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Aman in Kuala Lumpur was recently arrested for forging Indonesian passports. My first thought was why bother? Much better to forge Malaysian passports or passports from EU countries, which would grant you access to the rest of the world and the comfort of the Malaysian or European welfare state. But as I considered his possible reasons, I wondered if his clients were people who only used the Indonesian passport to get nearer to Australia, where they would eventually seek asylum. It’s a perfectly reasonable plan. The question is, what about the rest of us?

Indonesian passport holders do not enjoy visa-free travel to most of the world. True, we have access to other Asean countries, Hong Kong, Morocco, Iran, Peru, Chile and some off-kilter African countries, but a visa to, say, the United States will set you back $131, multiple visits to the embassy and at least two weeks. By comparison, someone from Singapore or Brunei simply flies to New York.

What other advantages to Indonesian citizenship are there? There are no first-class Indonesian public schools or universities. There is not a single Indonesian university in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education list, and nobody in Jakarta who has the choice sends his or her child to a public school (though public universities are slightly better). So even if education is subsidized by the government, why would young people with options study here?

They do not, of course. They end up leaving the country and paying absurdly high tuition fees elsewhere. For example, an EU resident pays about 3,500 British pounds ($5,300) for one year’s tuition at an Oxford college, whereas an overseas student pays 14,000 pounds, four times the amount. It also goes without saying that there are more scholarships for residents from developed countries than there are for outsiders.

The only real benefit of being Indonesian in Indonesia is that it allows one to own property in the country. But even that exclusive right is being steadily eroded as developers lobby the State Ministry for Public Housing to be able to sell land to foreigners.

Before continuing with this litany of self-abuse, I should say that there are many reasons for ambitious young people to remain Indonesian. First, because it is their country, because it is home to them. Their families are likely here. But also because it is a great and rich country whose best days are ahead of it, and whose trajectory since independence has been, despite numerous difficulties, upward. Because they want to be a part of that story.

But that is for the future. What about today?

Today, it seems the government is trying especially hard to turn away the very young educated Indonesians it should be attracting. When I say this, I am chiefly thinking of the ban on second passports, a counterproductive measure that forces Indonesians to choose between their own country and a foreign one. This is not a simple matter of patriotism. Educated Indonesians will naturally gravitate to places that attract other highly educated people, and no matter how patriotic they are, living in a developed country offers advantages that a poorer country cannot match. The government should encourage the Indonesian diaspora to pursue those advantages. Eventually, as we see in China and India, these people will return home with knowledge and experience to help the country.

Discussing second passports may seem like elite whining given the scale of other problems in the country. But the ban on dual citizenship actually hurts the middle class disproportionately. Anyone who is wealthy enough usually has second passports (yes, illegally), and some children were even delivered abroad to ensure their claim to another citizenship. The people who are really hurt are ambitious middle-class Indonesians with fewer options. They were lucky enough to study abroad but cannot usually enjoy the advantages — say, in the form of cheaper education or a social security net — of their developed host country without citizenship. (Countries often have another designation — permanent residency — but that does not usually confer the same benefits as citizenship).

I have heard people say that dual citizenship is inherently disloyal. But does this make sense? In my experience, there is enough love in a heart for more than one place. It does not follow that just because one is Indonesian one cannot also be French or Filipino.

The other concern I usually hear is that of a “brain drain.” Won’t letting Indonesians become foreign citizens increase the number of educated people leaving the country? To which I reply, “Are they not leaving already?”

But let us also be entirely clear about what the arguments against dual citizenship imply. They seem to suggest that the government should deliberately create a policy that restricts the movement and frustrates the ambition of its citizens in order to pursue national ends. If that is indeed the position of the government, fine. But at the end of the day, my guess is that you cannot stop people from voting with their feet, especially if economic opportunity is greater elsewhere. What you can do is create incentives for them to work back home, and moreover, simplify the process by which they can retain ties with their home country. The choice isn’t between letting people leave or letting them stay. It is between letting educated people retain their citizenship or be forced, by archaic and senseless laws, to renounce it.

Traditionally, Indonesians have returned home more frequently than Indians or Chinese. But recently I have seen people stay away for longer and longer periods of time. While there is no data on this, I suspect the trend is growing. There seems to be an increasing number of us out there who remain away worrying about the difficult choice we will one day have to make: to keep our Indonesian citizenship or to renounce it?

At the moment, the Indonesians I speak to are sitting still. They cannot imagine having to apply for a visa every time they enter their own country once they are no longer citizens. There is also no desire to forfeit any land they may own or might inherit. But if the country persists in making life difficult for bright young Indonesians who merely happen to live abroad, one day they will take the hint.

Artha Prameswara is a journalist in Mumbai who grew up in Indonesia. He can be reached at artha.prameswara@gmail.com.