Canada’s debate about immigration usually revolves around borders, population growth and labour shortages. Far less attention is paid to another critical question: Who is paying the price for the highly educated immigrants on whom wealthy countries increasingly depend?

In many cases, the answer is the Global South.

Canada, like many OECD countries, increasingly relies on skilled immigrants who were educated and trained elsewhere. This dependence is most visible in health care, where labour shortages have become acute, but it extends into engineering, information technology, academia, finance, research, higher education and the broader knowledge economy.

This is not simply migration. It is a global transfer of vital human capital in which poorer societies disproportionately bear the costs of producing skilled labour while richer societies capture much of the benefit.

While this is a global problem, there are steps Canada can take to mitigate its negative impact on the Global South:

increase long-term investment in domestic education and training to prepare more current residents for work in critical fields where shortages now exist;

expand co-development work and sign ethical recruitment agreements tied to sustainable workforce development with the countries of origin; and

work with other wealthy countries to find ways to compensate the Global South for its losses.

Across the OECD, immigrants account for 15 to 35 per cent of the highly skilled workforce. Nearly one-quarter of physicians and 16 per cent of nurses are foreign-born.

In Canada, internationally educated health professionals have become indispensable. According to Statistics Canada, there were nearly 260,000 of them in 2021, representing 13 per cent of all health care professionals in the country. Most were trained in Asia, while large numbers also came from Africa and other parts of the Global South. 

Canada’s health care crisis has made this dependence even more pronounced. Federal and........

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