Exit East: The quiet reversal of the Arab brain drain

Growing up in Mount Lebanon, September’s cool air always carried the weight of returning to school and bracing for the severity of Jesuit discipline. Later in life, the month became marked by airport goodbyes and fluorescent security lines.

Still, once the suitcases were unpacked, Paris, where I’ve lived for a decade, retained a strange sense of comfort. That has since changed.

During the past two years, the sense of belonging in my small Parisian apartment gave way to an all-encompassing feeling of being unwelcome and constantly watched; images of Palestinian children torn apart, relentless news of Lebanon under bombardment, merged with a tightening crackdown on Palestinian solidarity in Europe. The atmosphere was stifling.

But back in Beirut this summer, I found that, despite the war and collapse, some had returned for good. Meanwhile, others were oscillating between two worlds.

Across Western cities, a quiet exodus of professionally successful Arabs is underway. Young migrants are packing up, moving home, or heading to the Gulf seeking relief from what has become indescribably unbearable. Under-documented, yet increasingly visible, this reverse brain drain is not simply driven by better opportunities elsewhere, but by deepening Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, structural discrimination, and a political climate that has grown openly hostile since October 7, 2023.

A quiet exodus of professionally successful Arabs is underway. Young migrants are packing up, moving home, or heading to the Gulf seeking relief from what has become indescribably unbearable.

Even before the end of the colonial era, fortunate Arabs looked to the West not just for safety and opportunity, but for dignity, freedom, and the promise of meritocracy. Each wave of regional turmoil sent a fresh surge of talent abroad. Fleeing war, repression, and institutional collapse, many saw Europe and North America as places where education would be rewarded and civil liberties respected. At home, authoritarianism, corruption, economic stagnation, political instability, and rigid social hierarchies made it nearly impossible for talent to rise on its own.

But that promise has steadily eroded. What once seemed like refuge has become another site of exclusion. The same systems advertising opportunity isolate migrants through post-9/11 surveillance, counterterrorism laws, and the normalization of Islamophobia.

October 7, for many, made the continuity of colonial violence undeniable. The repression of Palestinian solidarity is not new, it is the empire’s latest iteration. This growing realization has led to a rejection of alignment with whiteness. The myth that Arab professionals can “become white” has dissolved, and in its place, stronger community bonds have emerged, alongside a renewed commitment to solidarity with other marginalized groups.

Palestine and the War on Terror

The modern policing state, already disproportionately violent toward racial minorities, has only tightened its grip in the past two years, and the West’s treatment of Palestine lies at the heart of this crisis. The racialization of Palestinians laid the groundwork for a logic of preemptive control and racial suspicion, which was considerably expanded to all Arabs after 9/11, according to David Theo Goldberg, critical race theorist and philosopher.

As early as the Algerian War, French and Israeli counterinsurgency experts were exchanging tactics on how to crush the “enemy within.” The same framework that cast Palestinians as a global security threat has been applied wholesale to all Arabs and Muslims worldwide since 9/11, treating them as suspects, subjected to disproportionate policing, monitoring, and security measures. Security narratives therefore collapsed entire communities into a singular figure: the Arab or Muslim “terrorist.”

Repression of Palestinian solidarity today extrapolates this logic. It recycles the War on Terror’s good-versus-evil binary, framing Palestinian solidarity as terrorism. This framing provides a convenient cover for exclusion, surveillance, and censorship, all justified in the name of counterterrorism and protecting “public order.”

Much of this exclusion remains hidden behind supposedly “neutral” state policies. France and most of Europe have banned ethno-religious data collection, citing republican ideals of equality. In the US, such data is collected through survey and surveillance, although Arabs are classified as “white.” These policies, cloaked as anti-racist, ironically hide structural racism from sight.

Goldberg calls this logic “anti-racialism”: the erasure of the language used to name racism, without actually dismantling it. By denying the existence of racism and its legacies, the system preserves its inequalities. The past is buried. Discrimination is individualized. The structure remains intact.

Racial hierarchies persist through seemingly neutral systems that have replaced formal apartheid. Inclusion remains conditional and defined by historically white standards of merit, excellence, and civility. Western cities and institutions, that were built on slavery and colonial plunder, continue to reproduce structural racism through zoning laws and policing practices.

Colonialism weaponizes race, class, and religion as tools for control. As the researcher Mathieu Rigouste wrote, the very design of French cities and suburbs is engineered to isolate and contain minorities, while keeping them accessible for repression should dissent or grassroots organizing emerge. In the 19th century, France imported and adapted the colonial and military techniques it had used to surveil and suppress colonized peoples, particularly Algerians, to its own territory. These tactics were handed over to the police, tasked with enforcing counter-insurgency measures against racialized populations, especially North Africans. Despite its liberal efforts to rebrand, this logic continues to shape how France polices its minority populations, particularly in the suburbs.

