Rethinking “Brain Drain” in the Era of Globalisation

Abstract

This paper discusses a range of issues concerning the idea of “brain drain” within the context of recent thinking on transnational mobility. It argues that the traditional analyses of brain drain are not sufficient, and that we can usefully approach the topic from a postcolonial perspective concerned with issues of identity, national affiliations, and deterritorialisation of cultures. Based on interviews conducted with international students from India and China in Australian and American universities, this paper analyses the ways in which student subjectivities and career aspirations relate to the dilemmas of globalisation: the opportunities provided by the new knowledge economy and global labour markets on the one hand, and the perceptions of national and community loyalties on the other.

Introduction

In recent years, there has once again been a great deal of popular discussion and policy debate concerning the emigration of highly skilled workers from the developing to developed countries. When, in 2002, an issue of The Economist carried a major article addressing the topic of “brain drain”, asking whether the developing countries gain or lose when “their brightest talent goes abroad”, it was inundated with reader response, which was as varied as it was intense. Some readers felt strongly that it was fundamentally wrong for the developed countries actively to recruit highly skilled workers from countries which might have invested heavily in their education and where their skills can make a significant contribution to national development. Others disagreed, and regarded transnational movement of people as a positive phenomenon, and an inevitable consequence of globalisation. In a globally integrated knowledge economy, they argued, both the developing and developed countries benefited from the global circulation of skilled workers.

The debates regarding the transnational movement of highly skilled labour are not confined to the popular media. International organisations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the International Labour Organization (ILO; Lowell & Findlay, 2001), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have also promoted them. A recent report from the World Bank (2002), Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, has, for example, expressed concern at the rapidly increasing rates of emigration of knowledge workers from the developing countries, thus depriving them of conditions necessary to sustain their universities. The report fears the emergence of a global knowledge divide which, it suggests, will inevitably delay economic growth in the developing countries. The UNDP's Human Development Report (2001) has similarly documented the various negative effects on developing countries of highly skilled emigration, and has called for strong policy measures to arrest the worsening trend.

It is not only the developing countries, however, which are concerned about the loss of highly skilled workers. A recent report by the OECD (2001) examined issues of skilled mobility with respect to its own member countries. The report noted that the role of immigration in human-resource planning is high on the agenda of policy makers and business leaders throughout the OECD for a wide variety of reasons, including the growing recognition that knowledge-based economies rely more heavily on workers with higher skill levels than ever before. It observed that most OECD countries have been unable to meet their skilled human-resource requirements, and thus face the conflicting demands of arresting the flow of their own skilled workers to the more advanced centres of research and development on the one hand, and developing policies to attract skilled workers from less developed countries on the other.

On the supply side, skilled workers in the developing countries continue to be interested in emigration for a wide variety of reasons, which relate both to the opportunities that individuals are able to pursue abroad and to the changing structure of the global economy. Any adequate explanation of the phenomenon of brain drain, therefore, needs to consider both its objective and subjective dimensions. In a globally integrated knowledge economy, the circulation of skilled workers is due not only to the changing structure of economic activities but also to “the opportunities for high technology entrepreneurship, access to leading clusters of research and innovation, bottlenecks of employment opportunities in public and private research and the globalization of the R & D activities of national firms” (Guellec & Cervantes, 2002, p. 71).

The drivers of international mobility are not only economic, however. They are also cultural and political. Crucial, for example, are the strong diasporic networks which encourage people to view emigration as perfectly normal, and which provide a supportive environment for managing the complex processes of mobility. Important also are the pro-skills immigration policies that most developed countries have now put in place to attract those with skills in certain labour fields. Such policies do not only recruit skilled migrants directly through application of a range of preferential measures, but also indirectly through international education policies. Indeed, international education has now become a major channel for the movement of highly skilled workers. Many students view an investment in international education as “their ticket to migration” (Rizvi, 2005, p. 7), and although it is not possible to provide precise numbers, more than 50% of international students from Asia eventually secure permanent residence in a developed country (Tremblay, 2004).

In this paper, I want to consider issues of brain drain from the perspective of international higher education. I want to do this not as a migration economist but as someone interested in the cultural politics of identity, mobility, and globalisation. My interest is in looking beyond the human-resource analyses that dominate much of the literature on brain drain. In my view, this analysis is insufficient to account for the complex cultural dynamics of movement, because it overlooks the processes of people reimagining their identities, social affiliations, and national obligations. In particular, I am interested in how international students think about transnational mobility, develop and marshal cosmopolitan resources strategically to create social networks appropriate to the dynamics of globalisation, and yet retain their sense of belonging—no longer against some abstract sense of authentic nationhood but in ways that necessarily involve cultural compromise and the negotiation of the complex terrains of knowledge and power. Viewed from this perspective, I argue that the traditional notion of brain drain used to describe the transnational mobility of skilled workers needs to be fundamentally reconceptualised.

