Scott Sommers' Taiwan Weblog

The Outsourcing of Professional Labour

The main point of my many posts on English teachers as migrants is that as part of the neoliberal reordering of the American workplace, people who would have in the past been entry-level professionals are moving into culture industry positions in peripheral economies. It seems that entry-level management is not the only kind of professional labour being affected by the new order of things. I have recently become aware of the outsourcing of legal services by major multinational corporations. This article from CNN provides an overview of changes in the industry. Some industry insiders quoted in the CNN article describe this move as a"fad" pointing to the fact that it only affects about 1% of the legal services market in the USA. I have heard all this before about education and health care. My view is that once cost cutting starts to hit a profession, it is very hard to stop it. It will be interesting to see if the next 10 or 20 years leads to American lawyers affected by a drop in business due to outsourcing looking for work in peripheral markets.

For more information about the outsourcing of legal services, see these links.

Are Your Lawyers in New York or Delhi?

Outsourcing Legal Services to India

The Issue of Social Class Among Foreign English Teachers

One of the most sensitive issues about foreign teachers is the problem of social class. Social class is one of the key concepts of Sociology, and as such its nature is hotly debated. In the West, it is common to see social class discussed in terms of income and education, but as I will elaborate on later, such definitions are of limited value to the discussion of social class among foreign residents in Taiwan.

In the past, Michael Turton and I discussed the problem of income and employment status among foreigners in Taiwan. I continue to maintain that many foreign English have disposable incomes higher than many expat workers. In fact, I maintain that the fixation on expat's income rather than other salient factors is itself a reflection of the belief that social class must follow income, at least roughly.

But what is a social class? What does social class do for you? A complete answer to these questions is far beyond anything I can discuss here, but an answer is in part called for. Some theorists have talked about social class as a kind of capital. With this symbolic capital, aspects of society can be accessed for personal use. Others have talked about the role of language and education in the accumulation of this symbolic capital; still others discuss the role that symbolic capital can be used to protect oneself from stigma. The point is, however, that social class gets you 'stuff'. Whether this 'stuff' is protection, resources, or the right to be listened to, class is a major ingredient in the social equations that defines what kind of life is possible for you.

In the Taiwan foreign community, however, the ability to get 'stuff' is fundamentally grounded in relationships other than just income and education. Certainly income is important, but given the lack of access to political rights, pensions, proper labor representation, as well as other significant forms of legal representation, the ability to 'get stuff done' is facilitated by personal characteristics that go beyond just income or education.

One working model that I often describe divides foreign residents into 3 social classes based on their connectedness with production in core regions of the world. What I mean by the core is those places in the world where political, economic, and military decisions are made. Primarily this refers to the USA, Europe, and Japan. It also includes to some degree Australia and New Zealand. Some foreign workers in Taiwan come here with the authourity of political, economic, or military organizations from this region. Others work here on different terms. It is this that divides foreign workers in Taiwan into social classes.

The Lower Class - Culture Workers

The lowest class of foreign residents are the largest and includes those of us who work in the culture industry. This includes primarily language teachers, but also many translators and proofreaders. It would also include entertainers who exploit their ethnicity as professional speakers of Mandarin and other such workers in the entertainment industry. Income in the culture industry can be very high, as the numbers cited in this post indicate. It is possible for top teachers to make very high incomes for long periods of time. Opening one's own language school has little affect on social status, but if successful can be extremely lucrative.

Culture workers are employed in a workplace that is socially isolated from production almost anywhere else in the work. Work experience is entirely defined locally. While I can move almost effortlessly to within geographical East Asia, this is because Korea, Japan, and Thailand share this culture industry. There is virtually nowhere in the world outside this region of East Asia that recognizes work experience here as meaningful. No amount of work experience is meaningful in the language markets of North America and Europe without appropriate educational qualifications. In fact, I have read posts on Dave's ESL Cafe that teaching experience at the university level in East Asia has only limited value in other markets, such as the Middle East for otherwise qualified indivuals.

The Middle Class

The middle class is the most intriguing to me. Perhaps this is because it is the closest and most accessible to me socially. But I also find it intriguing because it is relatively new. The middle class is composed of workers whose jobs are accumulating merit that is transferable to a workplace in a core nation. It is a diverse group that includes local hire managers, foreign owners and managers of small businesses. It even includes people who might otherwise be culture workers but have been given useful labels by powerful organizations, such as English newspaper editors, proofreaders for government organizations, and in-house translators for large business or political groups.

