Gaurav Khanna

I see many people arguing against this take👇that talented people should stay in their countries to help develop them, and I frankly don't understand why. Even if you are on the left, you should agree with this. How on earth does robbing a country of their best brains help them? A country's most precious resource is its people and arguing that it is somehow humanistic to pillage that specific resource for your own selfish prosperity is the height of hypocrisy. And if you are from the right and are anti-mass immigration, you don't want to do that either because robbing a country of its best brains means that the underdevelopment that this helps foster ultimately encourages more of their people to emigrate, and you end up with mass immigration... Immigration is all too often thought of as purely a domestic issue but it is, first and foremost, an inequality and international instability issue: the biggest causes are underdevelopment, lack of opportunities at home and, of course, wars and conflicts. If you ACTUALLY want less immigration, what you DON'T want to do is cherry-picking talent for your own benefit at the expense of others or cheering for America's insane warmongering foreign policy. In fact the only way you can be in favor of this is if you are an ideologue who either believes that individual freedom trumps all collective considerations (including the development of entire nations), or if you have such a supremacist view of the world that you see immigration as a form of "liberation" from inherently "inferior" places. The reality is that, from whatever angle you look at this, the most realistic and humanistic perspective (with some exceptions, like war), is to promote policies that enable the best and brightest to develop their potential within their own countries. And the truth is that if you cheerlead talent drain from developing nations, you might think you're supporting individual freedom but that comes at the cost of undermining the very conditions that would create real freedom of choice for entire populations. China actually has interesting initiatives in this regard. Through agreements with African countries, students who study in Chinese universities (now the 2nd destination worldwide for African students) are strongly disincentivized to stay in China. The whole point is for them to use their newfound knowledge to help develop their own countries. All countries should emulate these types of policies. In the end we can all agree that real development assistance means helping nations build themselves, not extracting their people for our own benefit under the guise of individual opportunity.