Application of human capital concepts to migration holds promise, not only for calculating “gains and losses,” but also for conceptualizing and analyzing empirically both individual and social investment choices regarding the locus, duration, and sequences of schooling and experiential learning. In discussing aggregative measures, stress is placed upon the desirability of assessing gross flows, of properly disaggregating migrant populations (including attention to locus of schooling and experience) before attaching human capital values, and of sorting out the substantial remigration component in migration figures. Taking into account the existence of differentiated markets in which people sell their services leads to speculations concerning the role of “package migration” and remigration in diffusion of skills and know-how. The cost-benefit models presented are human investment models which begin with an individual viewpoint but which are transformed into social decision models as parameters are readjusted to allow for cost and income transfers, as individually expected earnings are replaced by socially expected or realized productive contributions and as probability values are applied to allow for rates of return or nonreturn of migrants. They are illustrated with respect to choices among training alternatives and choices among policies for importing manpower. Suggestions are made throughout the article for new census tabulations which would allow more sophisticated application of human capital concepts to migration.
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Bowman et al. (1967) studied this question.