Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator in London.
It is one of France’s most prestigious schools. Its alumni include three former presidents of the Republic, three Nobel Prize winners and dozens of CEOs. And yet almost a fifth of last year’s graduates of the École Polytechnique have left France. Likewise, British entrepreneurs are fleeing the country’s rising tax burden by heading for the Gulf, while well-educated Germans are swapping stagnant Munich and Stuttgart for Switzerland. High-tax, big-state Europe is starting to suffer an accelerating brain drain. But the main country that should be capitalizing on that — the United States — is moving in the opposite direction. Surely this is a moment for America to throw open its doors once again, helping both itself and, ultimately, the Western alliance.
With its government in permanent crisis and with one of the highest tax burdens in the world, it is hardly surprising that many of France’s most talented young people are deciding to make their careers elsewhere. According to a Syntec Federation survey of French workers and students, 15,000 graduates from France’s engineering and management schools now start their careers abroad every year. The better the school, the more graduates leave, with 19 percent from the École Polytechnique leaving the country in 2024 and 17 percent from an elite engineering school, the CentraleSupélec, in 2022. Imagine almost a fifth of the graduating class of MIT or Harvard heading straight to the international terminal after commencement: not exactly a vote of confidence in the country.
Wherever they go, these French graduates are likely to have plenty of British for company. As many as 250,000 of them are estimated to be living in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, including Alasdair Haynes, founder of Britain’s Aquis stock exchange. More than 1.1 million others have moved to Australia. At a granular level, almost 2,000 U.K.-trained doctors relocated to Australia in 2023, a 67 percent increase on a year earlier. And about a quarter-million Germans are reported to be moving out of the country every year, the largest number of them to Switzerland.
There is no single statistical database of talent moving around the world. But if you start to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together, a clear picture emerges. There is an exodus of talent out of much of Europe. It is not hard to understand why. Major economies there have trapped themselves in a doom loop of stagnant growth, rising taxes and squeezed living standards. Jobs are hard to find. If you do get one, it won’t pay very well, and the taxes are crushing.
The United States would once have been their most natural destination. It is the biggest economy in the world, one of the richest, and the country with the greatest range of opportunity and geography. But that isn’t happening. Again, there is not a single statistical database, but figures from Henley & Partners, a relocation specialist, show that the UAE is leading the way, with a net inflow of 9,800 millionaires so far this year, compared to only 7,500 for the United States (a country roughly 30 times its size), 3,600 for Italy and 3,000 for Switzerland. There is a huge army of mobile wealth and talent, and the U.S. is not getting anything like its share.
The blunt truth is this: As part of its clampdown on immigration, the Trump administration started charging a daunting $100,000 for H1-B “special occupation” visas — at precisely the wrong moment in history. Most of us can understand the logic behind controlling the numbers of low skilled immigrants, even without necessarily agreeing with it. But German engineers, French mathematicians and British entrepreneurs? Or billionaires who bring jobs and wealth with them? Where is the sense in that?
The United States should throw open up its doors again. That would achieve two key objectives. First, it would boost the American economy. No country can ever have enough highly skilled people. Protected by a wall of tariffs, this government wants to rebuild domestic manufacturing and secure its supply chains, and a huge new pool of engineering and management talent would make that task far easier. Second, and perhaps more important, it could prove a catalyst for change in Europe. It has always been in America’s geopolitical interests to have a strong and wealthy continent on the other side of the Atlantic; that was why it spent so much money on the Marshall Plan after World War II. An enfeebled, overtaxed Europe can hardly pay for its own defense, nor can it contribute in any meaningful way to protecting the Western world or standing up to an increasingly assertive China. If a brain drain accelerates, at least a few of the nations of Europe might grasp that the time has finally come for reform.
Many of the expatriates would probably prefer to build their careers in the United States than in Dubai or Canada. Why not offer a youth mobility scheme to the U.K. that gives every Brit or American under 30 the right to live and work in the other country? Or offer 100,000 work visas a year to the highest ranked French or German graduates? True, these might not play well with Trump’s MAGA base. But there is a huge opportunity in offering a haven for Europe’s overtaxed, underpaid professional and entrepreneurial classes — and the United States would reap significant rewards from grasping it.
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