Immigration is also colonising the mind

The last colonial reflex isn’t a statue or a street name. It's the quiet, unquestioned assumption that the best of lives are lived elsewhere, usually west. This idea, a kind of mental colonisation, still pulls the world's talent in one direction.

We talk of brain drain as if it were a natural phenomenon, like water flowing downhill. It isn’t. It’s the result of a carefully constructed global system that concentrates wealth and opportunity in a handful of capitals, then congratulates itself on attracting the ‘brightest and best’. For every celebrated immigrant success story in London or New York, there’s a hometown left a little poorer in ideas, in expertise, in ambition.

The most galling part is the pity that follows. The very nations that benefit from this exodus of talent look at the countries left behind and see failure. They offer aid, they write reports, they diagnose problems of governance or culture, all while ignoring the fact that they are standing on the shoulders of the very people who could have solved those problems. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of extraction and condescension.

What if we judged the health of our globalised world differently? The honest test isn't a one-way street paved with visas for the skilled. It's a two-way flow. When a Parisian architect is as likely to move to Dakar for a great project as the other way around, we will know we have arrived. When a British doctor sees a career-defining opportunity in Mumbai, not just a volunteering gap year, we will be getting somewhere.

This isn’t an argument against movement. It is an argument against the deeply ingrained narrative that ‘progress’ only flows from North to South, from West to East. The current model isn't free movement; it's a recruitment drive for the rich world, depleting the human capital of everyone else. The greener pasture is a powerful myth, and it serves the gatekeepers of the global order very well indeed.

Why does the suggestion of a European moving to Africa or South America for opportunity still sound odd, a novelty? It exposes the quiet prejudice embedded in our idea of a ‘better life’. We have been conditioned to see vast, dynamic parts of the world as places to be escaped from, not moved to.

True globalisation will have arrived when human capital flows in all directions, not just toward the old imperial centres.