Matt Annunziato (GISD Student ’18)
“Brain drain” is a popular concept in the modern international neoliberal economy. It occurs when skilled workers are lost from one country to another. Examples include doctors leaving sub-Saharan Africa and tech-professionals leaving south and east Asia.
It is rooted in the international labor market and in skilled workers’ ability to take their talents anywhere they please. On the bright side, it enables workers to find higher wages and employers to pay less for international employees. Unfortunately, this practice can also be exploitative. But what many people don’t realize is that it often affects human rights. Immigration policies in high labor-demand economies that actively attract skilled workers impose huge training costs on source countries. These costs undermine social services and therefore many economic and social rights.
In 2014, The Nation published an article called “Brain Drain and the Politics of Immigration.” The authors of the article call attention to the inverse relationship between US immigration policies, which lure the most talented and qualified candidates from least-developed countries (LDCs) and USAID programs, which (unsuccessfully) try to foster better social conditions and retain talent in the same LDCs.
The policies undermine one another and ultimately encourage conditions in which professionals can make more money by moving abroad.
The policies undermine one another and ultimately encourage conditions in which professionals can make more money by moving abroad.
My sticking point with the article is its assertion that push factors in LDCs are the sole responsibility of the countries themselves.
“Ensuring that skilled workers have opportunities to flourish at home is ultimately a challenge for source countries, not the richer countries that absorb them when they leave,” Natalie Baptiste and Foreign Policy in Focus.
Time after time, we hear discourse on the failings of countries in the global south. Lack of opportunity, low pay for skilled professionals, horrid social and financial situations, and other colonialist views inappropriately tinge our perceptions of these vibrant and diverse spaces. Reality is often different from this colonial mindset. Rwanda, for example, has a Universal Healthcare System even in a context where the GDP per capita is only $702.84 (compared to nearly $57,500 in the US). Cuba’s life expectancy is higher than the US while it spends less than one-tenth as much per person on healthcare. It also manages to send tens of thousands of doctors a year abroad while retaining one of the highest doctor to patient ratios in the world.
We constantly hear information about cash-strapped LDCs, even as their governments and residents innovate and they develop at a much more rapid pace than either the US or Western Europe has developed in the past. The difference between my views and those of Baptiste and Foreign Policy in Focus can be attributed to human rights.
All rights – including economic and social rights – are universal and inalienable. All countries have a responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill these rights both at home and abroad.
All rights – including economic and social rights – are universal and inalienable. All countries have a responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill these rights both at home and abroad.
For example, Switzerland’s financial secrecy laws have repeatedly been cited as illegal by the UN Committee that oversees compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. When money is hidden in Swiss accounts, it escapes domestic taxation. This escape directly undermines realization of economic and social rights in those countries. Universal healthcare, equitable education, decent work, and all other economic and social rights depend on public policy that is funded by a robust tax base. Why is luring away taxpayers treated any differently than Switzerland luring away money? Both instances deprive source countries of income.
Even in 2006, the lifetime cost (education paid for by the state and lost returns on investment by the state) of a doctor leaving Kenya was $517,931 – this figure doesn’t even take into account the lost tax revenue that would have been paid by the doctor over the course of their career. As many doctors leave source countries every year, the losses add up and actively undermine the health, education, and work programs in those countries: Health systems lose doctors whose education was paid for as a right by the state, education systems are overburdened by doctors who have no plans to work in their home country, and work initiatives suffer from the lack of an adequate tax base. As the US and other states in the global north draw migrants from source countries, they actively undermine the economic and social rights of remaining citizens.
Although there is a clear connection between the so-called brain drain as a tax burden and violations of international law, there are several other rights at play. Outward migration cannot be restricted, because everyone has a right to the unrestrained freedom of movement (ICCPR article 12). It is also clearly not a negative thing for professionals to seek out higher salaries. But the question remains: Whose responsibility is it to ensure better conditions in source countries?
While duty to reduce push factors ultimately falls on governments in LDCs, they cannot provide for their citizens while they are being actively undermined by foreign governments. Host countries should be held accountable for the way they undermine rights.
For example, when the US lures a doctor away from Kenya, it should repay Kenya for the doctor’s education and for the state’s lost return on their investment.
For example, when the US lures a doctor away from Kenya, it should repay Kenya for the doctor’s education and for the state’s lost return on their investment.
Better yet, USAID funding should follow a more rights-based formula than the current model. USAID vaccinations only go so far when it refuses to pay for a right-to-health based system. In other words, when the US increases pull factors here, it also needs to help reduce push factors abroad. Continued neo-colonial exploitation of southern labor should not continue.
When paying attention to rights it is clear that developed countries have a duty to fund economic and social rights everywhere. We need to shift our discourse from one of “aid” and “immigration” to one of rights.
Regardless of one’s location, everyone deserves a life of dignity. All US policies should reflect these values.