My analysis is based partly on in-depth interviews that I and my colleague, Michael Singh, have conducted over the past five years with some 80 Chinese and Indian students who attended universities in Australia and the US.1 Half of these interviews were conducted with international students during their final year of study, while the other half were with graduates who had either returned home or had stayed on in Australia or the US. Initially, the main purpose of these interviews was to determine how, upon graduation, international students sought to reinsert themselves into the communities they had come from. However, during the interviews it became clear that a majority of students viewed their studies as a way of facilitating permanent residence abroad, or at least as an opportunity to work in a developed country for a prolonged period. Even some of those who went home had this aspiration, and viewed transnational mobility as necessarily good. However, few expressed a desire to move permanently, and continued to express a commitment to their own country. This paper seeks to analyse this “in-between” transnational space, seeking to show how the phenomenon of transnational mobility has become much more complex in the global era than most human-resources analyses concerned with brain drain appear to assume. This underlines the importance of rethinking the idea of brain drain, as linked to a broader range of postcolonial issues of identity, shifting notions of national affiliation, and cultural change.

International Education and Brain Drain

Most of the recent debates about brain drain have centred on its adverse economic impact on developing countries, especially in the fields of science and technology. Higher education has, of course, always been implicated in the exodus of talented people from the developing to the developed countries. In the past, however, the number of international students from the developing countries undertaking their studies in universities in developed countries was relatively small, and was largely supported by scholarships. There was an expectation that the graduates would return home and utilise their skills in nation-building projects. This expectation was underpinned by a developmentalist ideology (Peet & Hartwick, 1999), constructed around linear notions of national economic and social development, which followed a predictable historical path. Educational aid was a part of this ideology, designed to create in the newly independent countries an administrative elite sympathetic to the interests of the donor countries. A good example of this approach was the Colombo Plan, which enabled students from poorer Commonwealth countries to study in countries which had more established systems of higher education, like Britain, Australia, and Canada (Oakman, 2005).

In recent years, however, international education based on the principles of aid and cooperation has arguably been replaced by its commercialisation. This has resulted in a growing number of students from the developing countries undertaking their studies in universities abroad on a full-fee-paying basis. In a relatively short period between 1998 and 2002, the number of international students enrolled in the OECD countries alone has increased from 1.32 million to 1.78 million (OECD, 2004). For some details, see Table 1.

Table 1. Principal sending and receiving nations of tertiary education to and from OECD countries, 2001

Nations receiving students	International students		Nations sending students	International students
	Number	Proportion of all students		Number	Proportion of all students
US	475,169	3.5%	China	124,000	—
UK	225,722	10.9%	Korea	70,523	2.3%
Germany	199,132	9.6%	India	61,179	—
France	147,402	7.3%	Greece	55,074	11.4%
Australia	110,789	13.9%	Japan	55,041	1.4%
Japan	63,637	1.6%	Germany	54,489	2.6%
Canada	40,667	4.6%	France	47,587	2.0%
Spain	39,944	2.2%	Turkey	44,204	2.6%
Belgium	38,150	10.6%	Morocco	43,063	—
Austria	31,682	12.0%	Italy	41,485	2.3%
Source: Systeme d'Observation Permanente sur les Migrations (2003).

These numbers are expected to double within the next decade as demand, especially from China and India, grows and as universities in the developed countries become increasingly reliant on the revenue generated by international student fees and by economically motivated transnational programmes (OECD, 2004).

Of the countries that have been most aggressive in recruiting students from the developing countries, Australia, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand stand out. The number of international students in Australian universities has, for example, increased dramatically from fewer than 45,000 in 1991 to over 285,000 in 2005 (Australian Education International, 2005). These students are recruited largely from Southeast and East Asia, and they enrol mostly in the fast-growing disciplines of the global economy—such as business studies, information technology and communication, and systems engineering.

The motivations of students wanting to invest in international education vary, but the desire to immigrate eventually has now been identified as one of the most important factors (Marginson, 2003). Data on the proportion of international students who go back to their countries of origin upon graduation are difficult to find, but most estimates suggest that fewer than half return home. Others seek and are granted either permanent residence or long-term working visas. According to Tremblay (2004), the proportion of Chinese and Indian doctoral students who intended to stay in the US after completion of their studies in 2001–2003 was over 80%. An indication of the potential and effective loss for selected countries of students who completed their doctoral studies in the US can be garnered from Table 2. In more longitudinal terms, Zhang and Li (2001) have shown the return rates of Chinese students after completion of studies in Australia and the United States during the period 1978–2001 to be 44.9% and 14.1% respectively.

