The Human Face of Global Mobility
International Highly Skilled Migration
in
Michael Peter Smith and Adrian Favell,
editors
Comparative Urban and
Community Research, Vol.8
Jan 2006
Contents
1. The Human Face of Global Mobility: A
Research Agenda
Adrian Favell, Miriam Feldblum and
Michael Peter Smith
Part One: Global and Regional Contexts
2. The
Sandra Lavenex
3. From Migrants to Movers: Citizenship and
Mobility in the European Union
Ettore Recchi
Part Two: Highly Skilled Migration in the
4. “The Best and the Brightest”: Immigrant
Professionals in the
Jeanne
Batalova and B. Lindsay Lowell
5. Disaggregating
Immigration Policy: The Politics of Skilled Labor Recruitment in the
Gary P.
Freeman and David K. Hill
6. Interests
and Institutions in Skilled Migration: Comparing Flows in the IT and Nursing
Sectors in the
Jeannette Money and Dana Zartner
Falstrom
Part Three: The Human Face of Global Mobility
7. Symbolic
Analysts or Indentured Servants? Indian High-Tech Migrants in
Paula Chakravartty
8. Students
without Borders? Migratory Decision-Making among International Graduate
Students in the
Katalin Szelényi
9. Wired
for Work: High-Skilled Employment and Global Mobility in
Ödül Bozkurt
10.
Adrian Favell
Bibliography
Blurb
Alongside flows of trade and capital, the free movement of professionals, technical personnel and students is seen as a key aspect of globalization. Yet not much detailed empirical research has been completed about the trajectories and experiences of these highly skilled or highly educated international migrants. What little is known about these forms of “global mobility” and the politics that surround them, contrasts with the abundant theories and accounts of other types of international migration – such as low income economic migration from less developed to core countries in the international political economy.
Drawing on the work of a long-standing discussion group at
the Center for Comparative and Global Research of UCLA’s International
Institute, this collection bridges conventional methodological divides,
bringing together political scientists, sociologists, demographers, and
ethnographers. It features contributions from Miriam Feldblum, Sandra Lavenex,
Ettore Recchi, Jeanne Batalova, B. Lindsay Lowell, Gary P. Freeman, David K.
Hill, Jeannette Money, Dana Zartner Falstrom, Paula Chakravartty, Katalin
Szelényi, and Ödül Bozkurt. Specifying an original and ambitious research
agenda, the volume explores the reality behind assumptions about these new
global migration trends. It challenges widely held views about the “elite”
characteristics of these migrants, the costs and consequences of the “brain
drain” said to follow from the migration of skilled workers, the determinants
of national policies on high skilled migrants, and the presumed effortlessness
of professional mobility in an integrating world. The volume also sheds new
light on international student migration, the politics of H-1B temporary skilled
workers in the
Forthcoming Winter 2005 in:
The Human Face of
Global Mobility: International Highly Skilled Migration in
Michael Peter Smith and Adrian Favell, editors
(
The Human Face of Global Mobility: A
Research Agenda
Adrian
Favell, Miriam Feldblum and Michael Peter Smith
Talk of globalization by political economists has familiarized us with the idea that the continued liberalization of world trade, and the movement of goods, capital and services on which it is based, is also leading to a spectacular liberalization of the free movement of persons. Authors such as Saskia Sassen (1996, 2001) link these developments with a consequent decline in the control powers of nation-states over population movement, something seen as the fulfillment of a new “age of migration” (Castles and Miller, 2003). The discussion is, of course, controversial. Despite market forces, the control functions of states do continue to pose obvious obstacles to poorer international migrants. Labor, for other political and cultural reasons, is often not as mobile as other factors of production. Political scientists are also right to remind us that political and institutional factors – the drama of international relations, variation in national policy approaches, attempts to coordinate border control or the policing of movement, and evolving modes of international governance – all pose significant constraints and boundaries on unfettered movement, at all levels of the economy (Zolberg, 1999; Freeman, 1995: Money, 1999; Guiraudon and Joppke, 2001).
In most of these discussions, however, labor migration is undifferentiated. Distinctions are rarely drawn between the processes, policies, or politics shaping highly skilled or professional migration, as opposed to those behind unskilled migration. To be sure, when the focus turns to the movement of highly educated and talented migrants, many assume that there are likely to be fewer barriers of all kinds to these forms of global “free movement”, and that the phenomenon is thus growing in magnitude and significance. To put it in the parlance of global city theorists (Castells 2000; Taylor, 2004), the virtual “space of flows” on which new global networks of capital and trade are based, must also be peopled by mobile persons who, it is assumed, are embodied by the world’s growing cadre of international highly skilled migrants (Beaverstock, 2001c). Some authors even speak of the emergence of new “global elites”, or a “transnational capitalist class”, with unprecedented mobile and cosmopolitan lifestyles, presaging dramatic social change to the national order of things (e.g., Sklair, 2001). These heroes of global free movement – top ranked employees of multinational corporations, international finance, IT companies, scientific research agencies, and so on – are, presumably, the human hands, brains and faces behind the impersonal dynamics of global markets and nation-state decline.
