I spent the past few months piloting a labor mobility project. This is a write-up of what I learned, in case it is useful for others thinking of launching similar projects.

Migration is an vast space. Migration occurs between thousands of origin-destination country pairs, across dozens of industries. There are refugees, economic migrants, family migrants. Every region in each destination country seems to have its own rules. I hope this post will help other entrepreneurs get up to speed faster than I did.

The opportunity in skill-trade migration

OECD countries are facing labor shortages in skill-trade workers in fields like construction and healthcare. For example:

There is a global gap of 7 million workers in green energy alone.
Canada has 40k+ job vacancies in construction work.
The UK’s NHS has over 100k+ unfilled jobs.

The driver is straightforward demographics: There are less young people in rich countries to do these jobs.

In rich regions working age to old age ratio has halfed since 1960 and is expected to half again by 2050 (1).

In a growing number of cases, governments are realizing the labor needs and are making visas available for workers in critical fields. For example, the UK does not cap visas for skilled workers. But obviously, there are a lot of frictions in hiring a worker from abroad, such as validating certifications, getting visas, booking flights, and establishing trust from both the employer and the employee that this job will work out.

The market to solve these problems is tens of billions of dollars. Increased skill-trade migration will be a huge trend over the next 30 years. Significant new businesses will be built in skill-trade migration.

It is also an area where there is enormous impact to be had.

The migrant benefits by 3-10xing their income, gaining new skills, and improving their quality of life.
The origin country benefits from remittances (typical migrant sends $1k+ home per year) + a stronger incentive for human capital investment
The destination country fills critical labor gaps

Learnings from looking into the space

Over the past few months, I explored the possibility of starting an organization facilitating migration of nurses or construction workers from Africa to the UK and Canada, and had 50+ conversations with nurses, construction workers, recruiters, prospective employers, and experts.

Here are some of my key conclusions.

1. You don't need a huge operation to make real money.

You can make profit of a few thousand dollars per worker moved, assuming the employer pays you a headhunter fee, or the migrant pays you an income-share agreement. Assuming you don’t have any employees, you only need to move 30-50 workers per year in order to make a comfortable living.

I would love to see a bunch of operations that are one person, using a bunch of AI tools, to move 50-100 workers per year within a very specific niche. Who is the person who will get Tanzanian solar installers moving to Sweden? Nigerian electricians moving to Italy? Many pockets of opportunity.

2. Many have worked on labor supply, but not on labor demand.

There are a lot of nonprofits and funders who, for impact reasons, want to help Africans find jobs abroad. None of them understand in detail the needs of employers in rich countries.

My advice for any entrepreneur working in the space is talk to your customers, talk to your customers, and talk to your customers (1).

3. Visa and certification requirements are complex.

Prospective migrants don’t know how to navigate visa applications, certification requirements, or English tests. At times it seems processes are kept deliberately complex so that middlemen can benefit.

There is clear opportunity for non-profits to provide legibility here (like Rahi Impact). Perhaps for-profits too, as part of a wider suite of offerings.

4. International actors are overly cautious.

Offering someone the chance to move from Africa to Canada is to offer them a chance to 5x their income. On its face, in this situation there is no moral problem with charging that person a fee for providing them this opportunity. But the international norm is to say that under no circumstances can migrants pay anything.

Similarly, the WHO advises rich‑countries not to do healthcare recruitment from a series of redlist countries. The red list list is built on crude head‑count ratios and a generic universal‑health‑coverage score. Of the 54 countries in Africa, 40 are on the red list, and the nurses in those countries who want to find opportunities abroad are not happy that the international community is providing obstacles from them.

International actors have overcorrected their stances in response to very valid concerns about exploitation, and less-valid concerns about brain drain. There is potential for policy advocacy to shift some of these policies to be more migrant-friendly.

5. It’s tough for new players in UK healthcare space.

Africa→UK nurse migration was the pocket I looked into most deeply and I think it would be pretty hard for a new entrant to enter the market here.

Demand for nurses is much lower than it was 3-4 years ago.
The focus within the NHS has shifted to improving nurse retention.
There are shakeups within the NHS over the past few months.
Trust is incredibly important in nursing recruitment. And there are already trusted and approved agencies in place, who to some extent have captured the NHS.

—

What’s next for me with all these learnings?

In the near-term, I will be devoting my career to facilitating high-skill migration into the US.

There are exciting opportunities to improve migration here. More to come on this.
I want to be in the Bay Area - where the action is in AI.
I need to be in the US for immigration reasons of my own. My wife will be getting her green card over the course of the next year.

Skill-trade migration is something I’ll be keeping a keen eye on, and may come back to in the future.

If you are an entrepreneur making migration work better and want to chat, email me at ljeure@gmail.com (3).

—

1. For a sense of what this means - Japan had a working-to-old-age ratio of 2 in 2015, and there were news stories all the time about how Japan didn’t have enough young people. All “advanced regions” will be below 2 in 2050.

2. I felt I was being productive when I was setting up conversations with knowledgeable people in the space to pick their brains. I was fooling myself. I should have been talking to the companies who would be my prospective customers. If I had done that earlier, I would have learned much faster that the demand for nurses in the UK had gone down a lot in the past few years.

3. There are a growing number of organizations doing great work in the area. To help any other entrepreneurs get up to speed, the below is a list of organizations/individuals that I found useful and relevant: