Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.
The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.
What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.
If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.
One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.
Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.
That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.
Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.
