III. Brain Drain as a Contemporary International Problem: 



Brain drain, as a contemporary international problem, has its roots 

 in the profound changes in the political structure of international rela- 

 tions that have been brought about as a consequence of World AVar II. 

 These changes were to have a direct bearing on patterns of migration 

 in the postwar era. 



Trends in Migration Since World War II : A Changing World Envi- 

 ronment 



The distribution of world power shifted from the main actors in 

 world affairs during the 1^30's to those who had previously played 

 only limited roles. Destruction of the wartime Axis Powers, combined 

 with the voluntary and involuntary liquidation of the British, French, 

 Dutch, and later Belgian imperial systems, created vast power vacuums 

 in the world. New states and new constellations of power emerged to 

 fill these power vacuums, radically changing the alignment of world 

 forces. A new era of bipolarity and global confrontation between the 

 Soviet Union and the United States was also an era in which through 

 the processes of decolonization the LDCs in Asia and Africa were 

 for the first time to play a prominent role in contemporary world 

 affairs. 



FORCED migrations 



Human mobility was a marked characteristic of this new era, but 

 unfortunately much of this mobility was in the form, of forced migra- 

 tions. Programs of repatriation or settlement of those dislocated by 

 World War II, and population transfers resulting from the creation 

 of newly independent states or the outbreak of wars, involved mil- 

 lions of people. Migrations on this vast scale tended to overshadow 

 the normal free movement of peoples. The turbulence of the era is seen 

 in the statistics. After World War II, 18,000,000 people were up- 

 rooted by the partition of India and Pakistan; West Germany ac- 

 cepted 12,000,000 refugees dislocated during the war ; Japan resettled 

 6.300.000; South Korea absorbed 4,000.000 and Hong Kong 1.800.000. 

 In Israel, 1,000,000 Jews found refuge in a new homeland, while more 

 than 1.000,000 Palestinian Arabs fled the country. Ultimately, the In- 

 ternational Refugee Organization and Intergovernmental Committee 

 for European Migration settled 1,300,000 refugees overseas. These 

 statistics do not include the movement of people in the Soviet and 

 Chinese areas, but even this limited survey produces a total of 

 45.000.000 forced emigrants. Thits in one decade the number of people 

 compelled to move across frontiers was equal to the entire movement 

 of free emigrants across the Atlantic in the century ending in 1913.^^ 



»2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1973, v. 15, p. 422. 



(1077) 



