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Comment by TheRoque | Hacker News Reader

> there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success

And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ? Immigration exists because some parts of the world just suck, with corrupt governments, wars, you name it. I don't see how anyone can be happy of migrations, it means fleeing your home and leaving your roots. I don't think most migrations are something to be happy about.

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Its only tragic if you think of the world as a bunch of sports teams winning points, rather than a planet occupied by the human race. Would you rather the researcher toil fruitlessly in their home country that lacks the funding to properly support a good research environment? Or would you rather they had the opportunity to actually conduct their experiments or build their invention? They will draft a patent or a research paper that the entire world can now see coming from the US.

Or if you value community and realize all the folks with ambition leaving an area is sad for that community. I don’t have to be cheering for my hometown to win to think it’s sad someone must choose between the community they grew up in and using their talents.

Frankly, my home country doesn't deserve my brain, nor the brain of anyone else willing and able to leave it.

It's a nice sentiment, but you also can't ignore that, if people like myself are willing to go through the oftentimes extremely stressful task of emigrating with all the things that entails, there's probably a reason for it. It's not like you can just pick up and leave, after all

It's all fun and games until your host country grows a secret police willing to threaten what family remains behind to keep you from leaving.

None of my family has been back in decades, we've long since abandoned it.

Also, that situation is a lot more likely to occur in the mother country than most people's host countries, if it doesn't happen already. There's a reason it was the East germans fleeing, and not the other way around.

> And I find it so tragic. It means that the best elements of a given country are being sucked out of it. How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ?

They don't leave irreversibly, they can go back if the political and institutional milieu in their home country improves, and bring valuable insights from abroad. This dynamic has been quite common wrt. those who migrated to the Americas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

I tend to believe you, but it's not something that's about a lot. I would be curious to know the facts of expats coming back after a while, or a least investing in their home countries

> How can this country ever get better if the best elements just leave it ?

By competing for their talent. I'm not a huge proponent of capitalism, but that's the world we live in and the world we'll die in. These countries simply aren't competitive in a way to encourage their people to stay. There are innumerous ways to combat this. But our current thinking is so clouded by short sighted profit that today's outcomes shouldn't surprise anyone.

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