International Cooperation to Manage High-Skill Migration: The Case of India-U.S. Relations

Highly skilled people are among the most valuable factors of production in the contemporary world economy. Some have characterized the competition among nations for these people as a "brain drain" or "war for talent," which imposes significant costs on the countries of emigration. However, the distribution of costs and benefits that results from high-skill migration is not necessarily zero-sum or fixed. It may be altered through international cooperation, producing a self-reinforcing "win-win" scenario for sending and receiving countries. Bilateral cooperation, focused on specific sectors affected by migration, is the most promising approach for realizing such a scenario. This paper explores the prospects and potential for such cooperation between India and the United States, which comprise what is probably the world's largest high-skill mobility relationship. After sketching the broad contours of the relationship, we explore the prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation in three specific fields of high-skill migration: information technology services, medicine and nursing, and graduate education.