The question is whether brain drain, crime, and corruption are due to incurable pathologies or symptoms of transient disadvantages.
Who builds the next startup, starts a franchise chain or scouts investors to build a new machine, if you can always double your salary by serving rich foreigners?
It's sort of a Dutch disease [1]. I've seen it happening from afar to Barcelona, which was on route to become what Berlin now is in terms of IT/programming back in ~2005-2006 but the ever increasing rent prices caused by tourism put an end to that (plus the 2008-2010 crisis, of course, which hit Spain especially hard). I had expected the same thing to happen to Amsterdam, but it looks like it managed to hold up better.
Well... many of the German tourists only come to Amsterdam for smoking pot on a day or weekend trip, and the French additionally for a night in the brothels since sex work is banned in France, so all you need is a lot of cheap hotels with beds, no stuff like beach resorts or other... more high-class venues to deal with these people.
Additionally, over the last years many of the "coffee shops" (weed shops) have closed down - in the early 2000s there were 280+ in Amsterdam, now there are 166. The government wants to introduce a "weed pass" that's only for Dutch citizens to further crack down on weed tourism: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/corona-coffeeshops-101.htm...
Hawaii's education suffers dramatically because the work is all in tourism - this is firsthand knowledge from teachers I know over there.
How? There isn't much trade between Africa/Arabia and Europe other than oil, some agricultural products and used cars/outright waste.
> The natural beauty that attracts tourism can help repatriate the talented diasporas.
That's already the case in Croatia, many pensioners who worked in richer European countries retire back in Croatia because they can "live like kings" from pensions that would barely fetch a 1br micro apartment otherwise. For 500€ you can get a 75 m² flat in the center of Rijeka - in Munich that would be around 1500-2000€.
And those in working age... it's rare for them to return to their homelands for that reason.
> The question is whether brain drain, crime, and corruption are due to incurable pathologies or symptoms of transient disadvantages.
Neither, in my opinion. "Incurable pathologies" is bordering on racism, but it aren't "transient" issues on the other side. What's needed is massive amounts of wealth redistribution across Europe, combined with throwing the whole lot of political elites into jail (and that's also sadly valid for Germany, just look at Andreas Scheuer or the MPs who allegedly got huge kickbacks for anti-corona masks).
Basically Europe would need something like what the US did post-1945: a complete clean-up. Absent that, I'd also accept a revolution of the masses, but that isn't on the pipelines anywhere except in France...
Adam Smith not only promoted specialization but also extending the "reach" of trade. Politicians have the power to ruin things but they only succeed when riding the coat-tails of talented makers. I'd focus on promoting the makers rather than punishing past ruiners. Nihilism is never the answer.