A young engineer I coach told me last week that she has accepted an offer in Dubai. When I asked her what she was moving towards, there was a long pause, and then she said she only knew what she was moving away from. That pause is the reason for this article.
Youth emigration in Mauritius is usually discussed in the language of salaries, visas and brain drain, and that language is not wrong, only incomplete. A report in Le Défi this week quoted a sociologist, a political scientist and an HR director, and all three agreed that something deeper than pay is pulling young people towards the departure gate. What they are describing is a search for freedom, recognition and a credible future. In other words, a search for a self. This is a piece about what happens inside a young person long before they book the flight, and what the island, and the rest of us, quietly tell them about who they are allowed to become.
The question nobody asks at the airport
The Le Défi feature draws on Afrobarometer findings showing a strong inclination among young Mauritians to consider emigration, and then does something most coverage skips. It asks why. Sociologist Rajen Suntoo describes young people who want to step outside their familiar family, social and cultural environment and experience greater independence. Political scientist Avinaash Munohur goes further and calls sustained emigration “a vote of no-confidence in the future”.
I have sat with enough departing clients to know that both are true, and that neither is the whole story. Behind freedom and confidence sits a quieter question that almost nobody asks at the airport: who do you think you will be there that you cannot be here?
Towards or away: the motivation under the visa
In Neuro-Linguistic Programming we pay attention to a meta-programme called towards and away-from motivation. Put simply, some people move because they are drawn by a picture of what they want; others move because they are pushed by a picture of what they can no longer stand. Both get you on a plane. Only one of them arrives.
Away-from movers tend to feel relief on landing, then a strange flatness six months later, because the thing they were escaping was partly internal and it boarded with them. Towards movers carry a destination inside them, so the country is a tool rather than a cure. Youth emigration in Mauritius contains both kinds, and the difference rarely shows up in the paperwork. It shows up in the pause my client took when I asked her question.
The elsewhere self
I call the phenomenon at the heart of this the elsewhere self: the version of yourself you can only imagine becoming somewhere else. It is not a fantasy of wealth. It is an identity that feels impossible inside the existing roles, family scripts and social ceilings of home, and therefore gets relocated to a foreign city where nobody knows your surname, your school or your father’s reputation.
Psychology gives the elsewhere self a structure. Self-determination theory, the framework developed by Deci and Ryan and summarised at their research centre, holds that human beings need three things to feel alive: autonomy, the sense that your choices are your own; competence, the sense that your effort produces results; and relatedness, the sense of belonging to people who see you. When a society starves any one of these, a young person does not stop needing it. They start looking for the place that seems to offer it. Emigration is often the geography of an unmet need.
When effort stops predicting outcome
The most damaging sentence in the Le Défi piece is not about money. It is Munohur’s warning that young people become demoralised when they are convinced that competence and effort will not be enough without the right connections. Psychologists call the belief that your actions shape your outcomes an internal locus of control. It is one of the strongest predictors of persistence we have. Erode it, and you do not get a lazy generation. You get a mobile one.
Here is the uncomfortable part for those of us who stay and who hire. A young Mauritian does not need a job advertisement to tell them whether effort is rewarded. Their nervous system has already read the room. It has watched who gets promoted, who gets the contract, who gets interrupted in meetings. By the time they apply for the visa, the decision was made years earlier by a thousand small signals about whether who you are matters more than who you know.
Before you read on, answer these in your own head. When you imagine your best self, is it in this country or another one? If it is elsewhere, what exactly becomes possible there that is forbidden here? And who, precisely, is doing the forbidding?
Nobody emigrates from a country. They emigrate from a version of themselves that home will not let them become. The passport is just the paperwork for an identity that has already left.
What leaving cannot do
A composite from my coaching room, not a single real person. A 27-year-old from Rose Hill moved to Melbourne three years ago to escape a family where every decision was a committee meeting and a workplace where his manager’s nephew got the promotion. He earned more within a year. He also found himself, at thirty, agonising over whether to tell his parents about a girlfriend, and flinching every time a senior colleague praised him, because praise had always arrived with strings attached. He had changed countries. He had not changed the contract he held with himself.
This is the limit of the elsewhere self. A new city can give you autonomy and, with effort, competence. It cannot hand you the internal permission to use them. That permission is built, slowly, by noticing which voices in your head still speak with a Mauritian accent and deciding which of them deserve a vote. I wrote about that self-authoring work in success and failure, and I lived a version of it myself when I left for IIT Madras.
The island’s side of the contract
None of this lets institutions off the hook. Suntoo and Munohur both point to the same remedy: transparency and fair reward in government and in business. Jessyca Joyekurun’s distinction between brain drain and brain circulation is the practical version of the same idea. Let people go, and build real on-ramps for them to return with what they learned.
But the psychological version of the remedy is simpler and more demanding. If we want young Mauritians to see a future here, they need to experience, repeatedly and early, the three things the elsewhere self is searching for abroad: choices that are theirs, effort that counts, and being seen for who they are rather than whose child they are. Every parent, teacher and manager is either building that evidence or dismantling it. I have written about belonging in the boardroom, and the principle holds in the kitchen.
Youth emigration in Mauritius is not a verdict on the island’s beaches or its GDP. It is a verdict on whether a young person can imagine a whole self here. That is a question each of us can influence, whether we run a ministry, a company, or a dinner table.
My client is still going to Dubai, and I hope she thrives. The last thing I asked her was to write down, before she lands, the three things she wants to become there, so that the elsewhere self has somewhere to go once the novelty wears off. If you are standing at a similar threshold, or watching someone you love stand at one, I would be glad to sit with the question for fifteen minutes. Book a short consultation and bring your own pause.
