2010-10-31

Iran's brain drain

I came across Wikipedia's entry about Iran's brain drain, and I thought I would share it with you, dear reader:
According to the International Monetary Fund, the Islamic Republic of Iran ranks first in "brain drain" among 61 "developing" and "less developed" countries it measured. More than 150,000 Iranians leave the Islamic Republic every year, and an estimated 25% of all Iranians with post-secondary education now live abroad in "developed" countries of the OECD.
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According to at least one source, Iran had no significant emigration or brain drain to wealthier countries before the Islamic Revolution.
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Such trends are thought to be accelerating what many see as Iran's largest exodus of talented faculty, students, and researches to western Europe, Canada, and the United States. The lengthy list of Iranian chairs and directors of academia in these countries is arguably a sound index of this reality. Iran's Brain Drain has become a focus of the media both domestically and internationally
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A report by The Washington Prism in Jan 2006 claims that the International Monetary Fund considers Iran ranked highest in Brain Drain among "developing" countries, with an estimated 150,000 people exiting Iran per year.[16] IRNA reports the figure to be 200,000. And yet in spite of this situation and Iran's technological and industrial isolation due to political conditions in the past 25 years, Iran continues to maintain high levels of education and research in few major universities, although mostly at undergraduate level. Iranian students continue to win technical tournaments in Robotics, Computer Science, and other fields of engineering and science every year (example), and Iranians continue to increase the number of their publications in technical journals despite their highly limited facilities and resources.
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This is obviously a sad state of affairs for most iranians (those who are not part of this fascist and religious regime). But the flip side is that all these educated people instead of contributing to destroying their country by working for the government, create wealth abroad, are very likely to send some part of their income to their families in Iran.

More importantly, there's a massive number of educated, talented, wealthy iranians abroad, who are probably hoping for the regime to collapse — one catalyst might be the collapse of the price of oil — and would then be ready to go back home, which would be a great opportunity for their country to resurrect. Of course, the sooner this collapse occurs, the better, as once they have settled and started to raise a family, the probabilities for them to migrate one more time becomes a lot smaller.

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