Thousands of educated workers leave their home countries every day for more developed and stable economies. In turn, these emigrants deplete their homelands of resources—their talent and intellect, as well as their purchasing power and ingenuity. This phenomenon is known as “brain drain.” But there’s another pattern beneath these well-studied dynamics.

Although much attention has been paid to emigrants’ skillsets, less focus has been devoted to their values. From studying over two decades of migration trends in 149 countries, I discover that many people who choose to depart their countries of origin, whether for economic or educational opportunities abroad, are likely to hold more liberal democratic values than those who remain. When they depart, they passively (although not necessarily deliberately) take their political values, preferences, and votes with them. Emigration thus depletes a country not only of its economic capital but also of its political capital: a “democratic drain.”

Put another way, democratic values are an independent and powerful predictor of people’s desire to emigrate. Some democratically inclined emigrants may be catalyzed to depart by geopolitical crises, such as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or democratic erosion, such as the reelection of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in April of that year. Their departure may entail significant professional costs. But many leave their homelands not only or even principally because they are concerned about authoritarian tendencies but to pursue economic opportunities abroad.

Social scientists have paid less attention to the phenomenon of democratic drain because most migrants keep their politics hidden, and their decisions to depart are uncoordinated. When researchers query immigrants retrospectively about their motives, respondents often cite the family members they rejoined or the career they ultimately pursued. Unless they are refugees or asylum seekers, they tend to omit their latent discontent with the status of the political institutions in their countries of origin. But surveying prospective migrants before they leave and directly inquiring about their political preferences and viewpoints in the context of other factors that may drive their departure brought out motives related to democratic values.

People who want to migrate out of nondemocratic states tend to be disproportionately young, educated, and from middle‑income households, and to have less authoritarian personalities than their compatriots. When offered a discrete choice between equally prosperous destination countries with different governments, these prospective migrants strongly prefer places that feature democratic institutions. Although such emigrants may depart at any time, people with democratic proclivities are more likely to leave after authoritarian parties or rulers win elections, particularly following an earlier period of democratic progress.

Just as brain drain leaves countries poorer and less productive, democratic drain enables a turn toward authoritarianism. Any time a disproportionate number of people with liberal and democratic values leave a society, a principal catalyst for democratic development and barrier to democratic backsliding is removed. There might be a silver lining if the emigration of democratically minded people reinforced flagging support for democracy in destination countries. But extensive scholarly evidence suggests that the arrival of migrants—no matter their values—is sparking nativist backlash and democratic backsliding across the United States and Europe.

Much like brain drain, democratic drain isn’t a phenomenon that can or even should be halted. But its discovery should mobilize liberal states to offset its deleterious effects. Democracy advocates should invest in local pro-democracy movements and their leaders in fragile states and persuade skeptics that immigrants are in the immediate national interest of destination states. Efforts to further restrict human mobility and its manifold benefits would be throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Limited research has studied the effect of emigration by people dissatisfied with their country’s politics. But some scholars have observed that it may act as a pressure-release valve, reducing the likelihood of uprisings and revolutions for regime change under authoritarian rulers. The political sociologist Jack Goldstone, for instance, wrote in 2002 that several kinds of demographic change increase the likelihood of uprisings and revolutions. These include a rapidly growing labor force in weak economies, particularly of educated young people vying for scarce elite positions, and unequal population growth between ethnic groups caused by differences in fertility rates or immigration dynamics. In the late twentieth century, emigration dampened dissent under........

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