This paper explores a theory of migration based upon a number of conjectures about the role of digital media. It proposes that a number of factors including rising use of the internet providing widespread access to global information and an intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people’s social space. This also expands the factors through which they compare their own living standards and social life with others. This expansion increases people’s stress and strengthens their inclination to resort to migration as a means of reducing this heightened stress. Other things held constant, the expansion of people’s social space intensifies their inclination to move across geographical space.

This article presents a set of reflections on what gives rise to remittances, which constitute a major part of the impact of migration on economic development in the migrants’ own countries. The collage of reasons presented serves to illustrate that remittance behaviour is the outcome of an intricate interplay between the preferences and interests of migrants and their families.

This paper synthesizes and extends recent research on “The New Economics of the Brain Drain”. In a unified framework, the paper shows that while recently identified adverse repercussions of the brain drain exacerbate the long-recognized negative impact of the brain drain, longer-term consequences turn the brain drain into the harbinger of powerful gains. These gains have been studied already in recent research, or merit attention in future research.

For nearly four decades now, the conventional wisdom has been that the migration of human capital (skilled workers) from a developing country to a developed country is detrimental to the developing country. However, this perception need not hold. A well-designed migration policy can result in a “brain gain” to the developing country rather than in just a “brain drain” from it, as well as in a welfare increase for all of its workers—migrants and non-migrants alike—as the new research reported here suggests.