Every year, Southeast Asians in the millions leave their home countries in search of a better life abroad. Many end up in urban centers throughout the region. Others aim for high-income economies around the world. Within Southeast Asia, 6.5 million, or 96 percent of the region’s total number of migrant workers, head to Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, the World Bank notes. Remittances, which reached US$62 billion in 2015 according to regional central banks, account for 10 percent of GDP in the Philippines, 7 percent in Vietnam, and 5 percent in Myanmar.
Highly skilled workers in Southeast Asia are also pursuing better opportunities outside their national borders. Recent years have seen a surge in Southeast Asians with university degrees departing for work in developed countries, the Asian Development Bank reports. Of the 2.8 million white-collar workers leaving the region each year, more than half come from the Philippines. Nearly 10 percent of all highly educated Filipinos, Singaporeans, and Vietnamese now work in OECD countries.
However, the pull factor of higher pay and better professional prospects is only one reason for the brain drain that many countries in Southeast Asia are witnessing. In Malaysia, as our first Spotlight article by AFP journalists Martin Abbugao and Sam Reeves elaborates, racially divisive politics is a strong push factor that has resulted in over one million Malaysians leaving the country since independence. While competing for the votes of the majority Malays, politicians seem happy to leave the rest on the margins, so better-educated citizens of Chinese and Indian descent are voting with their feet in response.
With the brain drain phenomenon intimately linked to university education, we selected a second Spotlight article that looks at international academic mobility in ASEAN. A recently published British Council report on the topic, author Yojana Sharma notes, highlights policies that promote internationalization in higher education in ASEAN and efforts to make recognition of foreign qualifications, more transparent. However, fear remains that once academic talents freely circulate, even within Southeast Asia, many may never return home.
Yet, this fear is misplaced, as the overall effect of brain drain may be positive. Countries like Malaysia and the Philippines have put policies in place to foster return migration, even if they are of varying levels of success. Ultimately, this much-analyzed issue hinges on factors beyond the control of governments in Southeast Asia and factors on which regional governments have leverage. In the end, each country is responsible for providing an attractive labor environment that allows its citizens, and others from far beyond, to flourish on their acquired skills and competencies.