Post-material values and brain drain: how value transformation shapes the migration mindset among highly educated South Asians?

While economic reasons are predominantly considered as drivers of brain drain in the existing literature, the present study demonstrates that migration decisions are substantially shaped by structural misalignments between individuals' value orientations and the institutional, cultural, and social environments of their home countries. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews and a focus group discussion, the study integrates Bourdieu's theorisations of habitus, field, and taste with Inglehart's theory of post-material value shift to understand how higher education cultivates durable dispositions oriented toward personal autonomy, quality of life, social justice, and self-actualisation that home-country context structurally fails to accommodate. The analysis reveals that highly educated (potential) migrants constitute a latent social class, defined not by a conscious collective identity but by the objective homology of their capital compositions, shared habituses, and convergent migration trajectories. This latent class formation helps explain not only why migration persists beyond economic motivation, but also why diaspora engagement and transnational knowledge transfer remain limited among these immigrants: when migration resolves a deep incompatibility between habitus and social context rather than a temporary material deficit, the motivational conditions for sustained home-country engagement are fundamentally weakened. Existing return and diaspora policies in South Asia have largely failed in this context, because they often prioritise financial incentives while disregarding the value transformations that originally produced emigration. Therefore, the findings call for a reorientation of policy frameworks toward addressing the structural field conditions, including institutional trust, professional recognition, political openness, and quality-of-life infrastructure, that drive value-motivated human capital flight.