A large middle class of foreigners is a new phenomena for Taiwan. Its true there used to be a large but transient middle class back in the heyday of foreign electronics companies and military presence. This is different from what I refer to now. The middle class now is composed of permanent residents, many of whom are married and have children. They are heavily integrated into Taiwanese society, speaking Mandarin, and sending their children to local schools. Their life style, whether they like it or not, is preparing their children for another generation of life in Taiwan.

This class began to expand rapidly around the turn of the century. When I came here in 1996, there was virtually no one other than culture workers and the elite workers I will discuss next. Now it is not unusual at all to meet foreign workers who are neither elite corporate power brokers nor English teachers, but rather work primarily in a professional capacity as researchers, writers, or editors in well-capitalized organizations.

One of the defining characteristics of middle class employment is a lack of any true decision making authourity. For example, a researcher with a politically-aligned research group once told me he would not allow himself to be quoted by journalists. As he related to me, he can not even put his name on documents from his group. It is not clear what his actual function within the group is, but it is clear he has no authourity or ability to represent the group in any capacity.

One of the more interesting aspects of the middle class is mobility within the class. The middle class can be stratified into at least an upper and a lower strata. For example, the researcher that I described above might fall into the upper strata whereas a government-sponsored editor would be a lower middle class worker. Given the lack of formal communication regarding employment opportunity that defines professional life for Taiwan foreigners, personal networks are extremely important. Joining groups that create such contacts is extremely important to 'hearing about things.'  Members of the middle class that I have spoken to have described sports team, pubs, and even the Sunday brunch at Carnegie's as significant places to make these contacts. I would include in this category Jerome Keating's Breakfast Club that I attend along with Michael Turton and many other members of Taiwan's blogging community.

The Upper Class

I have very little knowledge about what happens here. My interactions with this class are limited primarily to contacts from days when I played rugby union. Members of the upper class are primarily people sent here by their companies, governments, or organizations to solve particular problems. They are decision makers and have the power to speak on behalf of their group. In the past, when illustrating this class, I have described diplomats, expat business hires, and consultants. A Taiwanese friend told me that he would also include missionaries, but he meant those from the major denominations, such as the Presbyterians or Roman Catholics.

It is significant to note that not all business people in Taiwan are necessarily members of the upper class. For example, I have met representatives of the government food marketing boards. They did not have especially influential lives here, nor did they have a material life much greater than mine. They are not members of the upper class because they have no decision making authourity.

What I Would Like to Know

As I pointed out in my post on the family life of foreign English teachers, there are many ways in which social status affects our lives here. I would like to know more about these.

Many of the questions I have about the class structure of foreigners here concern mobility within and between classes. How much mobility is there? How are mobile people aware of the change in their class status? What are the conditions that make mobility possible?

One of the main aspects of life in Taiwan is entrepreneurship. How is this involved in the lives of foreign teachers and their place in the class structure? Am I correct that entrepreneurial English teachers are still part of the culture industry no matter what their income? Is it necessary to expand outside of the recognized culture industries to gain legitimate status as a businessman? If this is true, it might explain the expansion of foreigners into operating restaurants and bars, which, while ethnic, are not defined as the traditional scope of the culture industry.

The Family Lives of Foreign English Teachers in Taiwan

In a series of posts several years ago, I talked about aspects of the family life of English teachers. Mark Liberman at Language Log picked up on this and responded that he did not think my points were supported by his own and other's experience being raised outside their countries. My response was that the lives now being created in vast numbers for foreign English teachers in Asia are not like those generally experienced by people living outside their countries. In this post, I want to elaborate on my earlier statement by drawing from some official statistics of Taiwan's National Police Agency.

Kerim Friedman passed along this link of Excell spread sheets from the ROC National Police Agency. The information they contain addresses the number of foreign residents in Taiwan and what they're doing here. I believe the information they contain adds to my description of the distorted family lives available to foreign English teachers.

Foreign English Teachers in Taiwan

First, I would like to compare the profile of English teachers provided by the NPA data with the MOE data I discussed in the past.

Form #4 shows that in 2005, there was nearly half a million (429,703) foreign residents in Taiwan. More than half of these (297,287) were employed as 'Foreign Workers', but the Chinese is probably better translated as 'labourer' or 'general worker'. At the time of the count, there were 6630 'Teachers' in Taiwan. This number corresponds well with the numbers I obtained from an MOE website set up for buxiban operators.

