Yemen’s brain drain: The other side of the crisis

IF you are like me, you have probably come across highly accomplished Yemeni professionals living and working in the Gulf and elsewhere. I have met them all over the world, from Jakarta and Singapore, to Riyadh and Dubai, to London and Cardiff, to Detroit, New York and San Francisco.
Among those immigrants I have met, some have maintained strong ties with their homeland, but most have lost meaningful contact with it, except for nostalgic feelings and youth reminiscences. Most have no intention of going back, except to visit. They cite security concerns, social restrictions and tribal traditions, but especially the difficult economic crisis that has gripped Yemen for nearly a decade, with no end that they could see.
There are varying estimates of the number of Yemenis living abroad. Before the recent crisis started in early 2011, their numbers had been estimated at about two million, over eight percent of the total population of Yemen. Most lived in the Gulf countries, the United States and Europe.
In addition, it was estimated that over six million Yemenis had settled and become citizens of other countries, especially Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and India, in addition to Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries.
By most reliable accounts, the numbers of Yemenis living or settling abroad have significantly increased since the 2011 crisis.
Developing countries have long complained about the “brain drain,” whereby the migration of their best students, doctors, nurses, professors, engineers, scientists, and other highly skilled workers to rich countries consistently robs the human capital and fiscal resources of poor countries, from which those migrants typically came, for the benefit of richer countries.
Those concerns led in the past to calls for restricting the flow of highly skilled workers from poor to rich countries. There were demands that developed countries stop recruiting doctors, for example, from developing countries. Some of the parent countries of immigrants sought to legally restrict the emigration of their skilled workers. The Nobel Prize winning economist Jagdish Bhagwati, himself an immigrant from India living in the United States, wrote some of the pioneering work on this issue about 40 years ago.
However, calls for imposing legal restrictions on emigration have largely failed, because the decision to emigrate is largely a personal one. Attempts to restrict it by law could run counter to human rights principles that make it unacceptable to deny citizens the right to travel and emigrate to other countries.
As such, for decades, developing countries have stood helplessly by, while their best and brightest left their parent countries to the West.
To mitigate the negative impact of emigration, some countries, including Yemen, adopted policies to encourage their emigrants to maintain meaningful contacts with their homelands. Emigrants were encouraged to invest and act as a bridge for the benefit of both their old and adopted countries. Those policies have succeeded where there were profitable investment and trade opportunities to be had, and where the investment climate was hospitable, but not everywhere.
However, over the past few years, Yemen has adopted another, parallel policy, which was launched under the Ali Abdullah Saleh regime, but has continued under the current transitional government. The policy has sought to encourage Yemeni citizens to emigrate and work abroad. It has asked Yemen’s friends and neighbors “to absorb some of its manpower,” with the hope of reducing unemployment and poverty, and augment foreign reserves, through increased workers’ remittances.
While these are noble goals, the net effects of the policy may be negative. First, Yemen, with its very limited resources, spends billions on education from elementary school to university. If its best qualified graduates then emigrate, Yemen would in effect be subsidizing other countries instead of benefiting its own economy.
By encouraging emigration, Yemen would be gradually deprived of the fruits of its training and educational systems, while there are no guarantees that those emigrants would ever return. Their remittances, while important initially, would gradually decline as they settle in their host countries. Nor is it certain that other benefits would accrue in the near future from their migration to greener pastures.
While economists have long argued the pros and cons of brain drain and they differ on the exact costs and benefits of emigration from poor to rich countries, there are a few facts that are quite clear.
While it is clear that there are significant benefits of migration to the emigrants themselves and their immediate families, through large gains in income and skills. In addition, while their remittances to their home countries are significant, those funds typically decline as they settle in their host countries and start raising families.
As for the assumption that emigrants would act as a bridge between their old and new countries, there is little empirical evidence to support the idea that new immigrants typically engage in trade or foreign direct investment for the benefit of their homelands, as is often claimed. In a place like Yemen, it is less likely due to the concerns I mentioned earlier about its business climate.
While there are clear benefits if the migrants return to their homeland, it is not clear how many Yemeni emigrants would actually return in the foreseeable future. In any case, such intangible benefits, if they ever materialize, have to be weighed against the certain high fiscal cost of encouraging emigration. Taking all those factors into account should then weigh against encouraging emigration.

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