The scale has changed, but those days have never really ended. I'm from a Caribbean country that people are usually quite eager to leave. I've seen numerous cases of people with post-secondary education and jobs to go with it leave for the US or UK and end up doing "unskilled" labor because their qualifications don't carry across.
New (US) grads have significantly less qualifications than anyone wants to admit. It's getting 2 years of experience that makes the difference.
When looking to hire people from South America, there was lots of manufacturing experience, but we needed Design experience.
When we hired CAD guys, they followed directions fine, but possibly too literally or would stop too prematurely. When getting local, non engineers to do CAD, they would read our mind more.
Not that this is a show stopper. If we met 3 times a day for a quick meeting with our SA CAD guys, we achieved just as much. It just required more meetings/phone calls.