Form #6 shows the large number of Canadians living in Taiwan. Canadians are the single largest nationality employed in Taiwan as 'Teachers'. I have previously talked about the dominance of Canadians as foreign English teachers in Taiwan. Form #6 indicates that 1,783 Americans are employed here as 'Teachers, compared with 1,897 Canadians. The 'Others' category contains 1,129 people listed as 'Teachers', seemingly confirming my guess that most are South African.

The Children of Foreigners in Taiwan

Form #6 also contains information on the number of residents in Taiwan under 15 years old. Americans are much more likely to have children than any other nationality. In fact, the difference and its pattern is so striking that further discussion is warranted.

I obtained the number of adults of a given nationality by adding the number of workers from Form #6 to the number of 'Unemployed' from Form #6. This latter category includes 'Homemaker' and students. If we then divide the number of foreign residents under 15 from Form 6 with the number of adults from our calculation, we get the ratio for children per adult of that nationality living in Taiwan. For example, for Americans I made the following calculation,

  1,822 Unemployed, etc

+ 4,937 Workers

= 6,759 Adults ( + 3,727 under 15 = 10,486 Total)

3,727 under 15 / 6,759 Adults = .551

If the number is 1.0, this would mean there is 1 child in Taiwan for every adult of that nationality. If the number is .1, this would mean 1 child for every 10 adults of that nationality. In this case, the number .551 indicates slightly more than half a child per adult American or slightly more than one child per married American couple.

The most normal family composition is found among residents from the USA. In fact, the .551 children per adult obtained from Americas means that in a household composed of 1 man and 1 woman, there would be 3.1 people, which is slightly smaller than the US national average for family size in 2001.

Trailing the USA, but still reasonably 'normal' are the industrial neighbors of Taiwan.

Japan .254

Korea .224

The next and largest category contains a wide diversity of nations. The striking fact about this category is that it includes many advanced nations, although they generally come out at the top of the range. The major exceptions to this rule are Canada and the UK who compare more with Malaysia and India.

Germany .195

Singapore .193

Australia .190

France .176

India .133

UK .117

Canada .116

Malaysia .103

Not surprisingly, the numbers we get for nationalities where the majority of citizens are employed as general workers in factories, construction sites, and homes are extremely small, indicating that very, very few of them have children in Taiwan.

Indonesia .004

Philippines .002

Vietnam .0005

Thailand .0008

Employment and Family Structure

Korean, Japanese, and particularly Americans living in Taiwan generally appear to live in households whose composition resemble a household in their native country. This is a significantly different pattern than found among Australians but particularly Canadians and British. Among these nationals, approximately one in eight residents of Taiwan have a child. As I stated above, the household of an average American married couple would have 3.1 people. An average married Canadian couple's household would have only 2.2 people. What explains this difference?

Among the Anglo-American nations, the rank ordering of percent working as 'Teachers' is identical to the rank ordering of family size: Canada, UK, Australia, USA. The vast majority of Canadians (63.4%) over 15 living in Taiwan are employed as 'Teachers'. This is also true for Brits (48.6%) and Australians (31.2%). Compare this with the same number for the USA (26.1%). Virtually no Korean adult (1.2%) or Japanese adult (6.3%) residents are working as 'Teachers'.

One further calculation supports this relationship between employment as a 'Teacher' and family size. Subtracting the number of teachers from the total number of adults and using this number in the calculation of adults per child yields .446 for Canadians and .336 for Australians - numbers more in-line with those obtained for Americans residents.

The Families of English Teachers in Taiwan

These numbers are not powerful evidence, but they do act as an indicator in the direction I discussed previously. There appears to be a relationship between working as a foreign English teacher and an absence of children in one's household. At least foreign nationalities in Taiwan represented by large numbers of citizens working as English teachers have fewer children than those working in business or other non-education occupation. Several factors could explain this.

English teachers tend to be young. The occupation has a very high turn over rate and as a result, the median age remains very low, probably in the mid-20's. This does not however explain why the occupation has such a high turnover rate. In this post, I described English teaching as an entry-level job in the culture industry, comparing it with workers in America's ethnic food industry. As I described in this post, the career path would either be up or out. Some English teachers would go on to establish their own schools or professionalize to such a degree that they could enter authentic teaching jobs and compete against Taiwanese. The majority would reject these options, and like South Asian workers, return home.