This
popular image calls for scholarly investigation. The lives and experiences of
these frequent-flying, fast-lane, global elites are better known from the
editorial and marketing content of glossy magazines or corporate brochures,
than they are from solid social science research. And behind the image of
global elites lie other, socially differentiated realities. In fact, the
skilled and educated among the globally mobile, also include students, nurses,
mid-level technical and clerical employees, ambitious or adventurous upwardly
mobile middle classes, migrants from a range of intermediate developing states,
and many more it would be hard to describe as “elites”. In addition, there are
those international migrants, of course, who are counted as unskilled migrants
in official statistics because of their menial employment destinations after
migration, but who may have attained high levels of skill and education in
their home countries, or who have had to move for political reasons. A whole
range of types of international migrants, in fact, are not captured by the two
stylized images counterposed at either end of the social spectrum: high flying
corporate elites, and desperate, poverty stricken labor migrants and asylum
seekers. Our volume thus seeks to open up a whole new field of research that
can begin to fully document the many worlds of international high skilled,
educated or professional migration, as well as integrate the various types of
theory and methodology needed to account for these phenomena.
Lacunae in global and transnational studies
Academically speaking, there has been relatively little “human level” research on the diverse, yet prototypical avatars of globalization in the skilled, educated or professional categories. More broadly, there remains a call for more micro-level, phenomenological studies of the everyday reality of “global mobility”, despite the avalanche of writings on globalization in all its forms. Looking back, the first generation of global studies was nothing if not sweepingly macro in its scope and argumentation. Rarely did authors consider the “human face” that might be found behind the aggregate data and structural logic that led to the recognition of global cities and global networks in the work of Sassen, Castells, Taylor, and others (see Loughborough University’s Globalization and World Cities project, for a panorama of this work).[1] The grounded ethnographic work by authors such as Beaverstock (2002, 2005), or Yeoh and Willis (2005) on corporate employees and business networks, is in fact exceptional in relation to the general body of work in urban and regional studies on global cities.
A more recent second generation of global studies has to some extent heeded the limitations of the macro-bias, with more “agent-centered” studies in anthropology, human geography and sociology: on transnational networks, transmigrants, and the new “spaces” of the transnational global economy and politics (e.g., Pries, 2001; Conradson and Latham, 2005a). The move to “locate” transnationalism has been a positive one, not least in showing how global processes always have locally inflected and mediated expressions (see, e.g., Eade, 1997; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Scott, 1997; Guarnizo and Smith, 1998; Smith, 2001; Burawoy et al, 2000). On the other hand, transnationalism in these debates is, more often than not, presented normatively as a blow against the capitalist, nation-state centered order of things, emphasizing transnational actors’ resistance and freedom in its conceptualization of “agency”. Building on this, a new wave of social theory focusing on “mobility” has sought to dissolve the category of “society” itself (Urry, 2000), celebrating a variety of new forms of social, gendered or transnational “citizenship” beyond the nation-state, supposedly enjoyed by mobile and networked populations (i.e., Glick-Schiller, 2005, Benhabib, 2002). Writing in this vein often tends to be thin on empirical research, and to reify the lives and cultures of such groups in order to make theoretical (and political) points, rather than empirical ones. Even more problematically, the cultural and critical theory leanings of much of this work, has lead to a complete disconnect from quantitative studies of migration by demographers and economists, as well as institutional studies of the politics of immigration by political scientists and sociologists.
