This article is a comment on Ryszard Borowicz’s text of 1992 on the post-1989 emigration of young people from Poland and on the debate inspired by Marek Okólski’s text of 2012 on the modernising impet of emigration. Three issues are being discussed in this article: 1) the adequacy of the „brain drain” concept, 2) relations between international migrations and modernization and 3/ some examples of empirical research on this problem.