In the 19th century, France imported and adapted the colonial and military techniques it had used to surveil and suppress colonized peoples, particularly Algerians, to its own territory.

Silent flight, structural failure

France offers a striking case of the reverse brain drain unfolding across the West. A recent study by researchers Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard, and Julien Talpin, France, You Love It but Leave It, reveals a stark trend: middle- and upper-class French Muslims, highly educated, and socially mobile, are leaving. Olivier Esteves estimates tens of thousands have already left.

Charles, a French Muslim and participant in the study, relocated to Dubai in 2015, where he now works as a sales director, said he doesn’t identify as an expat. “For me, an expat is someone who comes here to collect money and then go back to France. That’s not me, that’s not my thing. I am an immigrant, and I have no intention of going back to France.”

For Charles, everyday humiliations were routine: “I’d arrive with a bag, [people would] say to me: ‘I hope you don’t have a bomb in there.’”

More than 70 percent of respondents reported discrimination and a pervasive climate of pressure and fear. The fear of being “too visible” haunts daily interactions, whether it’s a foreign name on a resume, a beard, a headscarf, or the mention of Arabic as a second language. Many speak of having to constantly prove their loyalty, their civility—their “Frenchness.”

In the French labour market, highly skilled Muslims and citizens of postcolonial backgrounds face entrenched barriers: exclusion from leadership roles, glass ceilings, hiring bias, and the routine devaluation of their qualifications. In 2015, men perceived as Muslim were up to four times less likely to be called for interviews than Christian counterparts.

The “push” to leave, the study found, was far stronger than the “pull” of higher salaries or better opportunities abroad. Crucially, the report shows that these forces are not separate. Economic motivations are inseparable from structural racism. The problem has only worsened. France is grappling not only with economic stagnation, but also with the growing devaluation of academic degrees. The number of master’s graduates has soared, yet the job market for highly qualified roles has failed to keep up. From 2000 to 2010, the number of master’s graduates nearly doubled. 56 percent of higher education graduates held executive positions in 1998, compared to the 49 percent in 2017. Similarly, the unemployment rate for those with five years of higher education rose from 5 percent in 1998 to nine percent in 2017.

France’s secular trap

For many today, leaving France is not just about professional careers; it’s also psychological liberation from constant surveillance, microaggressions, and structural barriers that have shaped personal experiences and daily encounters. Participants shared that it had restored their dignity, safety and self-worth, allowing them to “breathe” again.

Now raising a family in the UAE, Charles describes the constant pressure he endured in France and said he is determined to shield his children from such experiences. At work, in the media, and in public spaces, “you feel singled out, judged, and constantly obliged to play this character of: ‘I’m nice, I’m like you, don’t worry!’” he says.

At work, in the media, and in public spaces, “you feel singled out, judged, and constantly obliged to play this character of: ‘I’m nice, I’m like you, don’t worry!’”

The study frames this as a structural failure of the French republican model. The brain drain not only has severe economic consequences, it robs France of the pluralism essential to the democratic ideal it claims to embody. At the heart of France’s contradictions lies its secularist model, laïcité, which claims to ensure equality for all regardless of ethno-religious background, yet has increasingly been weaponized to legitimize state-sponsored Islamophobia.

Take for instance France’s fixation on the headscarf, an enduring threat to the republic since 1989, when three Muslim schoolgirls were suspended for refusing to remove theirs. Decades later, the headscarf still haunts French public discourse like a ghost. This past year, lawmakers proposed banning girls under the age of 15 from wearing the headscarf. All this is carried out in the name of secularism and, with impressive audacity, women’s rights. Never mind that the primary effect of these bans is to exclude Muslim women from public life and employment. Her emancipation, it seems, must be from Islamic patriarchy, and it must arrive neatly wrapped in neutral tones, European haircuts, and a firm belief that freedom can only be stitched together by secular fabric. Framed as a principle of neutrality, laïcité now defines who belongs, and more pointedly, who doesn’t.

In 2015, France passed the 2021 anti-separatism law to combat “an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the Republic,” according to French president Emmanuel Macron.

By 2022, the government had inspected over 24,000 Muslim organizations and businesses, shut down more than 700, and seized €46 million in assets. Mosques, Islamic schools, charities, and sports clubs have been swept up in the crackdown. The law’s enforcement has disproportionately targeted Muslims, collapsing distinctions between religious expression and radicalism. Ordinary expressions of Muslim faith have all been framed as warning signs or early indicators of terrorism. The law tightens restrictions on religious symbols in schools and public institutions, bans modest swimwear, and polices public prayer, effectively suppressing Muslim visibility.

Ordinary expressions of Muslim faith have all been framed as warning signs or early indicators of terrorism.

