I mean tbf (at least in my case as an Egyptian) it's not just the high salaries. Maybe Egypt is an extreme case but this country just has no future. The regime isn't just dictatorial; it's also dumb. There's almost no money going to scientific research, the system as a whole was outdated 50 years ago, the military is monopolizing everything and undercutting the market because they can use slave conscript labor and don't pay taxes, etc etc. I'm firmly of the opinion that this is at least partially caused by Britain's unwillingness to fully decolonize in the 1920s and their godawful decolonization in the 1950s, but the fact remains that these countries have a duty to their people that they're not fulfilling, and that's why brain drain happens.

As a living example of said brain drain, salaries were near the bottom of my priority list when I made the decision. I was more concerned about living somewhere where I don't need to worry about being arrested because I said my opinion on the internet (or even just complained about prices) or because I do my prayers at the mosque (I was actually told by my mother to not go to the mosque all the time because I might get arrested. It's that bad). Below that were things like a sane administration that actually cares about things being even just barely functional, a decent education system and academia and the ability to have confidence that the country will actually exist in 20 years. Living in a wildly different country (especially as a Muslim in Japan as is my case (halal food is a pain to get here)) is such a pain you couldn't pay me to do it, but it's hard to turn down actually getting to have a future.

What I wanna say is that it's not just the Global South being undercut by the West; many Global South countries are failing at fulfilling their responsibility towards their constituents, and that's why they're leaving. Now how much the West was involved in creating this situation is another story, but you can't reduce it to just high salaries. Global South governments, as a rule, aren't interesting in solving their own problems. That's why the problem solvers go solve Western rich people's problems.

People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. Our material conditions limit our agency. We go where the jobs are, where the money is, where the possibilities for a better future are. Those are all choices.

But you can't ignore the material conditions that lead to those choices. We aren't just free floating agents in a sea of possibilities.

That's not it, but in many cases Western imperialism is involved in the conditions that made these people want to leave in the first place.

People don't have free agency to move to any country they want. In my view the free agency which you say is being removed never actually existed in the first place.

But I do find it funny that "give me your poor" (yes I'm borrowing from the US) turned into "give me your elite".

There's no agency in the market. That's the entire point of markets - being independent of a single human's whims and being an equalizing force, the "invisible hand".

And the entire point of communism is getting that agency, having production for the sake of humans rather than humans for the sake of production.

It also has a chicken-egg problem. What if the indicators of talent or skill aren't apparent because of abysmally poor living and educational conditions? The lack of opportunity in many developing countries is such that people will be less successful and appear less talented simply because their country has limited ways for them to demonstrate it.