This book considers the origins, performance and diffusion of national immigration policies targeting highly skilled immigrants. Unlike asylum seekers and immigrants admitted under family reunification streams, highly skilled immigrants are typically cast as “wanted and welcome” as a consequence of their potential economic contribution to the receiving society and putative assimilability. Testing the degree to which this assumption holds is the principle aim of this book. In contrast to publications which see highly skilled immigration as functional response to labor market needs, the book probes the political and sociological dimensions of policy, drawing on contributions from an international group of established and new scholars from the fields of history, law, political science, sociology, and public policy. The book is organized into four parts. Part I probes the origins of post-WWII immigration policies in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Part II analyzes recent debates on highly skilled immigration policy in the United States, whose origins go back to the 1965 Act by Congress which favored family reunification over skilled immigration. Part III considers the degree to which highly skilled immigrants are welcome, by focusing on the integration trajectories of foreign trained professionals in Canada. Paradoxically, just as Canada has succeeded in orienting its admissions system more explicitly toward privileging highly educated and skilled professionals, highly skilled immigrants have experienced worsening economic outcomes as reflected in rates of unemployment and falling earnings. Part IV considers the internationalization of highly skilled immigration policies, focusing on Europe’s most important immigration countries, Germany and Britain. As is true in Canada, the labor market outcomes for highly skilled immigrants in Europe are disappointing, and the final chapter discusses why this is the case and what might be done to improve matters. Given its combination of cross-disciplinary insights, cross-national comparisons, and empirical richness, the book will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers concerned with immigration policy.

Through a comparative case study analysis of the United Kingdom and Germany, with references to the United States, this study examines the impetuses for and processes by which governments came to choose the points system for immigration control.

As the global economic crisis ripples across the financial, political and social landscape, it is leaving its mark on international migration. The recession, hailed as the worst since the Great Depression, is impacting the scope and pace of international migration and its effects could deepen should the world economy worsen. Governments, businesses and individuals have all felt the damaging consequences of the global downturn, which has shaken confidence in established institutions. The crisis is driving some policymakers and analysts in Europe and North America to re-think their assumptions about labor migration. Yet while policymakers face exceptionally strong popular and political outcry to protect jobs at home, they face mid-term demographic challenges. These two opposing policy pressures require responses that will not only help ease the current economic crisis, but will also secure the long-term prosperity of these regions. This book reflects the effort of the Transatlantic Council on Migration to map how profound demographic change is likely to affect the size and character of global migration flows; and how governments can shape immigration policy in a world increasingly attuned to the hunt for talent. This volume is the second major product of the Council. The Council was launched in 2008 as a new initiative of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in Washington, DC. The Bertelsmann Stiftung and the European Policy Centre are the Council's policy partners.

Skilled migration is rapidly rising as countries vie for the 'best and brightest' migrants to fill labour market shortages or to add to their stock of 'knowledge workers'. The 'knowledge economy', and the increasing value placed on human capital over physical capital, has led to what some describe as a 'war over skills'. Within this context, the way in which Australia seeks to attract skilled permanent and temporary migrants is put under the spotlight in this very timely publication. Are we open and flexible or defensive and protectionist? This book compares the policies of Australia with those of other nations. What makes this book unique is the input of lawyers, for the first time in Australia, in the discussion of issues. Their challenge to existing selection policies, taxation systems and recognition mechanisms provides a major new contribution to these topics.

This International Encyclopedia of Migration will define and explicate terms, concepts and key topics with widespread usage and recurring relevance for learning about and developing the fields of both international and internal migration. With migration being partly defined in the modern era by law and public policy, the subject includes knowledge not only from these areas but also from a full array of academic disciplines. Hence, this encyclopedia will include material from such fields as anthropology, archaeology, criminology, demography, economics, education, ethnic studies, geography, health sciences, history, law, linguistics, public policy, political science, psychology and sociology. As migration has been such an important part of the peopling of all parts of the world, this encyclopedia will also include synopses of major geographic movements from ancient and early history. The International Encyclopedia of Migration will be a significant resource for students, teachers, practitioners, scholars and researchers interested in or working on any aspect of migration in any field. It should be particularly useful for people seeking information and knowledge about migration from fields other than their own.

The economic literature on international migration interests policymakers as well as academics throughout the social sciences. These volumes, the first of a new subseries in the Handbooks in Economics, describe and analyze scholarship created since the inception of serious attention began in the late 1970s. This literature appears in the general economics journals, in various field journals in economics (especially, but not exclusively, those covering labor market and human resource issues), in interdisciplinary immigration journals, and in papers by economists published in journals associated with history, sociology, political science, demography, and linguistics, among others. - Covers a range of topics from labor market outcomes and fiscal consequences to the effects of international migration on the level and distribution of income – and everything in between. - Encompasses a wide range of topics related to migration and is multidisciplinary in some aspects, which is crucial on the topic of migration - Appeals to a large community of scholars interested in this topic and for whom no overviews or summaries exist