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born in each developing country residing in a rich destination country and refer to this number as a measurement of “brain drain.” Docquier and Marfouk do not in any way claim that their numbers are directly informative about the financial effects of emigration, but common usage of the term “brain drain” does tend to include the presumption of negative financial effects. Yet, the stock of tertiary-educated people born in Cape Verde who live in the United States may be enormously different from the number of tertiary-educated people who left Cape Verde, if many of them acquired tertiary education in the United States, and it is not at all clear that many or even most of them would have acquired tertiary education had they been unable to leave Cape Verde. One lesson from African physicians is that the stock of skilled workers abroad can be very different from the number of skilled workers who left. Lesson 2: A substantial portion of the public’s financial investment in training emigrants is recouped before they depart, even for those who never return. Even those African physicians who were trained in their countries of birth—the vast majority with substantial public subsidy—spent an average of more than five years in their countries of birth prior to emigrating. Even those physicians who depart, never return, never send any money home, and never interact in any way with their country of birth are therefore typically giving their country of training a substantial return on its public investment. This bears directly on the financial cost of their departure: They are not taking the entire training investment with them, because the country has already typically realized a substantial return on that investment. What portion of the public investment is recouped by receiving (conservatively) five years of service? Many states do permit limited contractual relationships that limit movement in exchange for public funding of higher education, but these limits rarely amount to five years of movement restrictions. Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, for example, awards scholarships for a few years of postgraduate study abroad that require the same number of years of residence in Brazil thereafter. The Turkish government’s Scientific and Technological Research Council also publicly sponsors doctoral research abroad in exchange for an obligation to live thereafter in Turkey, usually for no more than two years. The United States government pays for much of the training cost of physicians who agree to two years of work in certain facilities on Native American reservations.