The Globe and Mail has published a remarkable story this week, profiling a mass exodus of highly skilled and experienced foreign-born financiers from collapsing Western (primarily US-American) firms. They’re headed back to India (and China and Malaysia and so on), sometimes with their newly-minted US passports.

The root causes are both bureaucracy and opportunity. On the one hand, the United States’ immigration policies make staying difficult for unemployment green-card holders, and make it difficult for firms to hire the best foreign workers, even those graduating from top American universities.

And on the other hand, sometimes the opportunities are plain better. What you may be giving up in earning power you may gain in a shot for the top.

Here’s the central point:

According to a large-scale study of 1,200 Indian and Chinese returnees to be published next month by Vivek Wadhwa, a U.S. immigration scholar and consultant, the majority of people joining the reverse brain drain are under 40, most have masters or doctorate degrees, and they're generally leaving because they believe prospects look better in the world's poorer half.

"These people seem to be doing better back home than they would have done in the U.S.," Mr. Wadhwa said. "More than 60 per cent of Indian returnees and more than 80 per cent of Chinese returnees believe their home countries offer better career and professional opportunities."

All this seems rather exciting, even if the trend poses new challenges for wheezing Western economies.

But “Reverse Brain Drain” is a bit of a misnomer; Brain Drain has never been unidirectional. It’s been going on for decades within the West, as European and North American corporations raid each others’ executives. And it’s been going on within the United States as well, as states and cities attempt to lure creative classes from each other. It’s not reverse brain drain—it’s globalization of the same.

Not entirely unrelated, Andy Crouch posted this last week on culture-making.com: a time-lapse map of airplanes around the world over a 24-hour period. Because this is basically a map of economic integration, you can at least somewhat read brain drain into the activity. These are people in motion, after all, not goods, and not information.