From an article in today’s Guardian discussing predictions for 2008.

Another solid basis for futurological speculation is to follow the flow of people. Paul Saffo, a respected California-based forecaster, argues that the next few years will see the beginnings of a “reverse knowledge migration” in which, as well as bright and well-educated workers coming from the developing world to the west, people will start to move in the opposite direction.

This new global class of “cyber-gypsies”, says Saffo, will not only include American and European Asians returning “home”, but also highly educated, non-Asian Americans and Europeans going off to make their fortunes in places such as China.

The trend, he argues, will soon move from a source of sociological curiosity to a source of alarm for governments and businesses. Companies, universities and thinktanks in Europe and America, he warns, who often smugly assumed that they would be a magnet for the world’s talent, are going to discover that this is no longer the case.

Predictions for 2008?  Ha.  It’s already happening, maan.  I’ve been meeting these people for the past three years.

Asians returning home, seen them.  Europeans and Americans looking for new horizons, uh huh.

Much more than this.  Try these: Brits, Australians and Americans shamed by their countries’ actions in Iraq (the shame drain).   Individuals who no longer want to be part of the bullying first world, people who are fed up with just how complicated it is to live in the west and just how horrifically expensive it is too.  Those of us who recognise the waste, on every level, of living in a developed country.

When you can plug in your computer anywhere, is it not increasingly likely that we’ll choose to be online somewhere cheaper, more colourful, and where our high streets aren’t just an identikit jumble of Starbucks and McDonald’s?

All this shock horror crap about migrants into the UK.  Hey, we’re all migrants now.