TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Moving
Out, Needed In
By
Rip Ritchie
My experience in India enlightened me
about
a form of
migration that I could not see with my own eyes. It had to do
with an out-migration of Indian citizens to highly developed countries
such as those in North America, Europe and Australia. Many highly
trained individuals from India are moving to these places in order to
seek out employment and fill openings that are in high demand in these
places. I talked to several people while I was there who
mentioned this “brain drain” issue and referred to it as being a very
serious problem.
In learning about migration in India, the most
significant man that I talked to was named Ahmad whose son had traveled
to the United States after finishing his medical training at the
university. He found a job and was doing very well for himself
there. Ahmad said that this is very common and that several of
his friends also have children that have followed similar paths.
Stephen Castles and Mark Miller refer to this phenomenon known as
“brain drain” in their book, The Age
of Migration. They discuss
the trend for highly skilled workers to move from India and other
developing countries to industrial nations in the last few
decades. They acquire a good education in their homeland and then
move because they can receive better wages abroad. Ahmad was
disenchanted with this process because he was worried about what it is
doing to his country. There is a serious lack of doctors and
other professionals in India precisely for this reason. In
Ahmad’s views, it is not good that a country can support the education,
but the economy cannot support the employment. His son has
married a woman in the United States and has started to break with many
of the Hindu traditions. This worries Ahmad because he wants the
Indian culture to live on in his children. Furthermore, he knows
that his son is a good doctor and wants him to provide services for his
own people. If the highly educated and trained individuals leave
the country, how can India provide good services to its citizens?
I also talked to a young professional named Giuna in
New Delhi. He works for a technology firm and designs new
chemicals and medicines to be put on the market. His company is a
United States based company and he is paid well for Indian
standards. His concern with the company is that many of the new
products are being exported back to the United States and patents are
being obtained there. India is not receiving the intellectual
property and the resulting profits. It is a new form of “brain
drain”, and almost equally as serious. Western countries are
taking the good things from these less developed countries and
profiting off of them without giving much back to the host country.
The brain drain can be a very serious issue for the
countries that are being “drained”. They are losing valuable
assets that they could use to build up their economies and become more
developed. The Western countries are using these things to
support their dominance in the technology and highly skilled sector and
not letting the benefits spread around the globe. In a sense it
is keeping the less developed countries less developed and maintaining
the high development in the Western, industrialized countries. It
is a different form of migration, but it has become a very serious
issue. It involves not only the people migrating from the
country, but also the skills and the intellectual property they
produce. These are people, skills and ideas that could benefit
the host country immensely. They are not unskilled workers that
have little potential for their host country; they are assets that need
to be utilized in order to strengthen the
economies and societies of
developing countries. Ahmad and Giuna have very serious concerns
and something must be done so that their country can start benefiting
from the wonderful potential of their educated citizens.
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