Talent export discipline
Building immigration pathways? Your customers are in rich countries
A Kenyan who lands a job at Kapu, the grocery startup I helped build for three years, roughly 2x’s their income. A Kenyan who shops at Kapu saves about 7% on their weekly groceries.
But compare: A Kenyan nurse or software engineer permanently moving to the US is 5-10xing their income for the rest of their lives.
I won’t belabor this point. Migration is, by and large, extremely good for migrants1, and international labor mobility is one of the highest-leverage spaces anyone can work in.
But it’s easy to slip into the wrong mindset here: You probably don’t want to build a solution for the migrants themselves.
Don’t build for migrants
There’s no shortage of migrants who want to move. There is a shortage of companies willing to sponsor visas.
This means if you are building a business to open new pipelines for international mobility, your customer is a company in a rich country.
At the end of the day, there is going to be one employer in a destination country that wants to hire a specific person and sponsor a visa for them. That person making that decision is the person you need to build for2.
Even if you’re the most earnest development entrepreneur who only cares about helping people in poor countries, you still should probably spend most of your time worrying about the person in the rich country.
The migrant is about to 5-10x their income. They’re going to be great. But they’re not going to be be able to move at all if hiring them is not a competitive decision in a foreign market.
Talent export discipline
In How Asia Works, Joe Studwell argues that the defining move of the postwar Asian miracle (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, later China) was forcing domestic companies to compete in global export markets. Not selling to a protected domestic market. Producing for export, to destinations where real customers had real alternatives and would not accept mediocre products out of charity.
Labor mobility works in an analogous way. Labor migration only works when the moving workers are globally competitive. Not “competitive for someone willing to be generous,” but competitive in an actual labor market where the employer has other options. Which means the missing link is almost always destination-specific: a deep understanding of the hiring dynamics, the certification regime, and the employer needs in the specific country you’re trying to route people into.
In global talent mobility, we need people who can make those linkages. People who understand the destination-side customers extremely well, and can hack through the bureaucratic issues needed to get people onto planes.
For this reason, I predict that the successful builders in this space will look like single-destination specialists. They will focus on a specific subset of buyers, learn them really well, and only later think about expanding. The recent initiatives that seem to be working (TERN, Taldo, and Lighthouse of course) look like this.
Remember who your real customer is
If what you’re after is to increase the flow of people across borders, you need to convince people where the grass is greener3.
Focus on that, with maniacal intensity. If you build something that makes a destination-country stakeholder’s life obviously, materially better, the rest of the system will bend to let people through. If you don’t, no amount of supply-side earnestness will fix it.
This is why rich countries spend so much on border enforcement - because more people want to migrate than is politically feasible.
It took me longer than I’d have wished to realize this. I wrote a bit on my personal learnings here in a previous blog post.
PLUS if you make folks happy in the destination country, you’re setting the stage for friendlier immigration policy in the future, as Alexander Kustov has shown.