Diaspora Migrations: Brain Drain or Symbioses

Abstract

According to the Migration Policy Institute, between 2011 and 2015, 48% of newly arrived immigrants to the USA were college graduates (Batalova and Fix in Immigrants and the New Brain Drain: Ways to Leverage Rising Educational Attainment. Migration Policy Institute, 2017). Further, reports suggest that many of the recent immigrants are skilled and professional workers in highly valued fields such as medicine, higher education, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The emigration of skilled and professional workers from across the world, especially from developing countries, is a phenomenon known as “brain drain.” Africans are a growing part of this extraordinary phenomenon. In the USA, Africans were documented to be the most highly educated and accomplished immigrant group (Anderson in African Immigrant Population in the U.S. Steadily Climbs. Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, 2015). Since the 1990s, about 20,000 skilled and professional African workers leave to the industrialized Western world annually (International Organization for Migration, n.d.). Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Ghana are the top emigre countries of skilled and professional workers. African educators, researchers, governments, both in the continent and in the diaspora, have expressed great concerns over the brain drain phenomenon. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa declares that “the emigration of African professionals to the West is one of the greatest obstacles to Africa’s development” (“Brain Drain in Africa: Facts and Figures”, n.d.). For decades, there has been no shortage of scholarship, debates, and analysis of Africa’s brain drain phenomenon. Arthur (Invisible Sojourners: African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States. Praeger, Westport, CT, 2010) writes that the brain drain of Africa’s skilled and professional class has become the “epicenter of national and international discourse” (36). For the most part, the brain drain discourse has focused on the negative effects—the impoverishment of the continent due to the loss of human capital. Recently, the discourse is shifting toward recognizing its net gain. In this chapter, I examine the question: In today’s changing times, is African migration to the Western world a brain drain or a symbiosis? I examine the mutually beneficial relationship of the “brain drain” and “brain gain.” As a scholar and teacher educator for two and half decades in US academy, I will approach the chapter both from personal and professional perspectives. In particular, I will highlight Africans’ transnationalized lives in the diaspora. I will examine the opportunities and the mutual benefits to connect and maintain ties with the homeland and the sharing of resources. I will also examine the cultural values and spirits of “Sankofa” and “Ubuntu” that imbue Africans in the Diaspora to return home and give back to their ancestral communities that laid the foundation for their success. Finally, I will discuss the various ways and engagements Africans in the Diaspora use to revert the brain drain to brain gain.