Table 2. Potential and effective mobility of US doctoral graduates

	Percentage of students who intended to stay in US after studies	Percentage of students who had received a firm offer of work from a US employer
India	81.5	60.5
China	80.5	57.5
Nigeria	64.5	32.5
Argentina	61.5	50.0
Israel	52.5	43.5
Turkey	51.0	31.5
Chile	49.0	29.0
South Africa	30.0	28.0
Brazil	27.5	20.0
Source: OECD (2000) and Tremblay (2004).

These data suggest that emigration has become a major factor in the decision by students in developing countries to seek international education. In both commercial and public policy terms, the developed countries clearly recognise this fact. Facing a shortage of the highly skilled workers needed to sustain their own economic growth in knowledge-based economies, developed countries like Australia and Canada, which once strongly encouraged international students to return home—and were almost apologetic when they did not—now view international education as a major avenue for recruiting highly skilled migrants. Over the past decade, both Australia and Canada have developed policies and programmes that have had the effect of linking immigration policy inextricably to international education. To encourage their immigration, both countries now award additional “points” to international students who have completed their studies in Australian and Canadian universities, especially in fields with high-skilled labour demand. Many EU countries are considering similar policy options, and the US has rapidly increased the number of temporary visas granted to the graduates of its own universities. So, while they put in place all kinds of punitive measures to prevent unskilled migration, most developed countries appear keen to have international students convert student visas into permanent residence.

It is within this context that recent debates about brain drain have been conducted. Much of the recent research into brain drain focuses on the scale of skilled emigration from developing to developed countries; analysis of the relations between education, migration, and economic growth; and policy options for solving the problem of brain drain, or at least for working positively with its inevitability. It is difficult to calculate precisely the flow and level of education of emigrants from the developing countries. However, despite the lack of systematic data about skilled migration, most estimates suggest increasing levels of transnational mobility, with the most highly educated emigrating to the US and Europe. According to a study by the International Monetary Fund (Carrington & Detragiache, 1998), the annual rate of skilled emigration (defined as people with university degrees) from Africa over the past decade has been over 30%. During this period, sizable brain drain from Iran, Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan has also been reported. The level of brain drain from India and China to the OECD countries via international education has slowed over the past decade, but remains significant.

There has been much debate among development and migration economists about the impact of brain drain on economic growth. Various economic models have been developed to examine the relations among education, emigration, and national productivity. Since education is widely regarded as a major determinant of long-term economic growth, it is argued that the migration of people with high levels of human capital is highly detrimental to the countries from which they emigrate. The negative impact of brain drain on developing countries has been stressed in the so-called New Growth literature (e.g., Miyagiwa, 1991), which emphasises the cumulative effects of skilled migration on productivity. According to Wong and Yip (1999), brain drain does not only affect the growth rate of a developing country, but it also has a negative impact on infrastructure, education, and income distribution. They argue that if the main driver of an economy's growth is human-capital accumulation and intergenerational externality, then brain drain must necessarily hurt the growth rate of the economy. It must also have important income distribution and welfare implications, and “in addition to the static effects that have been analyzed in the existing literature, ‘brain drain’ affects adversely the intertemporal welfare of the non-migrants in the present and future generations” (Wong & Yip, 1999, p. 699).

In contrast, a great deal of recent research challenges this view, suggesting that brain drain may in fact be good for the developing economies. Mountford (1997) has, for example, argued that when emigration is temporary, brain drain may in fact increase average productivity and equality in the source economy even though average productivity is a positive function of past average levels of human capital in an economy. He has asserted furthermore that temporary emigration can be shown to increase permanently the average level of productivity of an economy. Another economic model of brain drain suggests that “optimal brain drain” can be shown to increase a developing country's average productivity, especially if workers return after gaining expertise and skills in a more advanced economy (Johnson & Regets, 1998). Research has also indicated that when skilled emigrants send part of their earnings back to their country of origin, the remittances have “GDP multiplier effects” that increase national income (Taylor, 1999).

