New migration patterns in the future: brain drain from the West or from the East?

It’s a question that has been intriguing me ever since I started investigating megatrends: how will migration patterns evolve in the next 20 years?

It is quite difficult to have an exact picture of this, since these patterns are influenced by a couple of NEW forces that will be increasingly impactful over the next years:

1. Climatologic migration is likely to increase if global warming continues to cause an increasing number of regions suffer from draught or other consequences of climatologic changes. Water shortage will likely be a major factor, and when looking at the projections of the regions that will suffer from it by 2025, one can conclude that the movements will not only happen from de centre to the outskirts, but also within the Western world (to the East coast in the US, to Scandinavian countries in Europe):
   
   
   
   
2. Economic migration has been known for a long time now, but it is likely to take different forms in the future:

• demand-driven immigration of talents from emerging countries to the West: Western countries will increasingly encourage immigration of specific competencies and skills to fill the gaps caused by the ageing population. As Daniel Altman points out in the interview beneath, this might be a bad thing for the countries of origin of the immigrants, who will have to deal with a brain drain. But as the case of India shows, this is not necessarily so on the long run, more and more Indians are now returning to their home countries packed with skills and knowledge that they could not have obtained in their home countries.
  
  

• a less well documented cause of migration patterns might be the Western generation Y: is it not likely that their spirit of openness and boundary-less will ultimately drag them to ‘where the action is’ (hence, where the economic growth is highest)? As a first sign of this: universities in emerging countries are gaining much popularity worldwide, as they move up in the lists of most qualitative education offerings:
  
  (universities of emerging countries as they appear on quality lists of different sources -with their ranking in order of appearance: )
  
  
  
  
  (universities of emerging countries in the list of most popular universities globally, with their rankings in order of appearance: )

There’s obviously more forces determining migration patterns, but these three are quite new, will be increasingly impactful in the next 10 years, and their full impact is still relatively uncertain. So, to me, these three are the most crucial ones to follow up closely.