This may be less of a problem within the more specific field of migration research, where truly interdisciplinary work using multiple methods is more common. Here, it is the contrast between the volume of interest in research topics that is most striking. On highly skilled migration, there have been only one or two attempts to define a broad research agenda (Cornelius et al, 2001; Iredale, 2001), alongside the more policy targeted work of demographers and economists (Salt, 1992, 1997; Borjas 1989, 1995; Lowell, 1996; Findlay, 1995; Lowell and Findlay, 2001; Peri, 2005). The quite considerable body of empirical work in recent years on transnational communities, meanwhile, has focused on documenting the transnational strategies and resources of more typically lower end labor and asylum seeking migrants – and hence those more likely to be subject to control and restriction. Convincing transnational studies are certainly now accumulating: for example, of Mexicans (Smith 2005; Bakker and Smith, 2003), Ecuadorans (Kyle, 2000), Moroccans (Salih, 2003; Bousetta, 2000), Turks (Faist, 2000), and Senegalese (Riccio, 2001). Such work is usually driven by an ethnographic interest in ethnicity and inequality, and linked to the ways ethnic networks and cultures, facilitate the economic and political actions of relatively powerless or underprivileged actors, as well as providing the means for evading the control efforts of states (Portes, 1996a; Levitt, 2001).
The transnational theorists point to these findings as “globalization from below” (Portes, 1996b). But the migrants they portray are also those more likely to be subject to control and restriction. A better test case of the supposed liberalization of human mobility in the world economy, then, would be international professional, highly skilled or technical migrants whose mobility is linked more to choice, professional career and educational opportunities. That is, of those who face the least barriers linked to exclusion, domination, or economic exploitation. Their experience would reveal just how far liberalization might go under ideal conditions, but also will reveal in sharp relief what persisting limitations there might still be to a completely unfettered global economy of mobility. As everyone is aware, such migrants are clearly the most likely candidates to fill the role of genuine transmigrants, privileged as they are by the global economy, recruited by nation-states still keen to slam the doors on many other forms of global migration, and endowed with the kinds of levels of human and social capital most likely to facilitate the real construction of global lives in new national destinations.
The lack of research on these migrants, as well as the empirical weaknesses of many other debates on transnationalism and global mobility, leave a clear opportunity for a new kind of integrated research agenda on global mobility and the international migration of the highly skilled. The political economy of globalization can too easily become an overly structural and faceless account of the capitalist logics of global investment and labor demand. Yet, without a structural dimension – without an emphasis on the constraining nature of global economic and demographic trends, or of efforts to control and/or liberalize migration flows by governments – the imagined “agency” of migrants and movers can become an insubstantial, de-contextual, reified thing. Both lead to an idealization of social processes that we need to understand from both a structural and agent-centered viewpoint. To a large degree, their agency depends on just how distinct this form of highly skilled migration is from other more constrained kinds – in both top down demographic and policy terms, and bottom up ethnographic ones. There is little or nothing to connect these two sides – partly because they are likely so separated by the distinct theories and methodologies that the different generations of global and migration scholars have used.
Addressing the methodology gap
The UCLA
International Institute working group on global mobility was brought together
with just these issues in mind. We sought to both identify the empirical
lacunae in current global and migration
studies on highly skilled migrants in the global economy, and to transcend the
methodological barriers that leave demographers, economists, political
scientists and ethnographers of international migration, unable to fully
integrate their diverse macro, meso and micro interests – indeed, unable to
even talk to one another.
Methodological divides have ensured that there is rarely an attempt to
cross-reference their distinctive contributions: the highly structural,
quantitative analyses of demographers and political economists; the explanatory,
process based approach of comparative policy and institutional analysts; and
the ethnographic, interviews and life-story approaches of qualitative
researchers. The interdisciplinary demands of migration research, however,
dictate that all such dimensions are
needed to specify the balance between global structural trends, mediating
political forces, and the reassertion of agency and context when migrants’
voices are listened to. The group established a congenial environment in which
a genuinely inter-methodological dialogue between these three types of research
became possible. Focus came from both the topic and its locations: looking at
highly skilled migration in the
The organization of this book reflects our combined efforts to respect the strengths of each respective methodology. Qualitative work is rarely in an authorative position by itself to generalize its case study, or small sample findings; a quantitative backdrop is always necessary. Explanatory efforts to isolate causal factors determining political processes still always benefit from interpretative work about the meanings and contexts of specific actors. Yet macro-level analyses, equally, should always be carried through meso-level institutional mediation to micro-level insights: into an appreciation of the very real consequences of these structures on the lives of actual individuals and groups. Having first established something quantitatively, or structurally, the most useful role of qualitative work is thus usually to show how these trends express themselves in the real life experiences of agents, both individual and collective, as mediated by context, contingency, and the unpredictability of life stories and circumstances. Our book thus sets out various analyses of demographic and political evidence, before moving into a substantial selection of specific ethnographic and interviews-based case studies. Along the way, several key themes can be highlighted. These take the form of challenging assumptions often made in the global and migration studies about highly skilled migrants and migration; and of rethinking three of the major regional contexts in which such migration is taking place. This will enable us to identify the various components of an ambitious research agenda, that is reflected in both the finished chapters we present here, as well as the contributory research of other members of our group that can be accessed via our website.[2]
Challenging assumptions
Despite its visibility as a conceptual reference point in migration studies, there has, as we have argued, been a lack of research on international skilled and professional migration: both from the experiential point of view of migrants, and in terms of more structural analysis of demographics and politics. What we find instead in much of the global and transnational literatures, is an explicit or implicit discussion about high skilled migration, often lodged in studies of other kinds of migration or global phenomena, in which a series of “assumptions” about this kind of migration can be found. These assumptions may be true or false, but all need to be interrogated in the light of concrete empirical studies. Working through five such assumptions, then, in fact leads to the emergence of a new, more specified, and more differentiated research agenda on “elite”, “professional”, “highly skilled or “highly educated” international migration – in all its forms.