Just as the issues relating to the economic impact of brain drain are hotly debated, so are the questions of how policy makers should address the problem. One option has been to recognise that nothing much can be done about the problem, and that, in the end, the principles of the global labour market will prevail. However, most developing countries have not accepted this view, and have attempted in various ways to reverse brain drain with a range of measures including restrictive policies aimed at delaying emigration through various taxation regimes. Various systems of incentives that encourage international students to return home, sometimes to guaranteed positions in their own areas of expertise, have been constructed. Another strategy involves bilateral and multilateral arrangements under which developed countries pledge not to recruit skilled people from the developing states. Other agreements require international students to work for a certain period of time in their home country before they can apply to emigrate. Another increasingly popular option involves the construction of diasporic networks that enable emigrants to make a contribution to economic and social development at home, no matter where they live. In this, the potential of the new information and communication technologies has been highlighted. Unfortunately, however, none of these strategies have yielded the outcomes desired by policy makers.

Issues of Economics and Culture

With all the confusion surrounding issues of how to deal with the problems of brain drain in the current period, it is important to recognise that the idea of brain drain has always been controversial. The term “brain drain” was coined in the 1960s to describe the frustration that the leaders of many newly independent countries felt about the loss of technical skills to Western countries. Many nationalist leaders considered it a neo-colonial phenomenon, insisting that their nation-building agendas were being thwarted by the emigration of their talented youth. In economic terms, the loss of productive skills was assumed to be a major cause of economic underdevelopment. Considerable stigma was therefore attached to those who left their country to seek their fortune abroad. They were often accused of being disloyal, and disinterested in the economic and social development of their own country.

While many of these sentiments clearly persist, analytically the populist discourse of brain drain remains unclear, due in part to the ways in which the idea of brain drain is used: in a highly emotive fashion, and as a generalised blanket term to describe a whole range of diverse processes. Not surprisingly, therefore, the nationalist and internationalist perspectives lead to diametrically opposed findings about the impact of brain drain on economic growth. To the internationalists, brain drain is a welfare-income-development maximising natural process, while to a nationalist it is a perverse process leading to loss of national income, welfare, and development, while enhancing patterns of global inequality. Within the literature, there is a notable failure to disaggregate the various different forms in which international mobility of people takes place, and only some of this mobility has negative outcomes. Outflow of highly skilled people is not bad, for example, if the skilled people come back to their home countries after acquiring skills or expertise, or if they remain attached to their home countries in some beneficial way. Nor is it bad when there are no specific opportunities for them to work at home in their area of expertise. It is therefore misleading to interpret all kinds of transnational flows of people in terms of a singular problem, under the general rubric of the term “brain drain”.

Instead, the issues of transnational migration of skilled workers should be regarded as multidimensional, affecting different countries and different skill areas differently. The Indian economists B. Ghosh and N. Ghosh have developed a typology of what they refer to as “brain migration” (1982). For them, brain outflow, brain export, brain drain, and brain exchange represent different modalities of migration of skilled people.

The movement of highly skilled people from developing to developed countries may be viewed as a form of brain export that lets the developing countries earn the foreign exchange that they need for their economic survival. According to recent estimates, the remittances that migrants send home are increasing exponentially. In 2000, some US$60 billion were remitted by diasporic communities through official channels and perhaps another $5 billion were remitted in various unreported ways. The financial inflow from emigrants to developing countries doubled between 1989 and 2000. While the level of foreign direct investments and overseas aid to developing countries dwindled during this period, the remittances from emigrants became an important source of income, amounting to almost 20% of the national income in some countries (The Economist, 2002).

According to Ghosh and Ghosh (1982), brain outflow refers to the emigration of underemployed or surplus labour with zero marginal productivity in the home country. Suboptimal utilisation, misallocation of resources, inadequate facilities, and limited prospects in the home country often contribute to this outflow. Brain outflow is therefore neither necessarily good nor bad; much depends on the particular circumstances, reasons for migration, and policy settings governing effective use of human resources in home countries. The loss of highly skilled labour is experienced more deeply, for example, in some smaller African countries than in larger countries like India and China, where there may already be a surplus of such skills. For example, a recent ILO report suggested that 40% of all highly educated Sierra Leoneans live abroad (The Economist, 2002), making a huge dent in the developmental capacity of that country. The same raw number of Indians emigrating would make no significant difference to India's national capacity at all.

