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Some 200 million people today—one in 33—do not live in the country where they were born. That number should grow as aging rich societies run short of workers, which should be a boon for development. Workers who have migrated from poor to rich countries already send billions of dollars back to their families each year, a flow that surpasses foreign aid. Some immigrants from developing countries, especially students, acquire new knowledge and skills and bring them home—engineers and physicians as well as entrepreneurs who, for example, start computer businesses.

But what about brain drain? Emigration has been blamed for emptying African clinics of nurses, who can earn far more in London hospitals. But in careful statistical study, CGD senior fellow Michael Clemens has found little evidence that these skilled people hurt their home countries by leaving them. Far more ails African clinics and hospitals than a lack of personnel, and personnel shortages themselves result from many forces—such as low pay and poor working conditions—untouched by international migration policies.

The CDI rewards migration of both skilled and unskilled people, though unskilled more so, using data on the gross inflow of migrants from developing countries in a recent year and the net increase in the number of unskilled migrant residents from developing countries during the 1990s. (Because it is based on census data, this last measure cannot be updated often.) The CDI also uses indicators of openness to students from poor countries and aid for refugees and asylum seekers.

Austria takes first place for accepting the most migrants for its size, many from the civil war in Yugoslavia, with Sweden, Norway and Switzerland also in the top four. Greece and South Korea host the largest shares of foreign students from poor countries. However, South Korea ranks last overall because it accepts less than 1,500 migrants a year from developing countries, a number equal to 0.003% percent of its own population.

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