The US Brain Drain and the World: Lose-Win Will Be a Net Loss
There have recently been increasing reports about the migration of intellectuals out of the United States, along with a parallel decrease in foreign scholars moving to the US. In the former category are three Yale professors -- Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley -- who published a joint video on the op-ed page of The New York Times last month titled: "We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S." They are all moving permanently to the University of Toronto, where I have been a visiting professor for the past two years.
Indeed, my reasons for leaving the University of Florida (UF) in 2023 included the Yale trio's stated concerns about the scary trends in the US, which I had observed during the Florida Republican government's anti-intellectual dress rehearsal in the 2022-23 period (and which have only become worse since my decampment). I explained my full set of reasons in some detail here and here, shortly after I left not just the University of Florida (UF) but also that state and the country where I had lived for my entire life. I have some further thoughts.
The second of my 2023 columns, "Fighting the Good Fight versus Knowing When to Move On," was devoted in substantial part to the potential criticism that one Times reader leveled against the Shore/Snyder/Stanley decision to leave:
What Profs. Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley say is undeniably true: The United States is rapidly descending into fascism.
Why, then, are they leaving the country? Why aren’t they staying and resisting along with the millions of people who are marching on the streets and refusing to submit?
Why aren’t they staying here in solidarity with those who have been unjustly imprisoned and deported, those who have lost their jobs and those who are at risk of losing health care and basic services? Do they think that appearing in a video from The New York Times is sufficient?
These professors have the ability to seamlessly relocate to another country. For all but the most privileged Americans, that is impossible.
It is incumbent on all Americans to stay and resist fascism in any way they can. Fleeing to another country and commenting from afar is not the solution.
So apparently the people in Europe in the 1930's who saw horrible things on the horizon and were the lucky ones who got out alive were merely taking the lazy path by "commenting from afar" and thus were "not the solution"? Professor Stanley has said in interviews both with US and Canadian media that he has children who are Jewish and Black, and he wants them to grow up in a safe place -- which the US no longer is. I have no idea whether Professor Shore and Stanley (who are married) have any young kids, but I am certain that I have none. So are people like me arrogantly exercising our privilege in some kind of blameworthy way? If so, go ahead and call me names, but it is the height of arrogance for someone to judge any of them/us for not "staying here in solidarity."
To stay or to leave one's country is an intensely personal, hugely complicated, circumstances-driven decision. Moreover, who is to say whether any of us might be able to do more from abroad than at home? Trolling by random Times readers notwithstanding, there are no universal answers to such questions when the world is facing a wave of fascism.
My main focus today, however, is not on the ethics of becoming an émigré (the first definition of which on dictionary.com is "an emigrant, especially a person who flees from their native land because of political conditions"). The fact is that there are already growing numbers of scholars leaving the US while many from abroad are newly disinclined to go there. The broader question that I will discuss here is what this net exodus will do to universities in the US and abroad.
There has been an increasing stream of coverage of this US brain drain in various media outlets over the past few months, one good example being a helpful 9-minute explainer this morning on the British YouTube channel TLDR: "Is America At Risk of 'Brain Drain'?" For readers who are interested, that video contains a number of links to other outlets' discussions of this topic. In my "Fighting the Good Fight ..." column, I emphasized that by 2023 there was already evidence of a brain drain from Florida to other states. And because Florida's anti-university moves were (as I put it above) a dress rehearsal for what even pre-Trump Republicans have always wanted to do to higher education, the grand opening of the nationwide shit-show simply increased the numbers of people involved and all but eliminated any potential domestic safe zones.
At this point, there are no good data regarding the overall numbers of people affected, but some of what is available (such as clicks on academic job sights originating in various countries) make it fairly clear that people like the Yale trio and me are not mere anecdotes. Universities (and similar institutions) in the US truly will almost surely see a large net loss of people whom a well-run country would not want to lose. How badly will that hurt the universities and thus the country?
Maybe not as badly as one might imagine, because there are plenty of highly regarded scholars who do not care whether (as Professor Stanley has acerbically put it) Columbia's immediate capitulation to the Trumpists means that it is no longer a university at all but rather a bunch of buildings and a name. Why would they not care? Because Columbia's name is still a name. Many people stay at prestigious places because their self-definition is fed by being at prestigious places, and even though the US's top institutions will surely drop in global rankings, even a fully degraded set of American universities with no academic freedom will still be universities in form (offering classes and degrees, just not very good ones) and will have rankings that designate which of them are among the best in the country. That will surely be enough to keep some truly good scholars in the US -- truly good in their fields, though not in their priorities.