What this brief analysis shows is that the idea of brain drain needs to be approached cautiously. Given the diversity of motivations, contexts, and circumstances, its capacity to explain the nature and causes of global inequality is at best limited. This much can be demonstrated by looking at the ways in which the major tenets of the dependency and world-systems theories of such neo-Marxist scholars as Frank (1980) and Wallerstein (1974) have been used over the years to explain the relations between brain drain and underdevelopment. In terms of Frank's dependency thesis, the idea of brain drain has been used to exemplify unequal power relationships of dependency between rich developed countries and poorer developing countries. Similarly, in terms of Wallerstein's world-systems theory, brain drain is interpreted as an outcome of the structure of world capitalism, which creates conditions that produce economic growth for some countries and underdevelopment for others through the application of different modes of labour control, state machineries, and distribution of political power. This is so because the capitalist world system is based on an international division of labour that determines the relationships among different regions as well as the types of labour conditions within each region.

Wallerstein proposes four different categories—core, semi-periphery, periphery, and external—into which all regions of the world can be placed. The categories describe each region's relative position within the world economy as well as its internal political and economic characteristics. The core countries benefit the most from the capitalist world economy, not least because of their control over international commerce and their ability to extract capital surpluses from trade for their own benefit. The periphery is controlled by other states, exports raw materials to the core, and relies on coercive labour practices. The semi-periphery countries are located between the two extremes, and are either core regions in decline or peripheries attempting to improve their relative position in the world economic system. It is argued that such a system encourages people in the periphery or semi-periphery who possess high skills or education to emigrate to the core, further strengthening the core's position within the world system. The world-systems theory is thus used to show brain drain to be a predictable structural consequence of world capitalism, resulting in the reproduction of underdevelopment and global inequalities.

Now, the main problem with this account of brain drain is that it pays a disproportionate amount of attention on the world economy as a system. It naturalises and reifies the world economy as a pre-given thing, disassociated from the actual cultural dynamics of emigration. It assumes that it is the developmental logic of capitalism that leads developed countries to develop policies that encourage emigration, and that it even determines the subjectivities of those who choose to move, without ever interrogating what mobile people are really up to. It privileges the economic over sociocultural and political processes, and gives scant attention to the discursive and material processes that lead people to make decisions affecting their lives. In this way, such neo-Marxist accounts lack an effective theory of agency with which to understand the cultural dynamics of transnational mobility.

Ultimately, both the dependency and world-systems theories posit a functional theory of capital accumulation that assumes that it is the logic of capitalism that somehow causes people, independently of their historical and social location, to become mobile. This account thus views culture not as an ever-changing product of human intentions and practices but as an expression of the deeper logic of global economic activity. It subordinates cultural dynamics to economic generalisations, and fails therefore to come to terms with people's “situatedness” in the world.

We cannot understand the contemporary phenomenon of skilled mobility without attending to the situatedness of people, which relates fundamentally to the issues of their social identities, and to the ways in which they are transformed through mobility (Clifford, 1997). The popular idea of brain drain appears to link, in an essentialist way, each person's identity to one and only one nation, to which individuals are expected to display loyalty. Whether this idea is sustainable in an era of globalisation is highly questionable, as is the notion that it is only possible to make a contribution to the development of a nation by being located within its physical boundaries. This is a fundamentally misguided way of looking at transnational mobility in the global era.

This much can be shown from our interviews, which reveal complex and contradictory dynamics of identity formation, cultural shifts, and changing senses of belonging. Largely illustrative in nature, these interviews show international students and graduates to be profoundly mindful of their diasporic condition, their changing sense of self, and their responsibilities to their country of origin. In what follows, I present four “narratives of belonging” to show the need to rethink fundamentally the idea of brain drain. I should point out, however, that I am not making any claim about these narratives being representative in some methodologically rigorous fashion. Rather, these narratives have been selected because they illustrate the divergent ways in which international students think about their changing sense of belonging, and about their commitment to their countries of origin. In this way, the narratives are designed to point to a range of issues which mobility and cultural globalisation are giving rise to—issues that underline the complexities associated with the idea of brain drain in an era of globalisation.

Narratives of (National) Belonging

When interviewed in 2004, Xuan was a fifth-year PhD student in a large Midwestern university in the US. He came from a north-east province of China on a scholarship to study for a doctoral degree in communications engineering. In the final stages of writing up his dissertation, he admitted to being conflicted about what he was likely to do upon the completion of his studies. On the one hand, he wanted to stay on in the US to pursue his research further by getting a job as a professor. After initially finding it difficult to settle in the US, he now felt comfortable living there, and believed that there were more opportunities in his field in America. “I did not like living in the US at first, but now cannot imagine going back. … Five years here have made so much difference to me,” he said. On the other hand, he faced a great deal of pressure from his family to return home and take care of them. His parents had reminded him repeatedly of his obligations to China (and also to them), and he had himself recognised the need to contribute to its national development.