A polarized world of “elites” and “proles”?
The first assumption concerns the question of who and what constitutes highly skilled migration. Authors routinely refer to higher end migrants as “elites”, usually as a stylized contrast to the disadvantaged, lower class, typically ethnically distinct, putatively “proletariat” migration that is the concern – for other, political reasons – of most researchers in the field. The dichotomy of highly skilled versus unskilled migration glosses over the stratifications within and across categories, as well as significant mediating factors, such as the gendered nature of some highly skilled movements like nursing (Hardill, 2000; Kofman, 2000). Further, the dichotomy obscures the hard realities of the many highly skilled, educated migrants who cross borders as unskilled migrants leaving behind their unconvertible human capital, as it were, behind at the border. Finally, the terminology – if dependent on education, profession, and migrant status - can leave out key populations: particularly international students who, perhaps more than nearly all other groups, are the quintessential avatars of globalization. This will determine data sources, as much as the theoretical arguments that might be made from them. Jeanne Batalova and B. Lindsay Lowell, in fact, offer a clear analysis of the hard methodological choices faced by researchers on this question as part of their contribution.
The explosion of literature on
migration is linked – quite rightly – to concerns with global inequalities,
development, and the exclusionary workings of ethnicity and race. But with
these kind of concerns uppermost for most researchers, it has not been well
equipped to study or understand other forms of apparently “less disadvantaged”
migration, except through a dismissive (“elites”) lens. The globalization
literature cemented this two sided view of international migration, with the
social polarization theme promoted by the leading studies of the global city
(Sassen, 2001; Friedmann and Goetz-Wolff, 1982; Friedmann, 1986). The image of
high-rise corporate downtowns populated by a sharp suited global elite service
industry workforce, but serviced by an army of lower class immigrant cleaners,
shop owners, domestic home help, and sex workers, is a powerful one, that rings
true in many contexts. A graphic example is Kloosterman, van der Leun and
Rath’s study (1998) of the two sides of the tracks that bifurcate the Bijlmer suburb of
Using contrasting methodologies,
both Ettore Recchi and Adrian Favell in this volume build on the observation
that the real action in international migration is, in future, likely to be in
the broad middle of society. Highly developed societies typically have fat
bell-shaped class structures, which means that the massification of hitherto
“elite” professional career opportunities internationally – particularly within
an integrating
A demand-driven migration?
Demographers and economists have often battled to assert the demand-driven nature of much migration to suggest that it is much less of a threat than politicians suggest (Fischer and Straubhaar, 1996; Piore, 1989). Yet, clearly it is much harder to defuse the relevance of sending conditions on lower-end, poverty and conflict related migration. As a corollary, one might assume that higher-end migration much more perfectly fulfills market demand. Consequences follow from this assumption: that skilled migration is always “selected” by the receiving country; that it is governed by efficient not sub-optimal politics; and that such skilled workers are not replacing or suppressing the job opportunities of natives. If this view were true it would reflect migration at its Pareto efficient best, operating in a George Borjas-type neo-classical world (Borjas, 1989).
