Legislatures all over are encouraging, cajoling, or ordering regulators to speed up and simplify the licensing of international professionals in occupations where there are shortages. A few reports from recent editions of Ascend Magazine’s Week in Brief demonstrate this story: Nova Scotia is to accept U.S. physicians without further checks; Yukon is reducing ‘barriers to licensing’; Florida has introduced a universal licensure bill to combat the state’s ‘ongoing labor shortage’; Alberta and Ontario want regulators to make it easier for international nurses to become registered.

At last, it seems, in the face of shortages of a whole range of professionals, we are waking up to the way regulatory restrictions limit supply and how our fragmented regulatory regimes create barriers between occupations, provinces, and states – let alone countries. When the U.K. left the European Union and rejected the free movement of labor within that block, a shortage of health professionals was immediate. The number of nurses from the E.U. applying to work in the U.K. dropped by 90% in a year. The government is now scrambling to reduce the shortage with doctors, nurses, and dentists from Africa, India, southeast Asia, and the Philippines. There are, it has been reported, more Ghanaian doctors working in the U.K. than in Ghana itself.

Are rich countries stealing from the poor? Of course we are, and there is really nothing new in this, it’s just that the economic terms are changing. Peter Frankopan, in his remarkable history, ‘The Silk Roads’ reveals that the trade in people, most often in slaves, is as old as human societies. As they expanded, each competed for advantage in resources over the other. Over millennia, the routes travelled by armies, goods, and people have changed in response to who has the money and the power and who has not.

I don’t want to suggest that we are seeing a new slave trade. Far from it. Enthusiastic volunteers come from less wealthy countries to share in a better life elsewhere and are welcomed for their skills and energy, but at the same time we are stripping some of the most talented from their home countries and exacerbating their problems to solve ours. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest burden of disease globally but the fewest of the world’s health workers.

In 2010, the World Health Organization published its ‘Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel’ which calls on countries to mitigate the negative effects of migration and encourage positive ones. I’m not sure it is much regarded.

More and more countries are closing their borders to refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants while at the same time begging educated professionals to leave their home countries to live in, contribute to, and benefit from ours. Professional regulation is caught in the cross currents of this new trade route. Regulation’s purpose has been to create barriers; to establish the difference between those who are good enough or not good enough to be licensed and admitted to the register. There are some 200 professional regulators in Canada alone and hardly a coherent or consistent approach, with many occupations licensed in one province but not in another. A similar regulatory divergence exists in the United States and across Europe. As professional monopolies, regulators have become adept – some more than others – in discrimination and exclusion in the interests of the profession. Now they are being asked to open the borders to people who are trained and licensed elsewhere, and even more concerning for them, to acknowledge the competence of regulators in other jurisdictions.

Now, let’s return to those ancient trade routes, most significantly the Silk Road, the long trade route between China and Persia which developed in the second century BCE initially to satisfy western demand for valuable Chinese silks. It stretched over 6,400 kilometres from the palaces of Beijing across the steppes, the mountains and deserts, as far as Byzantium and beyond. The oldest forms of international regulation – agreements on weights and measures and the acceptance of coins – were developed in response to this trade. In those days, regulation opened the city gates and helped smooth the way. Along the routes, cultures, cities, and peoples developed and advanced. As they traded, they exchanged ideas and so learned and borrowed from each other. Regulation of trade opened opportunities rather than closing them down.

No longer, it seems. It is an irony that professional regulation, which in creating monopolies is anti-competitive within a jurisdiction, is now generating competition between jurisdictions. Perhaps more than 2,000 years on from the Silk Road, modern regulators need to learn how to agree rather than disagree; how to cooperate rather than to compete. In 307 BCE, King Wuling of Zhao in northeast China wrote, “A talent for following the ways of yesterday is not sufficient to improve the world of today.” We should take note.

Harry Cayton is a sought-after global authority on regulatory practices who created the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) and pioneered right-touch regulation. He is a regular Ascend Voices contributor.