The cost of Bangladesh’s intellectual exodus

Each year, thousands of Bangladesh's brightest leave for Canada, the US, the EU or Australia, seeking better pay, security, and respect. Once, migration was a survival strategy; now the departure of skilled workers reveals a contradiction: what sustained the economy is draining its future. Talent, in countries like Bangladesh, is often celebrated as an opportunity to go abroad, but behind the success stories is a stark loss of human capital that weakens health systems, slows innovation, and undermines self-reliance. Brain drain is not just economic; it is a political question of development justice.

Migration is often framed as personal choice, but those "choices" are shaped by the rich countries. Facing ageing populations and labour gaps, states in the Global North design policies to attract skilled workers from places like Bangladesh.

Bangladesh's young, educated, digitally savvy population has become a recruitment target. As demand for healthcare staff, engineers, and tech workers grows, wealthy nations intensify efforts to draw the talented from the Global South. After Covid, many European states eased entry for foreign medical staff; Canada recruits nurses and IT experts from South Asia. Meanwhile, prospects at home are limited: rural doctors are underpaid, researchers lack funding, and entrepreneurs face heavy bureaucracy. Migration becomes less a free choice than a rational escape from structural stagnation.

This raises ethical questions: is it fair for rich countries to benefit from doctors trained with Bangladesh's public funds? Should their labour shortages be solved at the expense of the Global South's development?

Today's talent extraction echoes older dependency. Where colonialism drained raw materials, current migration channels siphon intellectual capital. Bangladesh's English-speaking, globally trained middle class is absorbed into richer markets, deepening inequality under the banner of "mobility." The issue is not people's right to leave, but whether global rules can make talent flows mutual and developmental, rather than one-sided and extractive.

When skilled graduates leave Bangladesh, the primary loss is economic. Doctors and engineers trained at public expense become a subsidy from poor taxpayers to rich countries when they settle abroad. A doctor educated in Dhaka but practising in London is a public investment serving another state.

The second loss is institutional. Health systems, universities, and the civil service steadily lose talent. Hospitals and rural clinics face shortages; universities lose potential teachers and researchers; capable officials look overseas instead of building careers at home. This erodes state capacity, weakens policy-making, and hampers basic services.

The health sector shows this most sharply. Bangladesh has too few doctors and nurses. Patients at home endure long waits and overworked staff, while publicly trained doctors fill foreign vacancies. The pattern repeats in higher education and the technological sector. Losing skilled workers deepens a knowledge gap, increases reliance on foreign expertise and technology, and weakens self-reliance as the country seeks a knowledge-based economy.

Remittances have long served as a political safety valve in Bangladesh's economy. In fiscal year 2024, they brought in about $23.9 billion, easing deficits and sustaining consumption. This apparent success masks an imbalance. Most remittances come from low- and semi-skilled workers in Gulf countries, not from the skilled professionals who migrate to the West.

These funds largely cover household expenses rather than productive investment, and they seldom generate technology transfer, research partnerships, or industrial development. Policymakers praise remittance inflows but ignore the forgone tax revenue, innovation, and institutional leadership that emigrating professionals might have provided. The myth of a "remittance dividend" conceals a long-term structural deficit in human capital.

The goal is not to stop migration, but to turn "brain drain" into "brain circulation"—a two-way flow where knowledge, skills, and resources move between Bangladeshi migrants and their homeland. Bangladesh can move in this direction by (i) creating return incentives such as research grants, startup funding, and faculty exchange or visiting scholar programmes; (ii) strengthening ties with the diaspora to support mentorship, technology transfer, collaborative research, and investment networks; (iii) negotiating fair migration agreements with destination countries that include training partnerships, recognition, and reintegration support; (iv) investing in domestic research and innovation ecosystems so that young professionals see credible futures at home, not only abroad.

Countries like South Korea, China and Taiwan once saw large outflows of talent but reversed them by aligning education, industrial policy, and innovation incentives. Bangladesh has the talent to do the same if it creates compelling reasons for its citizens to stay, return, and build. Yet this is not a one-country issue; it is a global one. Today's system allows the Global North to relieve its labour shortages with professionals trained at the expense of the Global South—a quiet transfer of public investment from poorer states to richer ones, and a deepening capacity gap.

The real challenge is not whether people will move—they will—but whether that movement can be made fair? If talent truly has no borders, then responsibility for nurturing and sharing it should not have borders either.

Dr Md Abdul Latif is additional director at Bangladesh Institute of Governance and Management (BIGM). He can be reached at abdul.latif@bigm.edu.bd.

Shirin Sultana is research associate at BIGM.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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