The papers in this volume empirically
challenge this neo-classical worldview in several respects. First and foremost,
they show that, in the case of skilled no less than unskilled global migration,
the macro-economic logic of market forces is mediated by institutional barriers
and channeling mechanisms. State policies regarding entry and exit, the
granting or withholding of visas and work permits, and the establishment of
numerical quotas on certain categories of migrant set the permissions and
constraints under which various regimes of immigration are established by
receiving nation-states. A good example is the complicated politics behind the
number of skilled workers allowed H-1B visas, the principle legal channel of temporary
labor migration in the
It is within the context of such mediating state policies and political processes that other institutional level factors challenge simplistic notions of global demand-driven migration. Sandra Lavenex offers a striking overview of how global governance structures, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s negotiations on GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) have reshaped international migration of this kind. The contributors to this volume also specify numerous corporate and professional steering mechanisms that structure the opportunities and constraints experienced by skilled professionals who wish to advance their life chances by transnational migration. These include, but are not limited to, intra-corporate transfer policies, the existing division of labor within transnational corporations, professional information networks and social connections, and corporate and professional training regimes. All of these institutional level policies and practices shape the contours of skilled global migration, often in ways quite different from pareto optimal assumptions about market efficiency. Finally, our studies reveal that neo-classical assumptions about the efficient operation of markets ignore the normative and ideological constraints that may effect the dynamics of the global mobility of skilled migrants. For example, the norms of multinational corporate culture, as well as the prevailing national cultures of sending and receiving societies, may affect processes of global mobility in different ways. Such conceptions can help create subtle forms of social exclusion, or set internalized limits on the vision and imagination of potentially mobile subjects.
So is there an efficient global
competition for skills, in which countries with “points based” quotas come out
on top (Freeman, 1999; Salt and McLaughlan, 2002)? This is a familiar refrain
from “immigration reformers” seeking to make the case for more high-end
immigration, usually at the expense of the putatively less desirable. The
argument is made that the
Brains keep on draining?
In decades past, high skilled migration raised the specter of “brain drain” from developing countries, with an enormous attendant literature and policy debate. Since then, high skilled and educated mobility has become far more complex and diversified, with the brain drain assumption challenged on numerous fronts. From “brain drain” to “brain gain” and “brain circulation” in a competitive global economy, the migration literature and popular press now underscore the new patterns, in which engineers and services can be more easily found, and more cheaply located, in regions that were previously identified as brain drain origin regions, especially in China and India. This, in fact, is the very root of the “outsourcing” phenomenon now so prevalent in the global economy.
Again, a simple equation lies behind the supposed distinctiveness of higher end migration: that the highest skilled are freer to move, that they more able to carry away with them the benefits of their own human capital, and hence that they automatically represent a “brain loss” for their countries of origin. The brain drain/gain/circulation question has in fact become the biggest single area of research on skilled migrants, as reviewed in depth by Szelenyi, and Lowell and Batalova in this volume. This is because of its sharp policy implications in developing countries in terms of economic development and political stability. Such fears of the developmental costs of brain drain assume a zero sum game in which sending countries lose as the developed world creams off the best and the brightest. But is it always the best and the brightest who move?
As
global movement becomes easier, in fact, this need not be the case. In a more
global world the best and the brightest might in fact be potentially hyper
mobile entrepreneurs who are now able to stay at home with the new emergence of
technical industries in developing countries or, when they do move, use
transnational networks, and contribute to the economic development of their
countries and regions of origin. In fact, these new patterns are already
evident. Whereas in the past thirty years, large numbers of Asian students came
to the
A second problem with the zero sum
assumption underlying the brain gain/brain debate is that this formulation
ignores, or at best understates, the frequent back and forth movement of
migrants, ideas, knowledge, information and skill sets, that is now a routine part of contemporary transnationalism. These
back and forth movements are part of a pattern of trans-local interconnectivity,
that many skilled migrants, like their unskilled counterparts, maintain to
their regions and localities of origin (Cheng and Yang, 1998). In fact, their
relative affluence and privileged status may in fact encourage them to be more
transnational in outlook and allegiance, contrary to individualist expectations.
As the respective chapters by Szelenyi, Chakravartty, and Bozkurt demonstrate,
the evolving ties of international students in the
“Controlled” immigration versus
“frictionless” mobility?
International migration studies have benefited considerably from geographers and critical theorists reminding them that geographical mobility in all its forms is something they should consider part of the subject, even when it is not officially classified as typical state-to-state “immigration”. One of the benefits of this has been the recognition that those forms of spatial mobility – moving from place a to place b – that get classified as im-migration are so classified for political reasons. They signal the historical state monopoly on freedom of movement that was one of the key emergent “pastoral” features of the modern territorially defined nation-state, and its growing bureaucratic powers to “penetrate” society and thus shape society in its own image (Torpey, 2000). Without sovereign political regulation of movement – in the shape of citizenship and naturalization laws, welfare rights for members, and the control and classification of border crossing and re-settlement – migration would just be people moving around (Zolberg 1999; Joppke, 1998). Typically, among those moving across the borders of territorial “container” states, there are the immigrants (e.g., refugees and the economically desperate), who are moved by forces beyond their control; and then there the others, most generally thought of as “international travelers” (e.g., tourists, businessmen, expats, exchange students, retirees) who move by choice alone. The first form – the story goes – elicit categorization and strict state control of numbers; the second melt through borders, untouched by the state, their uncapped numbers reflecting only market demand, commercial interests, and the dictates of economic and human capital accumulation. In a globalizing world, these are the masters of collapsing time/space coordinates, to echo the much discussed thesis of Zygmunt Bauman on mobility as the new index of global stratification (Bauman, 1998). The clarity of the stark official lines between the two are such that even many questioning scholars do not put into doubt the construction of such routine bureaucratic legal classifications.