This post leaves many questions unanswered. What is it about English teaching that deters teachers from having families? The money and liberty afforded members of the occupation is reasonable. It would appear that other factors play a significant role in the decision to defer starting a family until other work is available. Another interesting problem lies in the relationship between English teaching and Canada. While it is clear that economic problems in parts of Canada have contributed to the dominance of Canadians working as English teachers, is there a status significance implied in this? Certainly whenever this issue (or the issue of South Africans as English teachers) is raised on this or other sites, comments emerge that seem to point to Canadians as subordinate cultural representatives of the West. If this is true, it would not be the first time that Anglo-American speakers of English have been demarcated into different classes based on their nationalities.

How Many English Teachers are There?

In an article that appeared in the JALT publication The Language Teacher in 2001, I made the claim that between 250,000 and 1 million Anglo-Americans had taught English in East Asia. A good friend is fond of calling this my 'Magic Number', as it is little more than a guess. I have recently found some more reliable numbers.

An article from the Guardian has this to say about the number of foreign English teachers in South Korea

Official figures put the number of English teachers working legally in Korea at 7,800, but the number of those working without the necessary papers is believed to be significant. The government would not speculate, but two years ago the Korea Times put the figure at close to 20,000.

Similarly, an article from the Japanese-based English-language newspaper, Asahi Shinbun had this to say about the number of foreign English teachers there.

A 2002 survey conducted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry indicated that there were 15,800 foreign teachers and 1,010,000 students at language schools, where yearly sales were182.6 billion yen.

This number seems strange because later the same article states there are 1200 foreign teachers at Berlitz, and the JET website states that that program alone employs 6,000 foreign teachers. It is difficult for me to believe that JET and Berlitz employ almost half of all the foreign teachers in Japan.

The numbers I obtained from the Taiwan MOE website back in 2002 stated that there were 3013 legal foreign teachers in Taiwan on April 14. The website has changed since then, and equivalent numbers are no longer available. In addition, back in 1992, the China Post quoted National Police Agency figures that there were 10,000 Americans in Taiwan with expired visas, most whom were probably teaching English.

Taking these numbers at face value, we have a minimum estimate of

Japan 15,800

Korea 7,800

Taiwan 3,013

Total   23,900

A more liberal estimate from these numbers would be

Japan 15,800

Korea 20,000

Taiwan 10,000

Total 45,800

Based solely on numbers published in the news, between 25,000 and 50,000 Anglo-Americans are teaching English in the 3 Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan on any given year. It would appear that my original estimates of between 250,000 and a million might not be far off.

Canadian Diplomas in Korea

For anyone who has ever doubted the relationship between foreign governments as employers of Canadian university graduates, I refer you to this article in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. It appears that a significant number of the Canadians arrested in the recent South Korean crackdown on illegal English teachers are using diplomas from the Nova Scotia school Acadia University. Officials from the school have reacted to this,

...Acadia University's registrar is aware of the problem and is trying to work out a solution. The university "has been dealing with officials in South Korea as well as Foreign Affairs," spokesman Scott Roberts said in an interview. "We've offered to take a look at the degrees for them, and we can pretty quickly determine whether and how it has been forged -- whether it's bogus or made up."

Canadian English Teachers Detained in Korea

I ran across this article in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail about the mass arrest of almost 50 illegal English teachers in South Korea. It seems that, "Many of the foreign teachers, if not most, are Canadian."

Apparently the problem of illegal teachers has been componded by a number of highly publicized accounts of "immorality" by foreigners,

"Many of the arrests of foreigners have followed that of a Korean man who is accused of selling fake diplomas... Reports of marijuana and cocaine busts have long tended to feature Westerners -- including five Canadian teachers who were arrested two years ago. But more recent events have led to a furor. An unknown English teacher in Korea used the Internet to post what amounted to a how-to guide for seducing Korean women. Then, two English teachers from Cape Breton, N.S., made the headlines for breaking a local man's jaw in a bar brawl. They spent 40 days in jail and were ordered to pay $30,000 (U.S.) in a form of restitution known locally as "blood money." And lately, Korean TV has aired segments painting English teachers as inept, unqualified foreigners who frequently lie about their credentials.

