called 'brain drain' phenomenon.