[gutnor]

The main problem is not the emotional aspect. After all the majority of the people affected had left their country only 1 generation before.

The real problem is that you don't know what is the rational decision at the time you need to take it, only in hindsight. It is not in the business owners to share their 10 year strategy with their employees. Everything is positive, all green, until the very day you have 2 weeks to pack. You don't necessarily know the big picture. Is your company having trouble or is the whole region is going to be in ruin. You can make the rational decision to start a local business and have your market vanish way before you have benefitted. Same thing with the local politician, we are always at the end of the tunnel.

Same problem with training and moving. How much do you leverage your current competence. As a DevOps, do you learn development, or plumbery ? How far do you need to move. It is even worse here as you have even less information about the target sector or region.

So what happened to people that made the right decision, they did alright of course. But there have been a lot of people that trained in using newer better technology of their field and that did not help them when the job moved to India. Some moved to Spain and France, but the crisis started a few years later there. A lot opened businesses, and failed as new businesses do, but also because the whole region went under. Same outcome for people that moved to different field in the same region, they were caught in the ripple effects. None of those decision were irrational, or necessarily easy. They were just not the right decisions when you have perfect information.