“The implication is that migration is positive for the home country,” says Singh, “not only through remittances, but also by opening the export markets, which sort of dampens the ‘brain drain’ story.”

Indeed, the loss of human capital is often cited as an argument against the concept of migration as a form of development. When educated people move away from poor countries in large numbers, the thinking goes, those countries struggle without their best and brightest. But the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens has shown that rather than creating a void, African health professionals leaving home may actually encourage more people to attempt to duplicate their success by becoming health professionals themselves. And Columbia’s Jagdish Bhagwati put it well when he noted that the “‘brain’ is not a static concept. Trapped in Kinshasa, under appalling conditions, the brain will drain away in less time than it takes to get to New York.”

Major Destination Countries for Emigrants From Africa, 2010

Back in 2007, Bakewell argued that international development has been shaped by one of the nastier elements of colonialism, which depended heavily on controlling the movement of locals—from the theft of humans for slavery to forced labor on African plantations to apartheid-era Bantustans—for the benefit of European migrants to Africa.

In a study for the Overseas Development Institute, Priya Deshingkar and Sven Grimm made a similar argument. “Implicit in many agricultural or rural development policies in Africa is the aim of controlling population movements,” they wrote. “Policymakers have tended to perceive migration largely as a problem, posing a threat to social and economic stability, and have therefore tried to control it, rather than viewing it as an important livelihood option for the poor.”

When development aims to improve “home,” it is presumed that a better life at home is always the goal for the beneficiaries. We’re so clear about wanting to develop countries that we call the places we’re helping “developing countries.” The goal is to develop a place where people happen to live, rather than to develop people, wherever they live.

The trouble with development work that encourages migrants to stay home, or return home, wrote Bakewell, “is that it assumes that all the actors involved have a common view of the ‘good’ ends to which the process leads them. It operates on the assumption that the normal and desirable state for human beings is to be sedentary.” If improving only “home” is the goal, then, “It is impossible simply to bring migration into development (such as ‘inserting migration into the Millennium Development Goals’) without raising fundamental questions about the nature of development and how it is put into practice. These include asking about the conception of the good life in mainstream development goals; the appropriateness of models of development based on the nation state; and, the inherent paternalism of mainstream development practice.” For the beneficiaries of development initiatives, Bakewell added, these “activities may be trying to maintain a way of life which they would love the chance to abandon.”