A friend of mine graduated in mechanical engineering from a reasonably good college in 2015 and spent fourteen months applying for engineering jobs in India before taking a position in a business process outsourcing firm that involved no engineering of any kind. In 2019 he moved to Germany, where he is a mechanical engineer.
The commentary describes this as brain drain. I would like to know which four years it thinks were the drain.
The framing has a hidden premise and the premise is doing all the work. To lose something you must have had it. Brain drain assumes a domestic use for the person that emigration removed — that the engineer would have been engineering here, and now is not.
For a substantial share of the people the phrase is used about, there was no such use. India graduates engineers at a scale that has no relationship to the number of engineering positions in the country, which is a policy achievement of a specific kind: the seats were built, the seats were filled, and the demand side was assumed. My friend was not lost to Indian engineering. Indian engineering had already declined him, in writing, forty-odd times.
Now the version of the objection that has teeth, because there is one and the lazy contrarian version of this essay skips it.
The people who leave are not a random draw. They are disproportionately the ones who could have got the scarce good job — the top of the distribution, the ones with the language and the network and the marks. So the counterfactual is not "he would have been unemployed"; for the marginal emigrant it is often "he would have taken the one good position, and somebody slightly less good took it instead." That is a real loss and it compounds, because the very top of a small distribution is where a research group or a founding team comes from, and those do not have substitutes.
I accept that. It also does not rescue the phrase, because the phrase is not applied to the top of the distribution. It is applied to the aggregate — the hundreds of thousands, the annual figure, the outflow. And in the aggregate the claim is close to backwards: the outflow is a symptom of an absorption problem, and describing it as a loss lets everybody discuss the departure instead of the absorption.
You can tell the framing is doing this because of what it recommends. Brain drain suggests retention: bonds, incentives, appeals to duty, occasionally a serious proposal to charge people for the education they received. Every one of those addresses the leaving. None of them addresses the fourteen months.
My friend sends money home, which is counted as a benefit, and visits at Diwali, and is thinking about coming back in a few years to do something with a former classmate, which is counted as nothing at all because there is no line for it. He is, in the language of the discourse, drained. He would tell you he was poured.