Trends in global mobility support these distinctions in some senses, but go quite against it in others. On the affirmative side, as Lavenex (this volume) points out, even after two successive decades of control rhetoric and all kinds of efforts at international police cooperation, there is evidence of new forms of mobility slipping the immigration category. There is, she argues, a reinforced disassociation of regulated or unwanted migration, as officially viewed, from other forms of international mobility that can be allowed, even encouraged and institutionalized, under various international business and trade agreements such as the GATS. In some ways, these latter forms of migration are becoming more like trade in goods and capital, transformed into a temporary mobility that is less visible on the state’s radar. Tourist migration and the business migration of temporary “non-immigrant” workers or “posted” service personnel are cases in point, illustrating the multiple new ways that temporary mobility is possible. In cases that are more politically visible, such as the outsourcing of skilled services, national attempts to enact “clawback” measures at the national level have been blocked by WTO regulations. These are part and parcel of the process of supra-national private governance that authors such as Sassen (1996) and Strange (1996) have feted as states “losing control”. These new developments do not mean that the state has ceased to be a player in the politics of skilled labor migration, but rather that it is no longer a clearly controlling player.
Look closer, however, at the apparently clear disassociation, and the two kinds of mobility are approaching each other. Migration is clearly not what it used to be, given the ever increasing diversity of channels and opportunities. Many of those moving into and through these mobility channels are not rich white folk from Europe and America, but Indian software engineers, Central and South Americans able to get six months tourist visas to the West, or Koreans and Chinese using US immigration loopholes to get their children educated in the US, and on a fast track to citizenship. These movements are using visa categories available to anyone who can get enough money together, and who happens to come from a US or Europe approved country; all can only be thought of very ambiguously as “immigration”, although “temporary” in these cases, as Lavenex points out, can mean anywhere between three months and five years. However, this time dimension can often lead to a kind of immigrant experience. The experience of an international traveler is often assumed to be that of a “sojourner” and no more; a “frictionless” mobility, characterized by an absence of any kind of meaningful encounter or incorporation in the host society. But, in fact, highly skilled migration brings with it both different mechanisms for entry, and distinctive challenges and opportunities for incorporation. It is not a frictionless mobility, but rather a differently tracked mobility, with its own costs and constraints.
While the unchallenged transnational sojournment of the highly skilled and educated might once have been seen as evidence of the state losing control, this is no longer so, as migration bleeds into mobility. There is a re-regulation of these new forms, such that immigration is arguably becoming a less important focus of control than the new global mobility. In the aftermath of 9/11, it is increasingly these other forms of movement/mobility that are the big state security concern. There has been a growing perception that the “alien threat” might come more from the ranks of students, tourists and business travelers – hitherto a massive blind spot in border scrutiny – rather than official immigrant categories. After all, “true” immigrants have been subject to much more stringent screening that others coming through on a waiver basis or study visa, and they have also, of course, expressed a desire to become (for example) American, rather than simply exploiting mobility opportunities as free floating global movers. The new control technologies of the American state have been targeted at these now suspect movers, turning to bio-metric monitoring, and multiple new layers of bureaucratic paperwork, as the fulfilling of an almost Foucauldian effort in bio-power to cleanse a globalizing world from “terrorists”. Katalin Szelenyi documents some of the difficulties that international students have encountered in this new environment.
The
cooperative attitudes of other major world players indicate that states might
seek to outdo each other technologically in their enthusiasm for these new
forms of bureaucratic “governmentality”. The compliant stance of the European
Union – the
Human capital: All you need to succeed?
The all purpose lubricant of the (allegedly) frictionless world of elite global mobility is human capital, in which the “human” part is measured in terms of internationally recognized qualifications and quantifiable talent, and is every bit as universal and inalienable as human rights. Economic capital might indeed matter less in a truly neo-classical market for migration, in which talent and enterprise would drive the migration calculus, and where internationally recognized education or experience (rather than the right family background) would be the one way ticket to global elite status (Borjas, 1989). Again, the economist’s theory here does not match empirical realities. It turns out that faster social and spatial mobility, based on the “universal” metric of skill and talent, does not in fact remove the challenge of incorporation. Culture and particularistic know-how still impose all the difficulties of integration on these kinds of migrants. Moreover, even if mobility itself has become a form of privileged capital, not all other forms of capital are as mobile as elite status is supposed to guarantee.
