Thousands of educated workers leave their home countries every day for more developed and stable economies. In turn, these emigrants deplete their homelands of resources—their talent and intellect, as well as their purchasing power and ingenuity. This phenomenon is known as “brain drain.” But there’s another pattern beneath these well-studied dynamics.
Although much attention has been paid to emigrants’ skillsets, less focus has been devoted to their values. From studying over two decades of migration trends in 149 countries, I discover that many people who choose to depart their countries of origin, whether for economic or educational opportunities abroad, are likely to hold more liberal democratic values than those who remain. When they depart, they passively (although not necessarily deliberately) take their political values, preferences, and votes with them. Emigration thus depletes a country not only of its economic capital but also of its political capital: a “democratic drain.”
Put another way, democratic values are an independent and powerful predictor of people’s desire to emigrate. Some democratically inclined emigrants may be catalyzed to depart by geopolitical crises, such as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or democratic erosion, such as the reelection of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in April of that year. Their departure may entail significant professional costs. But many leave their homelands not only or even principally because they are concerned about authoritarian tendencies but to pursue economic opportunities abroad.
Social scientists have paid less attention to the phenomenon of democratic drain because most migrants keep their politics hidden, and their decisions to depart are uncoordinated. When researchers query immigrants retrospectively about their motives, respondents often cite the family members they rejoined or the career they ultimately pursued. Unless they are refugees or asylum seekers, they tend to omit their latent discontent with the status of the political institutions in their countries of origin. But surveying prospective migrants before they leave and directly inquiring about their political preferences and viewpoints in the context of other factors that may drive their departure brought out motives related to democratic values.
People who want to migrate out of nondemocratic states tend to be disproportionately young, educated, and from middle‑income households, and to have less authoritarian personalities than their compatriots. When offered a discrete choice between equally prosperous destination countries with different governments, these prospective migrants strongly prefer places that feature democratic institutions. Although such emigrants may depart at any time, people with democratic proclivities are more likely to leave after authoritarian parties or rulers win elections, particularly following an earlier period of democratic progress.
Just as brain drain leaves countries poorer and less productive, democratic drain enables a turn toward authoritarianism. Any time a disproportionate number of people with liberal and democratic values leave a society, a principal catalyst for democratic development and barrier to democratic backsliding is removed. There might be a silver lining if the emigration of democratically minded people reinforced flagging support for democracy in destination countries. But extensive scholarly evidence suggests that the arrival of migrants—no matter their values—is sparking nativist backlash and democratic backsliding across the United States and Europe.
Much like brain drain, democratic drain isn’t a phenomenon that can or even should be halted. But its discovery should mobilize liberal states to offset its deleterious effects. Democracy advocates should invest in local pro-democracy movements and their leaders in fragile states and persuade skeptics that immigrants are in the immediate national interest of destination states. Efforts to further restrict human mobility and its manifold benefits would be throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
UNDER PRESSURE
Limited research has studied the effect of emigration by people dissatisfied with their country’s politics. But some scholars have observed that it may act as a pressure-release valve, reducing the likelihood of uprisings and revolutions for regime change under authoritarian rulers. The political sociologist Jack Goldstone, for instance, wrote in 2002 that several kinds of demographic change increase the likelihood of uprisings and revolutions. These include a rapidly growing labor force in weak economies, particularly of educated young people vying for scarce elite positions, and unequal population growth between ethnic groups caused by differences in fertility rates or immigration dynamics. In the late twentieth century, emigration dampened dissent under authoritarian regimes in the island nations of the Pacific, in Egypt, and in the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos. But these observations were made after the fact and in the context of individual countries’ unique histories, rather than to discern a global phenomenon that links human mobility and political values.
The scale of annual flows from authoritarian-leaning countries to democratic countries worldwide is immense. From 2015 to 2019, the most recent period for which complete global data is available, 45 million people moved to a country that was substantially more democratic than their country of origin—more than two in every five global migrants. Since 1990, the average number of people who made such a move is 37 million every five years. Refugees and asylum seekers make up a small share of these annual flows, but most are voluntary migrants—people who are not forced to leave.
Emigration depletes countries of economic and political capital.
The phenomenon of democratic drain likely limited democracy’s consolidation in places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Georgia, Mexico, Peru, Serbia, and Tunisia. It also likely enabled backsliding in established democracies such as Brazil, Bulgaria, Hungary, India, Israel, Poland, and Turkey. But with the exceptions of the political sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Barrington Moore, who studied the importance of the democratically inclined middle classes half a century ago, a focus on the role of nonelite individual actors is largely absent from the canon of explanations for democratic political development in these settings.
