Dehan de Croos, I’ve already mentioned how entry and mid level tech employees are in unavoidable difficulty when labour is no longer protected by artificial constraints. Let’s run through a few implications from an employer’s perspective -

1. This is what Sri Lankan engineers who migrate to other countries do to “the natives”, pretty much all the time. With careful limits, people do not mind this because that is one more project that could then be offered cheaper
2. How many engineers are involved in this movement of labour is a matter of negotiating a cap correctly. Those are the details to argue over — should we allow 100s, or 1000s of applicants every year. I suspect no one has a great answer to this yet.
3. What are the implications to the employer of continuing to run projects at 20% higher cost than they could theoretically optimise for? Does it seem likely to you that this investing company may consider that running everything out of India would be cheaper, in this eventuality? I assure you that garment companies based in Sri Lanka have already taken this approach, with no need for labour mobility agreements
4. I’m glad you said this is a hypothetical problem because finding 50 engineers with any kind of exposure who can pass a FizzBuzz test (for market or slightly higher rates) in Colombo is less trivial than you might think.

I think the problem is that of maintaining the status quo vs growing the industry in Colombo. If you want a few people chasing ever fewer projects, we should keep doing exactly what we’re doing now. Once people get a few years experience, they go to Australia. Overall, the quality of leads decline as everyone starts doing too much, too quickly. Labour conditions and quality in the industry suffers as a result.

If executed correctly (big if), this agreement has the potential to give us a boost equivalent to every Sri Lankan with experience in the tech industry deciding to put off migration for an year. We didn’t pay to educate these people (or give them a degree quality education) with our taxes, remember. Who is the net winner?