Countries must embrace migrant workers for a competitive world economy

Countries like Vietnam, India and China are actively recruiting people from their diasporas - those living outside the region where they or their ancestors were born - to help build their economies

Politicians and the media expend inordinate amounts of energy debating migration, often using nativist, populist and xenophobic rhetoric. This is despite the fact that, as of 2017, only three out of every 100 people – a mere 3.4 per cent of the world’s population – have left their home nations to migrate to a new country.

The message from people like US President Donald Trump and the UK’s “Brexiteers” is that migrants should be kept out at all costs to “save” their economies. Yet many scholars have argued that attracting and keeping migrants is essential