Interesting article in the NYT on the Lebanese Diaspora coming home for christmas and challenging the political, military and economic paralysis of Lebanon. The article ends with:
These migrants supply Lebanon with about $1,400 per capita every year, Mr. Ghobril said -- one of the highest rates of remittances in the world. Those transfers are one of the pillars sustaining the consumer economy, he added, though they do not make up for the country's soaring public debt, the lack of long-term investment here, or the slow bleeding of the country's main natural resource - its people. But there is another way of looking at it. "Perhaps instead of talking about brain drain we should talk about brain globalization," Mr. Ghobril said with a mischievous grin. "The globalization of Lebanon."Through history Diaspora's have put political and economic pressure on existing systems. Hopefully the Lebanese Diaspora, of which there is a large contingent in Australia, place similar pressure on the poor state of affairs in Lebanon.
Maybe Lebanon can return to being the Paris of the Middle East like it was prior to the civil wars of the 1980s and the consequent political, military, and violent unrest since.
