Roughly a decade ago, I spent a year in a developing country working on a project to promote human rights. We had a rotating team of about a dozen (mostly) brilliant local employees, all college-educated, working alongside us. We invested a lot of time and money into training these employees, with the expectation that they (as members of the college-educated elite) would help lead human rights reform in the country long after our project disbanded. I got nostalgic and looked up my old colleagues recently. Every single one is living in the West now. A few are still somewhat involved in human rights, but most are notably under-employed (a lawyer washing dishes in a restaurant in Virginia, for example).
I'm torn on this. I'm sure my former colleagues are happier on an individual level. Their human rights are certainly better respected in the West, and the salaries are better. But the potential good that they could have done in their home country is (probably) substantially higher. On my way out, I signed letters of recommendation for each employee, which I later found out were used to pad visa applications. (I am perhaps feeling a bit of guilt over contributing to a developing country's "brain drain" as a result.) After I left, there was a blowup between two of the Western employees over whether to continue supporting emigration. The TL;DR of the disagreement was "It's the nice thing to do, and refusing to support emigration could reduce morale and our ability to hire go-getters" versus "We can't have lasting impact if our ringers keep leaving."
I'm curious about what other EAs have seen in their orgs. Is there any kind of organizational policy that exists on matters like this?
I think this is a huge and under-recognised problem with migration - that the very best people who could have made the biggest difference transforming their country end up leaving, mostly doing far less transformative and "cruxy" work in western countries. I live in Uganda and have seen the same phenomenon.
The strongest pro-immigration argument is usually that we should support migration because remittances are so important and the good done by that can overcome the harms of "brain drain". If the very best people leave though, I think the negative effect can be enormous.
Also see my comment here on this article by Lauren, along very similar lines.
"The best people leave, people that could be innovating, inspiring, leading and starting the best businesses that could grow the country. When you skim off the top 1%, you can "replace" them by training others, but you can't replace their natural brilliant traits that could have led them to transform their countries."
https://www.laurenpolicy.com/p/why-brain-drain-isnt-something-we
This issue was also discussed a little in the comments about my wee piece here.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9TnGxtSjjdpeufaqs/is-nigerian-nurse-emigration-really-a-win-win-critique-of-a
Thanks so so much for this insight and sharing, yes it's raw but not boring in the slightest and I think it's exactly the kind of thing we need to hear on the forum here.
What do you think immigration policies should be from your country?