Moreover, some American scholars who have not been able to get jobs in the US and have thus found jobs in the UK and elsewhere might now take the opportunity to grab recently-vacated jobs at Yale and elsewhere back home. The net harm to the US will therefore not be as big as it could have been, but even the most basic theory of economic competition says that an institution that can no longer hire and retain the best talent will not be as good as one that is able to do so.
What about the foreign universities? I have been saying for months that foreign universities should do what in fact many of them are now doing, which is aggressively advertise themselves as The Place to Be, drawing scholars and students who are now turned off by the US, and thus raising their quality (and rankings). Again, however, the question is whether this will add up to a large enough transformation to matter.
One question is whether the non-US universities that are already considered peer institutions to the best in the US -- Cambridge, Oxford, Toronto, ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, Peking, and so on -- will be able to capitalize on their suddenly improved competitive advantage. Toronto snagged those Yale professors by offering them positions at a newly endowed institute within the university, which is great for U of T (and Canada), but it seems unlikely that anything like this can be done at scale. How much can they absorb?
After the US election last Fall, I wrote a Verdict column in response to the wave of interest from people (not just professors, but everyone) who were thinking about leaving the country. My sobering point there was that it is impossible to imagine large-scale migrations, not only because of the difficulties of meeting legal requirements for entry into other countries but simply because no country could possibly absorb more than a small number of new entrants. For example, even if it were still possible to find a relatively prosperous country that was not experiencing a housing crisis, the "natural" housing vacancy rate would generally be in the low single digits, because having larger numbers of residences built and maintained but sitting empty would be a huge waste of economic resources. Growth through immigration is possible, but not when it is large and sudden.
With a much smaller number of people in the pool of potentially mobile scholars, is the problem more manageable? On the housing front, even those smaller numbers are still a problem everywhere, because all of these destinations are in fact in the midst of housing crises. As happy as I am to be in Toronto, and even though I am not a "burden on the state," the fact is that I am a marginal economic burden on the city, province, and country simply because I am living in an apartment that someone else could have rented. It is even worse in Vancouver, which means that its top-tier University of British Columbia similarly faces stark realities even as it tries to decide how many American scholars it can scoop up. And the situations in the cities of Cambridge and Oxford (and certainly in London) are even worse.
Beyond that, there are scale and timing problems at the institutional level. Imagine that, say, the University of Edinburgh would be able to lure a thousand new professors in various fields, all drawn from the likes of Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, Berkeley, and Michigan. Would it try to do it? Even if the answer is yes (which I highly doubt), they could not do so as quickly as those people might want to relocate.
Think about how things would look if the situation were reversed. Harvard and its peers have long been pressured to expand enrollments and thus faculty hiring rather than continue to sit on their endowments, but the universities have refused. Would they change their attitudes if there were a sudden surge of non-US scholars and students pounding on the door? Harvard has been sitting at about 7000 undergrads and 14,000 grad students for decades. Maybe a cataclysm like the current one would break that inertia, but there are reasons to think not. It seems likely that most universities elsewhere will have similar attitudes.
Even so, support from governments can make an important difference, and the TLDR video linked above notes that governments in France and elsewhere have begun to throw some money at their university systems, allowing them to expand and thus absorb the windfall to Europe and elsewhere that Trump has caused. Perhaps even more importantly, those countries are creating and expanding immigration paths that have been far too tight to allow even a small number of faculty relocations to happen.
The second part of this column's headline is "Lose-Win Will Be a Net Loss." By that I meant that the US will definitely lose because of the new brain drain, that other countries will win, but the net change will be a loss for the world as a whole. Why? The theory of international trade makes clear that autarky (that is, isolation) prevents resources from going to their best uses. National incomes do not go to zero, but they go down as a whole. When looking at international trade in brains, the same thing is true. Preventing people and institutions from finding their best pairings harms us all, even if some subset of people might be helped.
In addition (and again drawing from that TLDR video), some current professors who will want to leave the US but find themselves unable to do so will -- unlike the prestige junkies described above -- decide that being a professor is no longer acceptable in the face of the Trumpist onslaught. Those people will also not see their incomes go to zero, because they will find their next-best jobs, but next-best is not best, either for the scholars or for the country.
The completely unsurprising bottom line: Attacking national assets is harmful to the nation (and the world), and attacking one of the US's most valuable assets is hugely destructive. Only madmen would think otherwise.
- Neil H. Buchanan