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?
This is not a discussion about anyone forcing anyone to do anything (noone has suggested that), but the original question was about the degree we should potentially fund and support the best workers in our orgs to emigrate. This is a hugely important question, because from experience in Uganda with enough time and resources I could probably help almost any high level qualified and capable person to emigrate but is that really the best thing for me do?
As things stand every country in the world has huge restrictions on emigration, which does often "force" people to stay where they were born, something no one in this discussion thread has the power to do.
The most talented people from low income countries are often much better placed to improve up their own country than we are from richer countries, due to cultural knowledge and connections. In saying that I do agree that far more people from high income countries could be doing a lot of good living and working in low income countries.