Social networks (i.e., who you know and how this can help you) might be the secret of success globally as much as nationally or in your home town, but the real power of the global mobility myth stems from its individualist faith: the idea that the human capital of education can take you where you want to go, regardless of social structure or social reproduction. The globally talented are supposed to be able to make it work anywhere, even without local connections or embedded networks. One assumption of this kind would be that the human capital rich face fewer problems of discrimination, exploitation, and/or exclusion from receiving societies than do other foreigners.
On many straightforward issues regarding attitudes to migrants, this is still likely to be true. However, the very idea of a world uncritically open to the globally mobile is premised on the idea, promoted by some theorists of mobility (i.e., Urry, 2000), that societies (for the highly mobile at least) no longer exist – and therefore, that non-spatially located forms of capital have essentially interchangeable values in different locations. Were this the case, the obstacles encountered and submitted to by other migrants less rich in capital (the less talented) – forces of integration, such as national norms, sanctions for difference, or hierarchies of insider/outsider status, manifest as privilege and exclusion – should simply not apply here. Those with human capital mobility are thought to be able to exist “outside” of society and yet be effortlessly able to integrate when they choose to in their host destination. Integration, for them, would somehow escape the coercion of a sociological process, and become more of an à la carte set of individualistic choices, in which one can always out-trump the imposition of any particular norm or constraint by an appeal to post-national rights or one’s mobility right of exit.
Evidence on this question needs to be qualitative. We must look at the experiences of some of the most mobile, talented, human capital rich migrants on the planet and see just how they get along in their chosen host societies. The chapters by Chavravartty, Szelenyi, Bozkurt and Favell in part three of the book offer rich material to this end. High earnings, comfortable unquestioned status, and accelerated professional success through mobility are not uncommon. These migrants are indeed choosing their own paths, and garnering rewards from corporate or educational systems that reward universal rather than local standards. However, the picture muddies a great deal over time. It is rare to find that selective integration really works. We find instead that their power to choose only means they are choosing to stay out of local societies. They may be very functional parts of the cities they live in, in terms of economic consumption, but they have no voice politically or socially. Their ability to change or impact the places to which they have migrated is limited. This might seem a negligible drawback for the globally mobile, until we remember that over time “everyday” issues of housing, taxation, health, child-care, schooling, and retirement, all require some engagement and negotiation with local social structures that inevitably favor insiders. Failure to master the local rules of the game in fact may lead to a subtle exclusion from the benefits of long term residence. Freed of the less pressurized, coercive adaptation imposed on less capital rich immigrants, they may remain constrained to live the expensive life of the permanent expat, exploited by the city around them, and forced instead into a less than easily sustainable transnational lifestyle, that debars them from any meaningful “settlement”.
For the highly mobile, the work environment
is at least meant to function well as place where human capital is recognized
and convertible. Here too, however, mobility has costs as well as benefits. Skilled
migrants, because of foreign status, can face “glass ceilings” in professional
advancement, not commensurate with education, experience or professional
attainment, as Chakravartty points out. Because of the precariousness of the H-1B
type immigration status, it can be argued that skilled migrants to the
In his incendiary manifesto on offshore living for the globally mobile, libertarian Ian Angell recommends living like a “new barbarian” as a way to escape the burdens and responsibilities of nation-state membership in a fast globalizing world (Angell, 2000). Like master thief Robert de Niro in the classic Michael Mann movie, tax and citizenship evading barbarians have got to be able to take everything they own or care about and run, the moment they feel the Heat around the corner. But states are always catching up and states are globalizing their reach too. US citizens abroad, for example, always have to file a tax return or they may lose their citizenship. This can turn into a nasty catch 22 for dual citizens or permanent residents when they then find they cannot voluntarily “lose” their citizenship or residence status unless they can demonstrate they are not giving it up for financial reasons. In short, the offshore world in which it is easy to be a transnational barbarian may not really exist. Life outside of such everyday structures we do have is a life impossible to imagine. The permanently mobile and moving need to remember: live like a barbarian, and you might just die like one.