However, when he made inquiries about job prospects in China in his field, he did not receive positive responses from universities but a great deal of interest from the multinational companies. Increasingly, he was inclined to self-justify his preference for remaining in the US, and perhaps even becoming an American. Just the same, he remained troubled about his obligation to make a contribution to China. For example, he maintained that: “Staying here now does not necessarily mean never wanting to return. The more Chinese professors in US universities, the more communication [there] will happen between China and US, indirectly making a contribution to the development of China.” At the same time, he felt, “It's not easy for people to change their identity into a global one.” He insisted that he would always be a Chinese no matter where he lived, although he said, “I am not sure what being a Chinese means to me anymore. Some of the newer students think I am not a Chinese any more, because I now look at life differently.” As for the issue of brain drain, Xuan did not believe the concept was useful anymore: “In modern times, people should not be made to live in a country where they are not comfortable. You can't help the nation if you don't like living there.”

If Xuan was conflicted over the decision to return to China, Ming, another Chinese student at the same university, seemed certain about the moral responsibility Chinese students abroad have to make a contribution to the development of China. Ming came to the US from a poor farming community in the Zhejiang province and, in 2003, was into his seventh year of studying for a doctoral degree in finance. He felt the need to “repay the sacrifices his parents and his nation” had made for him. Yet he viewed brain drain as “an unavoidable natural phenomenon,” and understood why many students did not wish to return home. When asked to elaborate, he insisted that even when the Chinese economy is providing so many opportunities, that is only one of the many factors affecting the decision to emigrate. He said: “Chinese students do not want to go back because life in China is still hard, and living and working environments are better here.” He also felt that many students still find China too restrictive. So, for example, “It's easy to travel to China from US if you work in US. But if one chooses to work in China, it would be very difficult to visit US.” He maintained, “Many people who go back really hate the corruption and pollution in China.” He added further that some students felt that, “They can make better contribution by doing something related to China in America, like an export or import business, or by providing Americans good advice about doing business in China. I am sure I could get a good job here doing that.”

Unlike Xuan, Ming did not experience any pressure from his family to return home. On the contrary, his parents wanted him to stay so that they too could eventually emigrate. However, Ming was determined to go back, and felt that, generally speaking, “It's impossible for a Chinese to become a global citizen. Chinese traditional culture shaped over 5,000 years is deeply rooted. American culture is diverse; people tend to be more global, more mobile. It's rare for a Chinese to have that feeling.” He felt that China is benefiting from the opportunities provided by the global economy, but would not compromise culturally and become “too Western”. Even after seven years in the US, he felt very patriotic: “Always, always, no matter [whether] China is poor or rich … have been watching and reading news from TV or Internet about China almost every day.” He wanted to travel across China, especially to the areas beyond his hometown. He added: “I did not get the chances to see enough about China, and don't have a deep understanding about it, thus my view about China is narrow-minded. I want to understand my own country better.”

If the narratives of belonging of those “imagining the nation” (Anderson, 1983) from abroad illustrate considerable complexity, then so do the narratives of those who have returned “home”. Zhang had twice been overseas to study in Australia, and when interviewed in 2003 was teaching business studies in a university in Wuhan. He was born in central China to reasonably wealthy parents who ran a construction business, and who were committed to sending their only child abroad to have an education. For them, international education was both a way to get education relevant to the running of their business and also a marker of status. The first time he returned from Australia with a Bachelor's degree in the mid-1990s, he was full of determination “to make a difference to China”, and was employed briefly in his father's company. He did not enjoy that experience, and was required to undertake tasks that he found to be beyond his capability. His parents sent him back to Australia to get a Master's degree in business administration. Used to the Australian way of life, and with a Chinese-Australian girlfriend whom he wished to marry, he was disinclined to go back to China and applied for permanent residence in Australia, and was not sure why this was denied. He considered staying in Australia as an undocumented migrant, but was lured back by his parents to help them in their business. Unhappy after only 10 months, he left central China for his a current job in Shanghai.

In personal terms, in 2003 Zhang regarded himself as “a failure”, for whom mobility had had disastrous consequences. He maintained: “I would like to live in Australia but the government [there] does not want me. … I have applied again.” Estranged from his parents and his community in China, he added: “I wanted to work in my parents’ company, but things are done so differently here. My courses were useless. They did not prepare me for that.” Zhang expressed deep suspicion of the discourses of global economy and citizenship. He suggested that the economy and work cultures were still very local, and that individuals could not choose their identity, which was “imposed” upon them. He added: “Global citizenship is something that politicians have made up. I will always be Chinese, even if I don't want to be.” Regarding the concept of brain drain, he felt that it was grossly exaggerated, and that there was no such problem in China: “I don't think China is suffering because some students don't come back.”