You can find an up-date of these events on the Marmot's Hole.

The Theoretical Significance of Foreign Teachers as Economic Migrants

In response to Michael Turton's comment to the last post, here is one of the most heavily commented posts -- even if some of the posts come from me.

Kerim Friedman's link to this discussion raises some ethical points.

it is also dangerous to overlook important distinctions between different kinds of "economic migrants." There is a big difference between middle class migrants who are young, unmarried, and looking for adventure as much as they are looking for work, and older migrants with families who are fighting to improve their family's economic and educational opportunities.

I am less inclined to believe that those who end up teaching English are "looking for adventure" than I am to believe "adventure" is what they end up calling their lives after globalization has taken them apart. Remember, Nicholas Nickleby lived a life of adventure, but I'm not sure that's what he thought of it while it was happening.

But to return to my original point, in fact, it is precisely because English teachers are middle class migrants that they deserve special consideration.

There has always been emigration from developed nations. The amount of movement from nations like the USA is surprising. I only have limited numbers available, but from 1900 to 1979, over 10 million Americans migrated from the USA to other countries. The vast majority of these went to Mexico, Germany, Britain, Canada, Japan, Australia, or Israel. I do not have information available, but my guess is that most, if not all those migrating to Mexico and Japan are ethnically from those nations. What this means is that American migration is much greater than you might have thought, but most Americans who take passports elsewhere are going to advanced, English-speaking nations, unless they are driven to do so for biographical reasons.

I have suggested that motivated by economic reasons as many as a million Anglo-Americans have migrated to Asia in the last 10 years. Who are these people? While some of them may be people leaving stable jobs with companies and schools, the vast majority of them are young, single, (and I suspect male) marginally employed holders of liberal arts degree. They are the sort of people who, in the past, would have entered government or entry-level management positions and retired at their career peak in a mid-level position. Geographical and organizational changes in business structure during the late 20th Century altered the availability of jobs such as those described above. Increasing globalization and the opening of trade barriers has made the recruitment of some kinds of labour easier and cheaper. Even such highly professionalized occupations as physicians and lawyers have not been spared the effects of these changes; certainly less organized occupational interest groups can not be expected to isolate themselves from this mayhem.

Kerim looks at the trend from one side of the migration and sees relatively well-paid young Anglo-Americans having some fun while they travel the world. I see the first stage in the reorganization of a system of employment that powered our parent's generation. Workers who were once guaranteed life-long professional careers due to their educational background have now been forced to join the legions of internationally mobile workers following the availability of low-level employment. For those unable or unwilling to complete graduate degrees, MBAs, or other professional training open to liberal arts grads, the future of work is fundamentally the same as for the Thai migrant who opens a restaurant in New York. Most significantly, this group is, for the first time, involved in a mass movement into countries of significantly lower development than where they come from. Historical migrations from developed to under-developed nations have usually been under conditions of colonialism; this migration is substantially different. Workers are moving into a place where the pay is lower, where the living conditions are harsher, and where the legal system does not benefit them.

While the White English teachers of Asia are probably among the most highly paid migratory culture workers, it's not entirely clear what the future will bring. Large numbers of English teachers begin to complain very quickly after entering the market that the money and that working conditions are not competitive with their expectations. Websites for English teachers in Asia are full of complaints about the dead end nature of the occupation.

Imagine the next generation of the world I am talking about. There will be children of career English teachers born in countries where the major language is not English. Their parents will lack the job skills and education to return to an English-speaking world where their skills in the culture market have no value. They will lack the language skills in either English or Mandarin to become professional workers in either cultural world. Without the legal guarantees of colonialism, such children will not be able to do anything except move down the occupational food chain. They may become workers in restaurants or stores where only low-levels of language skills are necessary. They may even end up working in local industries where foreign language skills aren't important. Forced out by economic conditions, their parents would have made the wrong choice. Nevertheless, it would have been the best choice they could have made at the time.

Foreign Teachers as Entry Level Workers in the Culture Industry

This is one of my most viewed posts, as well as one of my favorites. With the beginning of school and my subsequent lack of time, I thought I'd repost it. 

A culture industry is one that turns culture into a commodity and then sells it to customers. This could include tourism, but also the restaurant industry, the sale of artifacts, or even newspapers and books. North America is full of businessmen and women selling pieces of their culture for profit.
The culture industry is an extremely common entry port for migrants. Lacking language and social skills, many migrants have nothing more to sell than packaged versions of their culture. Perhaps the most salient example of this is Chinese restaurants and laundries.

