Do highly skilled migrants return permanently to their home countries?

There's often times a hidden variable in the decision to return home - in my case it involved nice curves and brown eyes.

I'm a Kiwi and many of us head off overseas in our early twenties, usually with the intention of returning home in a few years. This 'Big OE' though is mostly because people want to see the world rather than because they want to move somewhere to improve their quality of life. So that's part of the explanation for the difference the study sees between migration between Western migrants and those from Asian regions say.

On their travels some people meet a pretty girl / handsome guy and so sometimes the new partner returns to New Zealand too and sometimes the Kiwi ends up staying in the new partners country. The decision in these cases is more a personal one than to do with any specific countries advantages / disadvantages.

Sure, not many skilled migrants return to their home countries, but this doesn't mean that they're not helping their home countries! They're still forming the sorts of international ties needed to provide opportunities for the home country. For example, by providing contacts and funds for starting companies in the home country, or collaborative research, etc. So it's not very clear to me that the feared "brain drain" is necessarily a "drain" -- in fact, India's very awful-seeming brain drain seems to have started to pay off pretty handsomely in the last 20 years.

I noticed that the migrants he was tracking were all "foreign faculty who had their first US faculty appointment after 1993". I would think that receiving a faculty appointment would be a relatively powerful reason to stay.

I do realize that those who get faculty appointments can be considered the "most successful" PhD graduates, and thus their return home would be more beneficial to their home country. However, I'd be interested if they numbers were significantly different for students that either received their PhD and went into industry, or immediately returned home.

It'll be interesting to see how this data changes over the next 20 years given the current state of US politics.

It is clear why only the best stay there. Everybody wants to have a feeling of accomplishment and success. And clearly with a "higher" countries education you are the elite of your own country, but in that country you might need some very excelent results and a lot of luck to just be considered normal. It is a tough fight uphill to survive in a higher developed country, far away from your family and culture and nobody interested in helping you.

It's an interesting question and I don't feel that article really does it justice.

I also have no idea why you would lump different source countries together when the difference between moving from the US to Aus and moving from India to Aus is so great.

In addition this is a question where the answer itself changes with time. Is there even any point looking at the current situation if the variability over time is very large.

I was listening to Dan Ariely's podcast a while back and one of the topics was on the hidden benefit of brain drains.

The theory goes like this. Only a few highly educated people have the opportunity to emigrate, say 1 out of 10 college graduates. But the benefit of emigrating is so huge, improving well being by 10x or 20x, more people will still pursue higher education even though they may not actually have the chance to emigrate.

So although 1 out of 10 top people end up leaving for the United States or Europe, the developing nation will still net gain the 9 out of 10 educated people that couldn't emigrate who will help improve the nation overall.