Brain Drain is just a theory, and a pretty contentious one at that. There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the positive effects of emigration can outweigh the negatives.
They have a massive industry over there training up nurses with the explicit intention of sending them overseas. The net result of this is a top class health care system.
Cash remittances make up 10% of their GDP. This is in addition to a culture of overseas workers sending massive gift boxes back home once a year (often containing expensive things like smartphones and laptops for the younger generations' education).
Plus you have the soft power and less tangible benefits (cultural exchange, etc.)
The Government actually actively encourages people to emigrate, in fact, as it's a great way for the country to get ahead culturally and economically. They simply don't have the industry locally to support the high number of skilled and educated workers they produce.
>What can outweigh intelligent people not improving life in home country but building career in 1st world?
This statement carries with it a couple of assumptions:
- People in a corrupt society will work hard to get an education when it doesn't give them an opportunity to make a better life overseas.
- Educated people who remain in their corrupt, third-world countries of birth will have the opportunities to use their skills to improve their home country.
- People in poor, but non-corrupt and growing economies that have the opportunity to stay and improve things will instead leave.
I'm sure you can find multiple examples to shatter every one of those assumptions (Nigeria really sticks out for the second one).
You actually confirmed my assumptions about self-perpetuating corruption. Tell me who is going to actually improve that if most people with necessary skills and mindset leave? Sending back money alone won't do it. These people may personally have worse life if they stayed, not denying that. But what about global view? First world will eventually have to deal with resulting political turmoil.
>Tell me who is going to actually improve that if most people with necessary skills and mindset leave? Sending back money alone won't do it.
You're ignoring the WhatsApp factor.
Immigrants experience first hand how well Western democracy works and then share that with everybody back home.
It's also quite common, at least in my experience, for people to follow politics back home. Invariably, they advocate quite vocally for more democracy, less corruption and less discrimination.
Whatsapp is not enough! Some of them need to stay there and actually get elected. Democracy needs not only advocacy but also competent politicians, and that's a rare talent. Probably there are enough of them in your country so you can't even imagine that as a requirement. Count yourself lucky.
So the children born in developed countries (who got developed on the backs of undeveloped countries) are entitled to living better lives than children born in undeveloped countries, who should not have the opportunity to move out to developed countries?
If providing a decent life to a hard working, aspirational individual whose work ethic and talent would have been pissed up the wall back at home counts as "developing off the back" of poorer nations, then I don't really see it as a bad thing at all.
Don't forget that many developing countries have a wide array of policies in place to ensure that they can't make proper use of their human capital.
My father-in-law, for example, is an environmental scientist who simply couldn't find work in his field (public sector) back in South Africa in the early 00s as there were racial quotas and affirmative action policies that didn't work in his favour.
He was offered a job in NZ, after a solid year of being unemployed, and jumped ship immediately. His talent wasn't stolen by the developed world so much as it wasted by his underdeveloped home.
I was referring to the era when resources were extracted to developed countries or labor (slaves) were moved around as needed to developing countries as “developing of the back” of poorer countries.
Intelligent people moving abroad, making bank, and sending home a sizeable portion of their cash back home to support their family and used to build their home country's capital stocks.
It's individual persons in the developing world that make the choice to move or not. Why are you so keen to build barriers to prevent them from making that choice?