If Zhang had been a casualty of international mobility for education, then Ibrahim, a graduate of the University of Melbourne in Australia, is one of its successes. Having graduated in 1997, Ibrahim, when interviewed in 2002, worked out of three different locations—Melbourne, Singapore, and Chennai. He worked for a Singapore company specialising in agribusiness, with extensive interests in Australia and New Zealand. Articulate and transculturally confident, he was effectively a development manager who was helping the company expand its Australian operations. However, because he was from Chennai, the company had asked him to bring additional market intelligence back to Singapore for possible entry into the Indian market. Ibrahim was constantly travelling, and could not imagine a better job. It allowed him to remain connected with his family in India, his friends in Australia, and his colleagues in Singapore. When asked where his home was, his response was complex:

When I first moved to Australia I knew my home was India, but when I began working from Singapore and had no intention of working from India ever again, I was troubled by this question. But now two years later I am perfectly happy to say that it is a meaningless question, because why do you have to have a home, why can't it everywhere? ... Neither here nor there. Or I can always say I have three homes. After all, my lifestyle is the same in all three places. I am the same person, who is privileged enough to be able to enjoy what the world has to offer.

Ibrahim appeared to regard his transnationality, moreover, to have a moral purpose, arguing: “I feel I might be doing more for India from abroad than if I had stayed.” Ibrahim's response illustrates something of what Ulrich Beck (2001) called the “globalisation of biography”. Beck argued that if we are to understand the globalisation of biography, “[W]e must focus on the oppositions involved in stretching between different places. This requires, among other things, that mobility should be understood in a new way.” Mobility between two or more places, suggested Beck, is changing the social landscape of identities under the conditions of globalisation which are powered by the new information and communication technologies. “What is coming to the fore is the inner mobility of an individual's own life, for which coming and going, being both here and there across frontiers at the same time, has become the normal thing.” Ibrahim's biography captures something of this logic, but not entirely. He remains troubled by the question of where, in his transnational existence, his loyalties should ultimately lie, and what his particular responsibilities are to the country of his birth: India.

Student Mobility and the Deterritorialisation of Culture

What these narratives of belonging suggest is that the relationship between social identities and the nation-state, which is the basic precept upon which the idea of brain drain is based, has, under the conditions of globalisation, become highly problematic. The “turbulence” of mobility (Papastergiadis, 2000) has had a whole range of unpredictable consequences both for individuals and nation-states. The commitment of people to the development of their countries of origin has become dislodged, and can no longer be taken for granted. This has presented a major challenge to those still attached to the notion of brain drain. The narratives of belonging I have presented have drawn attention to its limitations. The analytical categories assumed in both development economics and dependency and world-system theories—and with which scholars have sought to understand the notion of brain drain—are thus shown to be based on a view of mobility that is no longer applicable to the actual lives people lead.

If we resist the temptation to theorise globalisation in an abstract manner, then globalisation does not merely refer to the construction of a global economic space but also to the restructuring and extension of networks of money, technologies, people, and ideas and their articulations with real spaces at different scales. The movement of people leads to the emergence of transnational diasporic networks that are temporally and socially particular, and involve socially constructed relations of power and meaning. To understand the cultural politics of nation-building in the global era, we can no longer ignore how social identities are linked to transnational communication circuits, which spread out across social and national boundaries, and enable people to think about being affiliated with more than one place at once. The assumption that there is a one-to-one relation between territoriality and citizenship can no longer be sustained. Movement of people cannot, moreover, be assumed to involve a zero-sum game, because nation-states are being reshaped by global processes and have never been complete homogeneous entities, and because the loss of expertise in one country does not necessarily mean its gain in another.

This much is clear enough from the interviews we have conducted with Indian and Chinese students and graduates from Australian and US universities. By and large, our interviewees expressed deep ambivalence about their social identities both in relation to their country of origin and to the “Western” ways of life in Australia and the US into which they have become partially assimilated. Their ambivalence is articulated partly in their patriotic sentiments, their determination to remain in touch with friends and family at home, and to make a contribution to their home country, and partly in their strong desire to continue to live and work in a developed country, assuming developed countries provide them with not only better economic prospects but also more opportunities to express their emerging sense of cosmopolitanism. Even those international students who go back to their countries of origin find themselves attracted to employment within the transnational corporate sector. Almost half of the 50 students we interviewed in China and India were working in transnational companies like American Express, Citibank, and General Motors, raising the obvious question of the extent to which their return under these circumstances also constituted a case of brain drain.