The law also permits the expansion of the state’s surveillance apparatus, enabling home inspections, administrative closures, and profiling under the banner of defending “republican values.” Far from fostering inclusion, the law recasts pluralism as obligatory assimilation, sending a chilling message: Islam is incompatible with French identity, and any visible expression of it must be contained.

Rethinking the West

Across Europe and North America, Arabs and Muslims are reassessing their futures. Racism has become more elusive, but no less real. It still determines where one gets to live, study, and work. These spatial patterns in turn define opportunity and life outcomes. In Europe, 35 percent of Muslims report facing discrimination in the workplace and in the housing market. Strikingly, 41 percent were overqualified for their jobs, nearly twice the general rate, underscoring systemic barriers to professional advancement.

Housing is never just about shelter, it determines access to education, healthcare, jobs and even life expectancy. Chicago, one of the US’ core metropoles, has the nation’s largest life expectancy gap across neighborhoods (30.1 years), driven by racial and economic segregation. Similar patterns appear in more than 50 major U.S. cities.

In an Obama-faced era, neoliberal progress by way of representation masks the ongoing and entrenched legacies of segregation today. Structural inequality is reframed as personal failure, cloaked in the language of choice and meritocracy.

Since October 7, the climate has hardened. Islamophobic incidents and hostility have escalated sharply across Europe and North America. The fallout has been severe. In the UK, nearly a third of British Muslims are considering emigration, citing fear, alienation, and the growing normalization of anti-Muslim hate.

Discrimination has been particularly acute in universities. The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) has documented over 1,000 incidents since October 2023: cancelled events, smear campaigns, student investigations, disciplinary actions, visa threats, and disrupted gatherings. The German state is particularly repressive, with funding cuts, speech bans, and visa threats targeting those expressing solidarity with Palestine, prompting several prominent academics and artists to leave their positions or have them cancelled. In the UK, cultural workers and academics report similar experiences.

As for universities in North America, the Trump administration ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to investigate over 5,000 students and academics for possible deportation, most of them flagged by Canary Mission, a watchdog site that conflates Palestinian solidarity and anti-occupation activism with antisemitism. Around 75 percent of individuals targeted appeared on Canary’s watchlists. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) handed over 100 intelligence reports to the State Department, leading to the detention of individuals with legal status and no criminal record. Among them were Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia; Rümeysa Öztürk, detained after writing an op-ed critical of Israel; and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student seized during his naturalization interview.

Evidently, higher education in the West no longer guarantees employment that matches one’s skills, let alone one’s aspirations. In saturated job markets for university graduates, educated Arab and Muslim professionals face not only fierce competition but also entrenched systemic disadvantages. Hostility on university campuses makes the fraught reward even riskier; students seeking economic mobility may leave with little more to show for their studies than a disciplinary record. Shrinking opportunities and rising racism make career advancement increasingly difficult, signaling a quiet exodus that is far deeper and more widespread than it appears.

Reversing the drain

Dr. Lara Sheehi, professor and clinical psychologist studying the psychological toll of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism, who was also targeted by the Canary Mission for expressing solidarity with Palestine, says Arabs in the West have experienced intensified fear and anxiety since October 7.

“I hear from folks all the time that there’s a sort of increased worry, certainly increased stress, and in some cases, it feels devastating.”

Yet, she argues, this period has also been eye-opening. “It has clarified a lot of missing pieces, and the logics of oppression and repression that have been happening for decades for Arabs in the United States in particular, and even in Canada,” she says, noting that many Arabs arrived in America fleeing the very violence of imperialism, a violence often supported by the U.S., whether directly or indirectly.

For many, the past two years have shattered the colonial fantasies of moving West, replacing freedom of opportunity and expression with a sharper awareness of the empire's reach. Colonial violence severs individuals from collective histories of resistance, forcing people to understand the political or historical moment in isolation. This recognition is the first step in liberation from the psychic violence of colonialism, which embeds itself in the mind, enforcing self-discipline, assimilation, and the performance of being a “good colonial subject.”

Colonial violence severs individuals from collective histories of resistance, forcing people to understand the political or historical moment in isolation.

This fragmentation only feeds individualism, encouraging disconnection from the collective and erasing the revolutionary histories of anticolonial struggle. Political power, Sheehi argues, depends on the collective. White capitalist ideals, by contrast, thrive on alienation.

Arab countries account for about one-third of the global brain drain from developing countries, with annual losses estimated at $2 billion. But the trend is not irreversible. Between 2009 and 2018, the American University of Beirut repatriated 178 scientists and physicians, proof that with proper incentives and funding, return is possible.

Still, Sheehi warns that reversing the brain drain isn’t just about jobs. It means confronting history: the faults our countries face today are the products of deliberate degradation by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist plunder. To resist the ongoing brain drain, she says, we must reclaim our histories and reject the myth of benevolent Western intervention. As the past two years have shown us, Western expansionism and imperialism has neither served nor catered to Arab interests.