Engaging East Asian Integration: States, Markets and the Movement of People

6. The Migration of Professionals in an Integrating East Asia

160 6 The Migration of Professionals in an Integrating East Asia Manolo Abella Geoffrey Ducanes Asian professionals have been going to the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other western European countries over much of the contemporary history of migration.1 This is partly a legacy of a long history of colonial relationship, especially in the case of the Philippines and the United States, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom, and Indonesia and The Netherlands, and also due to strong trade and investment links between them which occasion movements of traders, managers, and technicians, including intracompany transfers. The desire of many young Asians to acquire advanced degrees from western educational institutions has reinforced these trends, while shortages of skills and talents in western industrial countries have prompted the adoption of welcoming immigration policies. Compared with other destinations these countries also offer easier access to certain niches of their labour market because of language and early steps taken to recognize professional degrees and qualifications acquired in foreign countries. Migration of Professionals in an Integrating East Asia 161 The rise of East Asian economies has deflected some of these flows towards destinations within the region and there are signs that the flows are accelerating, albeit from a low base. Expatriate Japanese managers have for some time been ubiquitous in the region’s capitals from Seoul to Jakarta, but today one also finds among their ranks Koreans, Taiwanese, Filipinos, Malaysians, and Thais. They manage factories in China and Thailand, run banks in Lao PDR and Cambodia, staff hospitals in Singapore and Brunei, and pilot passenger airlines from Hong Kong and Malaysia. The numbers engaged in these movements are difficult to ascertain, but they have clearly grown over the past decade and are likely to continue into the future in spite of the global economic crisis. Intracorporate transferees and the movements of professional managers and engineers are bound to grow with the extension of supply chains among East Asian economies as evidenced by the growth in the volume of intraregional trade in intermediate goods and commodities, related services, and direct foreign investments. I. INTEGRATION OF EAST ASIA According to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) intraregional trade in East Asia has grown from less than 35 per cent of total trade in 1980 to 54 per cent in 2003. This is a lower proportion than in the European Union, but higher than NAFTA’s, which is around 46 per cent (Kuroda 2005). The growth of intraregional trade, according to ADB, reflects intra-industry trade in parts, components, semi-finished products, and finished goods as multinational companies diversify their operations and create production networks across the region. These have led to a rapid growth of foreign direct investment flows within the region. Nearly half of total foreign direct investments in China and in the ASEAN countries are said to come from companies in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taipei (China) and almost half of the value of recent bond issues by East Asian economies have been purchased by East Asian banks. More than 60 per cent of the tourists in ASEAN countries are from East Asia. This growing regionalization is also manifest in the increased labour mobility across countries in the region. It is estimated that there are more than five million cross-border migrant workers within East Asia. Thailand has an estimated 1.8 million migrant workers, more than three-quarters of whom are estimated to come from Myanmar, 162 Manolo Abella and Geoffrey Ducanes and most of the rest from Cambodia and Lao PDR. Malaysia hosts 1.4 million registered migrant workers from other Southeast Asian countries, 80 per cent of whom are from Indonesia, 9 per cent from Myanmar, and others from Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia. There are about 400 thousand migrants in Japan from Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia collectively. Over 640,000 in Singapore’s labour force are foreign nationals, the largest majority of them from Asia. The Republic of Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have been importing hundreds of thousands of workers from nearby countries every year mostly for blue-collar work, while China has drawn technical workers and managers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea. The integration of the East Asian economies reflected in these indicators prompt the following questions: • Is there a redirection of flows of professional migration towards destinations in East Asia? • Are immigration policies likely...