Recent theorists of globalisation of culture have used the notion of “deterritorialisation of culture” (Tomlinson, 2000) to suggest that the localities where we live our everyday lives have become imbricated in broader global relations. Néstor García Canclini (quoted in Tomlinson, 2000), for example, referred to “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation of culture to geographical and social territories”. Similarly, Tomlinson suggested a “weakening or dissolution of the connection between everyday lived culture and territorial location”. Tomlinson argued that not only transnational organisations and the popular media but also increased global mobility are deterritorialising forces that have the effect of reshaping both the material conditions of people's existence and their perspectives on the world. He insisted that this has led to “the gradual and constant alterations in the cognitive maps of people, in their loyalties and in their frames of social and cultural reference” (Tomlinson, 2000, p. 34). With deterritorialisation comes cultural hybridisation, a force that has had both negative and positive consequences: it has enabled people to express cultural diversity as dynamic and creative, but it has also led to the homogenisation of cultural practices and has contributed to some people becoming dislodged from their communities, and removed from their social obligations. Either way, Tomlinson argues that deterritorialisation has been a powerful transformative agency in an era in which borders and boundaries are quickly eroding.

Against this analysis, the concept of brain drain is highly problematic. In an age of globalisation, the key issue has become not where people are physically located but what contribution they are able to make to the social, cultural, and economic development of the countries with which they identify. Under the conditions of deterritorialisation, the international mobility of skilled people is both a consequence of and a necessary stimulus to sustain the processes of economic and cultural globalisation.

The increasingly globalised knowledge economy demands that there be circulation of knowledge workers and brokers (Cao, 1996). This is as important for the developed countries as it is for the developing economies. If this is so then it is suggested by a number of policy scholars such as Meyer and Brown (2003) that, for the developing countries to benefit from the knowledge economy, the physical location of people is immaterial, so long as the developing economies are able to draw upon their expertise, regardless of where they live. Meyer and Brown called this the “diaspora option”, underlining the need to create links through which skilled emigrants could still be effectively and productively connected to their country of origin. They argue:

A crucial advantage of the diaspora option is that it does not rely on a prior infrastructural massive investment, as it consists in capitalizing already existing resources. It is thus at hand for any country which is willing to make the social, political, organizational and technical effort to mobilize such a diaspora. (Meyer & Brown, 2003, p. 3)

Of course, in many ways the diaspora option is not new. Relationships between expatriate intellectuals and their countries of origin have often existed in the past. In recent years, many of these links have been formalised into such networks as Arab Scientists and Technologists Abroad (ASTA) and the Latin American Association of Scientists (ALAS). Many members of such networks prefer to speak not of brain drain but of brain circulation, underlining the importance they attach to the role of vibrant, virtual, and global networks of professionals in imagining and pursuing national development as is consistent with the imperatives of the global knowledge economy.

Important as these developments are, there is a range of problems associated with such networks. As Teferra (2004) has pointed out, brain circulation is still characterised by its sporadic, exceptional, and limited nature. Most of these networks have short life spans, and fail to become systematic, dense, and productive. Among those within the networks who do not get extensive opportunities to travel and live abroad, there remains a great deal of resentment towards those who do, and the attitude of emigrants towards their own country of origin often appears to those with fewer opportunities to be mobile as arrogant and patronising.

Beyond these social and technical problems, there is a more fundamental issue: that the space within which brain circulation takes place is not a neutral one, but is characterised by uneven distribution of opportunities and by asymmetrical flows of power. The notion of brain circulation appears to rest on an assumption that the new knowledge economy is potentially less exploitative of developing countries than the old economy. While it is true that the globally integrated knowledge economy requires the development of greater transnational collaborations, and mobility among skilled workers, it is still based on modes of capital ownership and production that are inherently unequal. The substitution of the concept of brain drain with brain circulation does not solve this problem. However, what it does demonstrate beyond doubt is that, under the conditions of globalisation and deterritorialisation, the notion of brain drain needs to be reconceptualised in more contemporary terms, because issues of global inequalities now present themselves in markedly different ways. They are no longer linked to the modernist conception of national development but to the inequalities inherent in transnational flows not only of capital, but also of people, information, and skills. These flows reshape the “spaces of identities” (Morley & Robins, 1995), and require new ways of thinking about relations between globally mobile students and workers and their social obligations to the nation-state.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the methodology used in this research project, funded by the Australian

Research Council, see Rizvi (2005).