Examining individual attitudes and preferences paints a much fuller picture of the emigrant politics that affects global political development. In my study, I surveyed prospective migrants and their compatriots across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and drew on data from the Gallup World Poll across 149 countries to identify the relationship between prospective migrants and democratic worldviews—research that consulted nearly a million people worldwide over 20 years. I explored the mechanics of this relationship in interviews with about 50 current pro-democracy activists, party leaders, and journalists from Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, as well as another 50 people contemplating whether to move away from countries such as Hungary and Serbia to reunite with family, advance their careers, or pursue greater freedom.
I asked respondents if they planned to emigrate in the next year, where they hoped to go, and whether they had made plans such as booking flights, applying for visas, soliciting employment, and searching for lodging. I then measured the extent to which they held democratic values by asking about their support for minority rights, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and free elections. In some cases, I measured the extent to which people were dissatisfied with the quality of democratic institutions that ensure election integrity, protect a free press, and guard against corruption and abuses of power. In the Middle East, I used experiments to discern the appeal of destination states with strong democratic institutions, in the context of other pull factors, and the influence of pro-democracy activists in the diaspora.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
In general, I found that democratically inclined emigrants tend to depart under rather mundane circumstances—that is, not in the wake of a geopolitical crisis or political persecution. People may leave in response to a career opportunity or a chance to reunite with family members abroad. They may pursue a better or more specialized education, an investment opportunity, a job, a higher income, or simply the greater economic stability provided by countries with higher standards of living, greater labor protections, and welfare programs. According to my research, prospective migrants from democratically fragile or authoritarian states happened to hold more liberal and democratic political values relative to their compatriots—creating a global sorting effect. Democratic drain, therefore, is principally a residual effect of normal migration flows.
Most wealthy economies today design their immigration policies to facilitate the admission of highly skilled migrants, especially scientists, engineers, doctors, nurses, and software developers. Beginning in 2005, European states modified their labor visa standards to almost exclusively admit those with marketable skills. Concurrently, countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom pursued policies that favor applicants who possess technical skills, higher education credentials, and language fluency. Because these emigrants happen to hold more liberal democratic values than the compatriots they leave behind, these admissions policies simultaneously limit the global mobility of lower-skilled workers and inadvertently deplete democratic political capital in countries of origin.
To be sure, some voluntary emigrants are motivated principally by politics. These emigrants are not forced to depart in order to escape persecution or violence, but their governments may have pursued policies that weaken democratic institutions, circumvent checks and balances, or cease to protect people’s rights and freedoms. These democratically inclined emigrants ultimately choose to leave in search of political environments that are more likely to accommodate their values and preferences, or at least protect their freedom to live uninhibited by the authoritarian regimes they flee. Using polling data before and after national elections across 125 countries, I find that the election of authoritarian-leaning candidates and parties drives interest in emigrating among people dissatisfied with the state of local democratic institutions.
Democratically inclined emigrants should not be blamed either for their decision to depart or for the democratic backsliding their departure may facilitate. Decisions to leave one’s country of origin are deeply personal and often apolitical. When those choices are motivated by political developments, they are often pressured by state actions that discomfort those who might otherwise resist authoritarian power grabs and the suppression of rights. Democratic drain is thus a byproduct of voluntary migration flows but otherwise attributable to the actions of authoritarian-leaning governments.
DEMOCRATIC GAIN?
In the last decade, a widespread acknowledgment of brain drain has been complicated by social scientists’ observations of a potentially offsetting countertrend: “brain gain.” This phenomenon refers to the benefits that countries of origin enjoy when successful emigrants remit large sums of financial and intellectual capital to their friends and family back home. Financial remittances now make up over 20 percent of the national economy in countries such as Armenia, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Moldova, Nepal, and Samoa. In Tajikistan, such contributions make up a remarkable 51 percent of GDP. Less measurable, brain gain also takes place when migrant business owners outsource labor to their homelands or when business ideas and innovation are shared with family and childhood friends to implement at home.
Accordingly, an analogous “democratic gain” could take place after emigration. It is true that some emigrants seek to sustain their political engagement or even more actively reinsert themselves into homeland debates with their newfound freedom abroad. Diaspora activists originally from Sri Lanka, the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, and the Balkans, for example, have influenced elections, wars, and other political events in their home countries. Elite emigration has been found to invigorate India’s democracy by opening up space for historically disadvantaged groups to participate. In theory, foreign-educated individuals can promote democracy in their home country after being educated in democratic destination states. By modeling institutional integrity and mitigating inequality with remittances, migration could be a counterbalance to ethnic strife in countries of origin and reduce homeland corruption. Social scientists have also found that hermit autocracies endure longer than those that permit exposure to international influences.
