Think Again: Brain Drain

Studying, reaearch stays, or an exchange of creative ideas between nations is not emigration. Go to Europe or the U.S. and study hard, instead of listening to idiots

@Magdalena, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm afraid I'm a little too old and wrinkled to be "infantile". It is common for people to assert, as you do, that skilled worker migration causes large public harm of various kinds. Note what this implies, however: That stopping skilled worker migration --- per se, all else equal --- would by itself produce large public benefit. It's the same statement in reverse.

And that is where the argument runs into trouble. Migration is a choice, a choice of location, so stopping migration is abrogating the choice of location --- that is, forcing people to be in a location that (by revealed preference) they do not want to be in. So the claim that we can cause large public benefit by stopping migration per se is equivalent to claiming that we can cause large public benefit by forcing skilled workers to live somewhere they don't want to live.

What would you think of forcing skilled, talented people who grew up in poor neighborhoods of the United States to live in those neighborhoods, even if they wished to leave, because their presence there would bring public benefits to the neighborhood? Most people would be profoundly uncomfortable with that, as intuitively we sense that it would be both ineffective and unethical. But many of the same people have no trouble believing that forcing skilled workers to live in poor countries they grew up in would be both ethical and effective, and I'm not sure where that belief comes from.

If you would agree that it would take more than just forcing skilled workers to stay in the places they come from in order to realize the benefit, then you're accepting that migration itself is not the underlying cause of the public harm from their loss, just as the fact that the departure of many talented youths from ghettos is not the underlying cause of the problems of those neighborhoods.

These are issues we need to think through carefully, and I invite you and others to ponder not just the fact that skilled workers are leaving developing countries, but *why* they are leaving --- that is, I invite everyone to focus on the underlying causes of the problems of which skilled workers' departure is an easily-seen symptom.