4 ms·

It is a win for the home country only if the expat comes back, then they get access to an educated individual that would have been hard to train internally.

• zozbot234 5y ago
  Many expats do come back to their home country, and pretty much all expats have at least some meaningful links and interactions with it.
  • afiori 5y ago
    Then that is not a brain drain, in many places (like my own country) very few people come back. In that case whether justified of not, whether it should be stopped or not it is not a "win" for the home country people are leaving. I am not arguing for or against, I am arguing that the pointed problem is not fabricated.
  • chirau 5y ago
    Many??? I doubt this is true. I am African, and throughout my college years, I established a very extensive network of African scholars in the US. I can safely say that more than 95% of them stayed in the US. The number for Africans is obviously higher, but even in my own college network, most of the international students stay in the US. The few who go back are either because they are rich or already have something lined up for them, or they did not get a job/visa to stay. Otherwise, for the overwhelming majority, the plan is to stay and most of them end up doing so.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      Many African countries have truly dismal institutional arrangements that make return migration extremely unattractive. But when countries strive to improve, they stand to gain huge advantages from people coming back with good education and skills they acquired in a developed country.
      • karpierz 5y ago
        What does it mean for a country to "strive to improve"? Do you expect a country to flourish when you siphon off the educated? People won't return until the country improves, and the country won't "strive to improve" until the educated return.
        • zozbot234 5y ago
          > Do you expect a country to flourish when you siphon off the educated? Yes. Research shows that when more people are educated abroad (i.e. 'siphoned off') this tends to improve attitudes towards democracy and liberal values in the source country. This directly addresses one of the main factors explaining expats' attitudes towards coming back.
          • karpierz 5y ago
            Can you cite a source here?
            • zozbot234 5y ago
              There's a lot of research about this and I'm not going to link it all here, you can check wiki. One example is doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2015.12.001 "Emigration and democracy": "Migration is an important yet neglected determinant of institutions. This paper documents the channels through which emigration affects home country institutions and considers dynamic-panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries. The authors find that emigration and human capital both increase democracy and economic freedom. ...Simulations show an impact of skilled emigration that is generally positive, significant for a few countries and for many countries once incentive effects of emigration on human capital formation are accounted for."