However, the influence of diaspora activists hailing from authoritarian states has not been especially democratic, as migrants frequently support one warring faction over another. For example, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and the Kosovo Liberation Army—both of which benefited from substantial foreign donations and support in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s—were engaged in bloody battles of ethnic conflict. Such examples demonstrate how prospects for democratic gain require a country of origin that is receptive to the liberal democratic ideas and political capital that expatriates may seek to remit.
A number of democratically inclined emigrants have returned to their homelands to hold government office, but these were not people who advocated for liberal reforms from abroad. For example, in 2010, Mohamed Nur returned to Somalia from London to serve as mayor of Mogadishu, but he was appointed by unelected officials. Given the amount of consultation, deliberation, and organization required to build and sustain successful democracies, examples of democratization from abroad are therefore rare. My extensive interviews with pro-democracy advocates in the diaspora revealed that emigrants are typically consumed by the adjustments they must make to resettle in destination countries. Once abroad, many emigrants have limited capacity for activism. Voting rates among diaspora communities are generally very low. The majority of those who resettle for extended periods never repatriate. Moreover, many governments slander departed democratic leaders as treasonous, debilitating their influence back home. Therefore, any potential democratic gain is minimal at best and not enough to offset democratic drain.
STRONGER TOGETHER
Extensive evidence suggests that immigrants’ arrival is fueling the rise of authoritarian-leaning populists in destination states, too. In other words, the arrival of even relatively liberal and democratic foreigners does not compensate for the nativism and nationalism their presence triggers. Since 2010, populists have gained power in established democracies in the United States and Europe by exploiting citizens’ concerns about immigrants and a nostalgic desire to return to a previous era before globalization transformed economies and national demographics.
It is thus possible that human mobility—in so many ways an expression of human freedom and spur of human development—simultaneously contributes to the suppression of freedom and development in both sending and receiving states. This paradoxical possibility reinforces the need to persuade voters in destination countries to accept newcomers and recognize the ways in which they contribute to the achievement of national interests. More important, the democratic drain phenomenon places two of democracy’s most important national interests in ostensible conflict with one another: its interest in seeding and supporting liberal institutions abroad and in strengthening the national population and economy at home.
The policy implications of democratic drain are vexing. Rather than a problem to be solved, democratic drain should be interpreted as a negative repercussion of a global boon. Setting aside nativist backlash in countries of arrival, the emerging challenge is to identify policies that might mitigate authoritarian politics in countries of origin that democratic drain enables.
Democracies get more democrats, while authoritarianism grows stronger.
Currently, pro-democracy organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union invite activists to democracy training, education, and leadership programs that they organize in Washington, London, and Brussels. These organizations would do better by investing resources in programs that can be executed on the ground inside the partly free societies they wish to influence. They should also select resident candidates who demonstrate a clear commitment to remain in their country of origin, and then return these prospective leaders to their activism, thereby building a global mentorship network that can support future democratic activists at risk of emigration.
This model was pursued to a limited extent by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which relied on “foreign service nationals”—that is, foreign citizens employed by the U.S. government—to promote democratic governance and human rights in their countries of origin. In the same spirit, the U.S. Fulbright program requires scholars to return to their country of origin at the conclusion of their fellowship for at least two years. Similarly, governments can financially incentivize civil society organizations that receive funding to stay in countries of origin when they might be tempted to relocate.
But perhaps the bigger problem is the world’s habit of treating the pursuit of democratic development as atomized projects of specific nations. Anne Applebaum, a journalist and scholar of democracy and autocracy, has noted that although pro-democracy movements around the world act independently, autocratic leaders in countries such as China, Iran, and Russia tacitly and explicitly coordinate because of a clear understanding of their common interests. As a counterbalance, she proposes “Democrats United,” an international coalition of pro-democracy activists, including the diasporas of autocratic countries, to coordinate efforts on anticorruption, antidisinformation, and other common challenges for democratic advocates everywhere.
Any such effort would do well to focus on the liminal states on the cusp of democratic deconsolidation or where democratization is within reach but tenuous or fragile. Where emigrants are departing in large numbers, these are the states most at risk. Migration concentrates the world’s most intrepid, highly skilled, entrepreneurial people in the top economies. And it concentrates people with liberal democratic values in the world’s most stable liberal democracies. Rich countries get richer and democratic countries get more democrats, while authoritarianism grows stronger. That is, unless countries can work together to plug the democratic drain.
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