Rethinking regional contexts
The second part of our research agenda has been to look again at the major world regional contexts in which highly skilled migration is happening. This involves thinking through and differentiating the specific contextual research questions that might be asked in different global locations, and in relation to different forms of mobility, such as international students, workers in multi-national corporations, and high-tech professionals. Across the board, as Batalova and Lowell point out, one issue that immediately arises is the dearth of instruments to calculate and break down the magnitude of highly skilled migration wherever it is occurring. One immediate research agenda, therefore, concerns the question of what are the best analytical frameworks for ascertaining both the scale and specificity of such mobility. Research in future is likely to have to think creatively about combining official national and international sources, with other kinds of investigative procedures.
In terms of free
movement of persons, the European Union is the global leader, as it were, of regional
mobility possibilities, far outstripping those to be found within the regional
groupings of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Association) or ASEAN (the
Association of South East Asian Nation, which sometimes meets as ASEAN “plus
four”, i.e., the big four of Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan). Only in
Ironically,
the dramatic institutional encouragement of free movement in
Several
interesting research questions are suggested by the chapters dealing with
European migration trends in this volume. For one, why is it that Europeans no
longer move much, particularly in the light of their dramatic mobility in
previous eras? The point where the ultra-mobile economic theory of economic
integration, hits the apparent cultural fact of local and regional identities
and their relative immobility, is a
fertile place for understanding some of specificities of European society. Is
there a distinctive form of regionalized capitalism embedded in contemporary
European social and institutional forms? Or, put another way, how is the
unfettered neo-liberal notion of mobility
tempered by welfarist, community-based or other forms of closure, when
mobility threatens social reproduction, identity over time, or stable long term
returns? An equally keen indicator of the specificities of European society, is
the encounter of non-Europeans with receiving host countries, struggling with
the long term consequences of immigration. Much work has been done on the
immigrant experience in post-war
In a North
American context, it is
As
shown in the chapters by Freeman and Hill, and Money and Falstrom, the
The questionable self-containment of
the
Asia-Pacific
No work has done
more to cement the image of Asian migrants across the Asia-Pacific as the
paradigmatic transnational global movers, than Aihwa Ong’s widely read work on Flexible Citizenship (1999), about
Chinese transmigrants in the region. Remarkable new ethnographic work of this
kind will surely still be done on the manifold forms of migrant “agency”
displayed by Chinese, Korean, Japanese migrants and others, using loopholes in
national immigration regimes in the US and Canada, to create new kinds of
networks and practices across the region. Scholars are beginning to conceive of
fascinating new projects looking at the social organization of “astronaut”
families jetting between Asia, Australia and North America, or the strategic
planning of pregnancy or schooling that families use to gain US citizenship for
their children, or gain access to the US educational system. The relatively
invisible migration of long term, overstaying visitors from
Increasingly, Mexicans and Central
Americans deserve to be seen in a similar light, as participants in a
Pacific-Rim regional space, centered on the very porous economic opportunities
moving in and out of the
Research on migration in the
Asia-Pacific or
Conclusion
The Human Face of Global Mobility aims to put the empirical study of highly skilled, professional or educated migrants back on to research agendas in migration or global studies, which is more attuned to thinking about immigrants and immigration at the lower end of the labor market, and then usually in terms of minority race, ethnicities or cultures. Instead, we seek to open up opportunities for researchers seeking to resist the clichéd opposition of “elite” and “ethnic” migrants in a polarized global economy.
Our
chapters offer different views on whether highly skilled migration is
fundamentally different from unskilled migration, as well as how the idea of
“global mobility” differs from more conventional notions of “international
migration”. The chapters in this volume certainly document how highly skilled
movements are looked upon more favorably in the context of liberalizing international
trade regimes, and argues for their growing importance in national and international
policy. We point to the distinctive dimensions of national policies on highly
skilled migration, showing how it is as important to differentiate among
different instances and types of highly skilled migration, as it is to
recognize differences between highly skilled and unskilled migration. Evidence
we bring forward here certainly suggests that the economic impact of highly
skilled migration movements has moved beyond mere “brain drain” in many
contexts, and is now encouraging “brain circulation” to include new forms of
global competition. We also offer good qualitative evidence for thinking that,
although mobility across and
integration into receiving societies,
may differ quite considerably in its patterns to the experiences of less
skilled migrants, these privileges far from remove the challenges and
difficulties involved in global mobility and international relocation. All of
these themes, explored here through detailed quantitative, institutional and
ethnographic work, add up to an open invitation to further research. Mobility
is clearly a feature of the globalizing contemporary world, and mobility breaks
open and extends many of our conventional ideas about international migration.
What is needed now is a whole new range of empirical studies that can begin to
fill out the research agenda sketched here.