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Confronted with structural demographic challenges, during the last decade European countries have adopted new labour migration policies. The sustainability of these policies largely depends on the intentions of migrants to stay in their country of destination for the long term or even permanently. Despite a growing dependence on skilled labour migrants, very little information exists about the dynamics of this new wave of migration and existing research findings with their focus on earlier migrant generations are hardly applicable today. The article comparatively tests major theoretical approaches accounting for permanent settlement intentions of Germany's most recent labour migrants from non-European countries on the basis of a new administrative dataset. Although the recent wave of labour migrants is on average a privileged group with regard to their human capital, fundamentally different mechanisms are shaping their future migration intentions. In contrast to neo-classical expectations, a first path highlights economic factors that determine temporary stays of a creative class benefiting from opportunities of an increasingly international labour market. Instead, socio-cultural and institutional factors are the decisive determinants of a second path leading towards permanent settlement intentions. Three main factors-language skills, the family context and the legal framework-make migrants stay in Germany, providing important implications for adjusting and strengthening labour migration policies in Europe.

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International migration is often characterised as a process of immigration from economically less developed to highly developed countries. Whereas the factors driving those flows and the integration of the respective ethnic groups are widely analysed, the international mobility of the populations of precisely those affluent societies is regularly missed and less-frequently studied. The chapter describes the research design of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study as one of the first endeavours to study the internationally mobile populations from prosperous welfare states. Following an origin-based probability sampling of internationally migrating German citizens, it offers survey data to study the consequences of emigration and remigration along the life course. The chapter discusses the quality of this new data infrastructure along the survey lifecycle and compares the distribution of central demographic characteristics in the survey with official reference statistics. The aim is to establish this approach as a new avenue for studying the global lives of internationally mobile populations.