Let me explore this aspect a little bit more. It is commonly noted that migrants from certain backgrounds come to dominate certain industries and use these as entry ports into society. Chinese laundry workers, Mexican farm hands, Korean grocery store owners, and Irish policemen are all occupational stereotypes fed by the reality that migrants build networks that make it easier for others to follow. The stereotype fits just as well onto the image of the American English teacher in Taiwan.

In fact, there is no more reason that an English teacher should be an American than there is for the chef in a Moroccan restaurant to be from Morocco. Most English teachers in countries outside East Asia are not Anglo-Americans. Typically, English teachers are citizens from the country in which they teach who hold certificates to teach in state schools. The difference is that in East Asia, a great deal of education takes place in the private marketplace, and subsequently, stereotypes of what makes a 'better' teacher becomes important in determining who individuals acting as customers buy from.

The reality is that very few foreign teachers in Asia enter English teaching as professionalized teachers. Instead they enter as industrial workers in commercial schools. They enter not knowing about education, but also not knowing the thousand and one things it takes to run a commercial educational venture in their market. Most of these positions are designed to be temporary, with as much labour being extracted from the teacher as quickly as possible. If the teacher stays long enough, has the interest, and enough ability to do so, they may continue on to become partners in established schools or more often, open their own.

Given the temporary nature of commercial employment, others sometimes choose a different root. Instead of, or in addition to, opening their own school, some teachers look for professionalized teaching positions in established educational institutions, such as universities or high schools. But even in most of these cases, the teachers involved spent considerable amounts of time in commercial schools coming to understand what the English teaching industry is about.

With the exception of a very small number of teachers who are able to directly enter highly professionalized permanent positions, the vast majority of individuals teaching in English in Asia, regardless of educational qualifications, enter the occupation through commercial schools. English teaching in these commercial schools can thus be seen as an entry port into an industry in which one has no experience. It is an industry that sells language as a cultural product. And as such, English teachers in Asia can be interpreted as entry-level workers in a culture industry.

What's Happening to Teacher's Salaries?

Michael Turton has an interesting discussion of how teacher's salaries have remained stable for years. The main focus of his discussion is an often talked about change in market composition. Large numbers of South Africans have entered the English teaching market over the past few years. This is rumoured to have had such effects as driving down the salaries and wages of foreign teachers. I don't disagree with this, but I think it's important to see this as part of a bigger picture.

In fact, the market for foreign teachers has changed enormously since I arrived here in 1996. At that time, there were few legal employers outside of the major chain schools. The number of universities and colleges was much smaller than it is today, and it was extremely difficult to get a job at one without a PhD. The vast, vast majority of jobs were homogeneous in terms of both qualification and compensation, and appeared much more like entry-level positions at commercial language schools. In other words, 'top' jobs were not just good, they were elite. Their number was so small that it made access dependent on factors other than just qualification. The reality of today's market is very different.

By 2005, the market for foreign English teachers in Taiwan had taken on a highly stratified appearance. At the bottom, of course, is the large number of entry-level jobs that require virtually no qualification. But there are now a  wide variety of positions available in the market in terms of responsibilities and compensation. These range from teaching full-time at a university with paid vacation time to positions with companies or with company teaching contractors that pay substantial hourly rates. The top teaching jobs now available are competitive with positions available in the ex-pat business community.

I have described teaching English as a culture industry in which entry at the bottom takes nothing more than factors endowed on an individual by birth. This doesn't mean there is no perceived level of skill in the industry; chefs at major restaurants also need to know how to make ethnic food. English teaching is no different. The situation of stagnant wages that Michael Turton describes is only true for the bottom portion of the market. The arrival of large numbers of South African English teachers, if it has had any affect at all, has made no difference at all among the highly skilled segment of culture workers. This is not to say there are no South Africans in the highly skilled segment, but rather, the amount of time and effort invested to enter this portion of the market is so great that the number of applicants is still very small. Whether this will change in the future remains to be seen.

More Discussion of English Teachers as Economic Migrants

This time, it comes from a well-known site in Japan, GaijinPot.com. This post on the saturation of the market for English teachers lead to a link with my early posts on English teachers as economic migrants and this rather lengthy discussion.