The Business Case for Migration

The report presents a 'business case' for migration, illustrating how migrants fill critical skill gaps, create new consumer markets, and drive innovation. Through various case studies, it highlights the economic contributions of migrants in the US, the role of talent mobility in Africa, and the impact of diaspora engagement in India. It concludes that restrictive migration policies hinder corporate competitiveness and calls for a collaborative approach between governments, businesses, and civil society to optimize human mobility.

• International migration is a significant global process involving approximately 214 million people, representing about 3% of the world's population. The composition of these migrants is shifting, notably through 'feminization', with women and girls comprising nearly 50% of all migrants worldwide.
• The ICT sector faces significant operational delays and costs due to cumbersome visa and work-permit procedures. Examples include a US software vendor facing delays in the EU because separate visa applications were required for each member-state, and a German company unable to integrate young executives due to prior-employment requirements.
• In Mongolia's mining sector, which represents 33.6% of GDP, severe skills shortages have led to wage inflation of over 50%. This has diverted skilled workers from manufacturing and construction, causing productivity in those sectors to flatten or decline and mining-sector productivity to decrease by 9.3% over four years.
• Africa experiences 'jobless growth', where GDP growth (averaging just below 6% between 2000 and 2010) has outpaced job growth (3%). The region faces a massive employment challenge, needing to create 8 to 9 million jobs annually to absorb new entrants.
• In the United States, immigrants are critical for addressing long-term worker shortages caused by an ageing population. They are disproportionately represented in high-skill fields: comprising one in four doctors, one in three computer software engineers, and approximately half of the scientists and engineers with doctorates.
• The US Chamber of Commerce argues that legalizing the approximately 11 million undocumented people in the US would increase workforce stability and could yield at least US$ 1.5 trillion in cumulative GDP over 10 years.
• Migrants create substantial consumer markets. In the US, Hispanic purchasing power is over US$ 1 trillion and is projected to reach US$ 1.5 trillion by 2015. In the Philippines, remittances from Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) represented 13.5% of the country's GDP.
• Global population ageing creates specific business opportunities and challenges. In the home care sector, migration drives the need for multilingual caregivers; for example, a franchise in Windsor, Ontario, recruited 135 caregivers from 38 different countries to meet the linguistic needs of its diverse client base.
• India has institutionalized diaspora engagement through the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (established 2004) and the Overseas Indian Facilitation Centre (established 2007), which provides free information and facilitation services to the 'knowledge diaspora' of over 27 million people.
• US cities are increasingly taking the lead in immigrant integration to boost local economic competitiveness. Examples include Minneapolis providing Sharia-compliant loans to Muslim entrepreneurs and New York City, where nearly half of the business sector is supported by immigrant-owned enterprises.

APA

World Economic Forum (2013). The Business Case for Migration. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GAC/2013/WEF_GAC_Migration_BusinessCase_Report_2013.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. The Business Case for Migration. 2013. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GAC/2013/WEF_GAC_Migration_BusinessCase_Report_2013.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=The Business Case for Migration |date=2013 |url=http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GAC/2013/WEF_GAC_Migration_BusinessCase_Report_2013.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2013business, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{The Business Case for Migration}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2013}, url = {http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GAC/2013/WEF_GAC_Migration_BusinessCase_Report_2013.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }