Skill Transference and International Migration: A theoretical analysis on skilled migration to the Anglosphere

In this paper, we analyze how skill transference from an origin to destination country, captured by lower productivity at the destination caused by differences in language use, affects international migration by skilled workers, using a multi-country NEG model proposed by Gasper et al. (2017). Specifically, our interest is to explain how less frictional countries in terms of linguistic communication such as those in the Anglosphere (English-speaking countries) attract more highly-skilled international migrants. The analysis based on asymmetric skill transference among countries, in which the world is divided into two groups, Anglosphere (English-speaking countries) and non-Anglosphere (non-English-speaking countries), finds that countries in the Anglosphere are more likely to be the industrial core attracting all skilled (and imperfectly mobile) workers than countries in the non-Anglosphere. Also, we find that less frictional migration from the non-Anglosphere to the Anglosphere always accelerates industrial agglomeration in the Anglosphere core country, while both less frictional migration within the Anglosphere and expanding the Anglosphere (an increase in the number of countries constituting the Anglosphere) do not always accelerate industrial agglomeration in the Anglosphere due to the market crowding effect.