This document provides evidence to show that Colombia is a net exporter of 5% of its
population with a university or post-graduate degree, while Argentina, Brazil and Chile are
net importers of people with a similar level of education. We find that those Colombians
who returned home to Colombia from the United States between the years 1990 and 2005
were, on average, less well educated than those who decided to stay in the States, a fact
which has contributed to emphasising the positive selection made by Colombians when
choosing the US as their destination, and as a result has increased the net flight of human
capital (the so-called “brain drain”). The same exercise carried out on the South American
countries as a whole leads to an analogous result. Although data does not allow us to
include the quality of jobs immigrants are performing in the US as a determinant of the
decision to return, it allow us to show that immigrants to the US from Argentina, Bolivia,
Chile, Uruguay and Venezuela are generally employed in activities that require better
qualifications than those in which Colombian migrants are working, although the
Colombians are usually engaged in work which requires better qualifications than the jobs
where migrants from Ecuador and Peru are employed. In the case of Colombians, and for
the rest of South Americans taken as a whole, their level of education is closely linked to
the level of qualification required for the work they do in the United States.