Or we increase immigration to account for falling birthrates.
What can outweigh intelligent people not improving life in home country but building career in 1st world?
The Philippines is one that springs to mind.
They have a massive industry over there training up nurses with the explicit intention of sending them overseas. The net result of this is a top class health care system.
Cash remittances make up 10% of their GDP. This is in addition to a culture of overseas workers sending massive gift boxes back home once a year (often containing expensive things like smartphones and laptops for the younger generations' education).
Plus you have the soft power and less tangible benefits (cultural exchange, etc.)
The Government actually actively encourages people to emigrate, in fact, as it's a great way for the country to get ahead culturally and economically. They simply don't have the industry locally to support the high number of skilled and educated workers they produce.
>What can outweigh intelligent people not improving life in home country but building career in 1st world?
This statement carries with it a couple of assumptions:
- People in a corrupt society will work hard to get an education when it doesn't give them an opportunity to make a better life overseas.
- Educated people who remain in their corrupt, third-world countries of birth will have the opportunities to use their skills to improve their home country.
- People in poor, but non-corrupt and growing economies that have the opportunity to stay and improve things will instead leave.
I'm sure you can find multiple examples to shatter every one of those assumptions (Nigeria really sticks out for the second one).
Don't forget that many developing countries have a wide array of policies in place to ensure that they can't make proper use of their human capital.
My father-in-law, for example, is an environmental scientist who simply couldn't find work in his field (public sector) back in South Africa in the early 00s as there were racial quotas and affirmative action policies that didn't work in his favour.
He was offered a job in NZ, after a solid year of being unemployed, and jumped ship immediately. His talent wasn't stolen by the developed world so much as it wasted by his underdeveloped home.
We are saying the same thing.
You're ignoring the WhatsApp factor. Immigrants experience first hand how well Western democracy works and then share that with everybody back home.
It's also quite common, at least in my experience, for people to follow politics back home. Invariably, they advocate quite vocally for more democracy, less corruption and less discrimination.