Philippa Stevenson: Brain drain's more like a brain swap

I'd love my daughter to return permanently from Sydney and she knows it. She often emails or telephones from the depths of homesickness.

But no matter how much I miss her or she me, I'm not going to phone and tell her to come home, the economy's booming, there are jobs aplenty.

I'd fall off the phone if she ever rang and said: "Mum, what's the New Zealand economy like and how's the job market?"

I find it hard to believe the Government, according to Immigration Minister Paul Swain, plans to soon launch a campaign to bring expatriate New Zealanders back home potentially, in part, using creative ways to encourage families to lure their offspring.

Frankly, the idea scares me silly. I'd rather play my own, careful game on this one. Too much longing can easily turn to wheedling, which can sour into emotional blackmail.

It's enough my daughter knows she's missed. She needs to make choices about her future on more grounds than whether those choices stop her family missing her.

Also, I don't want the responsibility. I shudder to think that parents would tell their kids the economy's booming only to find the section their child is in has just taken a nose-dive.

There are jobs aplenty and a skills shortage to boot? Let's hold the numbers and look at the specifics. It's an easy exercise. Think of a skill, a talent or a qualification then scan the papers for a matching job. You'll probably be lucky if junior is a carpenter but less so if she or he is an astrophysicist or pedologist.

I can't help wondering whether the Government's thinking is driven less by a desire to plug job gaps than it is to look good in the eyes of those of us hanging by the phone or email in hope it delivers that longed-for message: Mum, Dad, I'm coming home for good.

After all, it's election year and the more than 464,000 people born in New Zealand who are living in 26 other OECD countries alone must have an awful lot of voting rellies back here.

So, if I don't want the Government to woo my daughter home, and I'm reluctant to do it myself, what hope do I ever have of reacquainting myself permanently with her bright smile (and those irritating habits that mysteriously are not part of my recall while she's absent.)

Well, I came back. Like a common or bush variety Kiwi I came home (from Melbourne) to breed or, more accurately, bred over there but quickly rectified the error and reared here. Perhaps more reliable than personal experience there's the research, most of it done by Waikato University's Populations Studies Centre and Migration Research Group (MRG).

MRG researcher Jacquie Lidgard found in the 1990s and again more recently that our chicks don't abandon us. Every year up to 25,000 return - more than half the current annual immigration target of 45,000.

Lidgard concluded in one paper that rather than a brain drain, New Zealand was enjoying a "brain exchange". The exchange is, in fact, highly complimentary because it means our talented youngsters are in demand worldwide. They are global "labour market winners and their movement is often circular".

"Thanks to this circulation of highly skilled migrants both sending and receiving countries can benefit rather than one country benefiting at the expense of another."

Research has also revealed the "push" factor - the thing that tips our babes out of the nest. It arises often in countries with free entry to university and when nations produce more highly trained personnel than they can absorb into the workforce.

"The fact that many of these people need to leave their country of birth to find employment is more of a brain overflow than drain," Lidgard reported. Brain drain, overflow or exchange - the important thing to parents is whether we get them back.

Again Lidgard's research is reassuring. "Almost 75 per cent of the survey respondents had returned to the city/town/rural district in which they had lived before they left New Zealand.

"The attraction of the 'old home area' was friends, relatives, familiar surroundings and, for a few, 'the jobs back home'."

The return of our wanderers is almost inevitable and the Government would do better to spend its expat campaign money on improving conditions like health, education, housing, roads and student loans.

Now, those I could really sell.

* pippa@stevenson.net.nz