Opportunity hunting as brain drain

It’s quite fascinating that in a world where new words and phrases are often coined to cleverly repackage old phenomenons, a phraseology popular in the 1960s is being brought back to describe a certain migration out of Donald Trump’s America.

One has to be cautious when one calls it ‘migration’, because one is not sure if it’s really so.

That is, if it’s a sustained trend of conscious escape or opportunity hunting. When Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo announced last week they were moving to the University of Zurich in Switzerland from MIT in the US, it was casually labelled as ‘brain drain’, although the economist couple had themselves not characterised the professional move as such.

An American news site reported that “one of the biggest risks of the White House’s war on academia and its slashing on scientific research funding has been brain drain—the situation where top scholars, spooked by the worsening climate, find working in other nations more attractive instead.”

It said Banerjee and Duflo were ‘decamping’ to Zurich. The site also quoted a source to claim the pair’s departure was connected with the White House’s attacks on academic freedom. It speculated: “The timing certainly is suggestive.”

MIT is among the top centres of learning in the US that the Trump administration has been pressuring to make institutional changes in exchange for preferential government funding.

Unlike many other institutions, MIT had spurned what is euphemistically called the ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education’ days before Banerjee and Duflo made their decision public.

Duflo had told the news site they did not wish to comment on their move especially when MIT was dealing with reaction to its refusal of the ‘compact’.

However, Duflo had co-signed an op-ed in Le Monde as early as March 2025 that had pretty much made her stance clear. The article had warned that academic and scientific freedoms were under unprecedented attack in the US and ‘ideological censorship’ was spreading.

Although the Trump administration had initially circulated the compact with nine top American universities including MIT, this week there has been news floating around that it is being extended to all academic institutions across the US.

Now, one will have to wait to see if this move is going to lead to an actual wave of ‘brain drain’.

The brain drain narrative in the US is in place, with a number of examples of disillusioned top academics being cited regularly by the media, but the reality of action remains to be tested.

Even if brain drain happens, it may happen over a period of time, not in an instant surge.

That is simply because other nations and other universities across the globe need to expand infrastructure, build resources, and, more importantly, create trust.

It’s easier said than done. If one assumes that the destination of those leaving the US is Europe, Asia or Australia, there is no guarantee that ideological regimes there may not bring similar pressures and obstacles. In fact, that nature of illiberalism is on the rise in Europe and other continents, too. Trump has allies and imitators everywhere.

In Banerjee and Duflo’s destination, Switzerland, the government and politics is currently dominated by the Swiss People’s Party, which is unabashedly far-right and Eurosceptic.

Its anti-immigrant rhetoric is loud and it commands 28 percent of the lower chamber of parliament. China, where cutting-edge scientific and skilled work happens, is often presented as an alternative to the US.

Many say China may eventually end up accommodating the best brains from across the world, like the US did during and after World War 2.

But there are political and cultural barriers for this to happen. China is run by a communist regime. Freedoms come filtered through many sieves of ideology.

To add to this, there is the impediment of language (against the default of English), culture and civilisation. Also, recall the country’s perception during the Covid pandemic.

It may take many generations for these barriers to be broken; by then, democratic America may have recovered. It may have seen another election and picked a president who may restore everything with a pen stroke.

This may happen as early as three years and a few months from now. Therefore, one needs to ask if all the talk of brain drain is just hype and propaganda.

Are some individual choices being made out as a trend? It’s difficult to assume that America will crumble soon. For that to happen, it may take longer than what the British empire did.

Interestingly, brain drain was used in the past to describe the movement of the skilled and educationally qualified from the ‘developing’ to the ‘developed’ world.

To escape what was known as a ‘third-world’ drabness. Like it was in India in the 1960s, where Nehruvian institutions of higher learning manufactured talent, but did not have an economy to accommodate them.

Those who left were actually a minority and mostly upper-caste. They could leave also because the US immigration policy became more liberal after 1965.

Then, too, there was a hype around the idea of talent leaving the nation after using public resources, although there was no anti-national virulence against those who departed.

To address the rhetoric of those times, economists like Jagdish Bhagwati even proposed a ‘brain drain tax’—without actually proposing how to impose and collect it.

By the end of the 1990s, India realised that brain drain was actually never a drain—it was a long-term investment. Migrations and globalisation had created complex outcomes.

In the early 2000s, as the IT industry grew, the phrase ‘brain drain’ was replaced by ‘body shopping’, signifying the changing economics of cheap skilled labour.

The phrase ‘brain drain’ had almost been forgotten. In recent discourse, it has been used to refer to something altogether different—negative cognitive performance as a result of the ubiquity of smartphones.

There is an attempt to restore the phrase’s old meaning. But an anachronism remains one even if it’s smartly twisted as ‘reverse brain drain’ or ‘brain gain’.

Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship

(Views are personal)

(sugatasriraju@gmail.com)