Attracting and retaining high skilled migrants: European lessons and problems

1
Attracting and retaining high skilled migrants
European lessons and problems

• 7th Europe Asia Young Leaders Forum
• September 4-7, 2008
• Park Hyatt, Seoul
• James Wickham
• Employment Research Centre
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

2
Overview

• Introduction
• Migration and mobility
• Blurred boundary line between travelers and
  migrants
• Service class cosmpolitanism
• Managers and professionals are becoming global
• New reasons for migration
• Its not just the economy stupid!
• Conclusions
• From hard to soft policies?
• Issues and dilemmas

3
Competition for skilled immigrants

• Immigrants often out-perform natives
• Asian engineers highest pay of all US engineers
  (Mahroom, 2000)
• Importing scientists best investment for
  scientific growth (e.g. Fischer, 1996)
• Settler countries selective immigration
• Immigrants as of all skilled occupations
• Australia 25
• Canada 20
• USA 10 (OECD, 2002)
• Continental Europe welfare immigration?
• In Europe (apart from UK and Ireland) immigrants
  are disproportionately in unskilled jobs and now
  have relatively low labour market participation
• Now strong moves (France, Germany) to move
  towards more Anglo-Saxon immigration policy

4
Conventional assumptions

• A global war for talent (zero/sum game)
• Immigration is movement from country A to country
  B for permanent settlement
• High skilled individuals can be attracted by
  correct level of financial incentives
• All of these are debatable.

5
From migration to mobility

• High skill migrants (Mahroum, 2000)
• Managers and executives Accidental tourists
• Engineers and technicians Economy-class
  passengers
• Academics and scientists Pilgrims
• Entrepreneurs Explorers
• Students Passengers
• Most of these are unlikely to permanently settle
  in their destination country, but they will not
  necessarily return home
• New zones of movement
• Global
• Europe
• Anglo-sphere
• American pendulums
• ....?
• There are new zones within which different
  people construct their careers across national
  borders

6
Travelling or maybe migrating?

• The growth of business travel
• Business meetings and trade fairs
• Co-located work (projects, consultancy)
• Multiple workplaces and multiple residencies
• Expatriation
• Long distance commuting
• Except for the first, these can be seen also as
  migration

7
Service class cosmopolitanism

• Traditional model
• Spiralism within national (or international)
  bureaucracy
• Contemporary model
• Boundaryless global career?

8
Changing composition of service class

• UK service class occupations disproportionately
  likely to be born outside UK
• London 30 population foreign born,
  over-represented in top quintile annual earnings
• London sixth biggest French city in world
• Eurostars in Eurocities (Favell)
• Some European cities become escalator cities

9
Percentage foreign born in each educational
category
Germany is the extreme case within Europe of a
national service class.
Source Derived from Dumont and Lemaitre,
CountingTable A4 (OECD, 2005)
10
Moving through Ireland
But remember people can also leave!
Source 2002 Census micro-data (COPSAR)
11
Education and emigration
12
New actors and institutions

• National innovation systems
• Structure and location of research activity
  effects attractiveness and openness to immigrant
  scientists
• Transnational companies
• Towards the transnational community (Morgan,
  2001)?
• And/or global managerial labour market
• Strategies of delocalisation can also increase
  (temporary) immigration (e.g. Millar Salt,
  2007)
• International recruitment agencies
• From executive search to ethnic skilled migration
  chains (Xiang, 2001).

13
Lifestyle migration

• More than ever before, migration can involve
  values and sometimes even fun
• Long tradition of Anzac emigration as walkabout
  (King Shuttleworth, 1995)
• Oppositional migration (e.g. US in 1970s, Poland
  today, quite apart from asylum seekers)
• Student exchanges, gap years, and baristas(what
  matters is not the wage but the quality of
  conversation)
• Cultural centres (from 1920s Paris to
  contemporary Berlin)
• All of this can have crucial effects in the
  serious economy
• Overall growth of the cool economy
• How better coffee bars in Dublin gave Ireland a
  multi-lingual workforce for IT call centres
• And makes cities attractive to off-duty suits

14
Creative class

• A new basis for mobility
• Knowledge workers (Bell), Symbolic analysts
  (Reich), Creatives (Florida)
• Detached from physical workplaces
• Attached to physical living places
• So instead of people moving to jobs, jobs have to
  move to people
• The trick for cities, then, is to figure out how
  to make this mobile talent want to come and
  ideally stay. (Florida, 2005 166)

15
What makes people come?
16
Classifying Policies
17
Dilemmas and issues

• Policy-makers focus on hard policies BUT soft
  policies may be more important
• Much migration is now short-term BUT migrants do
  not want to be Gastarbeiter
• Offering citizenship may be crucial BUT do nation
  states need more than thin citizenship?