International education is an important channel of labor migration. Most commonly, this form of labor migration is considered as “brain drain,” represented by the retention of graduate students in science and engineering in the host labor market. This case study of contemporary Chinese student migration to Japan shows that international students have different credentials, interests, and motivations for migrating abroad, and consequently provide the host society both unskilled and skilled labor power. Moreover, Chinese students’ labor market practices as skilled labor migrants show their important roles in the economic globalization. Aside from scientific and engineering skills, Chinese students use their linguistic and cultural competencies to act as intermediaries between their host and home economies.

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Selecting labour migrants based on skill has become a widely practised migration policy in many countries around the world. Since the late twentieth century, research on 'skilled' and 'highly skilled' migration has raised important questions about the value and ethics of skill-based labour mobility. More recent research has begun to question the concept of skill and skill categorisation in both government policy and academic research. Taking the view that migrants' skill is socially constructed, we centre our discussion on three questions: Who are the arbitrators of skill? What constitutes skill? And how is skill constructed in the migration process and in turn, how does skill affect the mobility? We show that diverse actors are involved in the process of identifying, evaluating and shaping migrant skill. The interpretation of migrants' skill is frequently distorted by their ascriptive characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender and nationality, reflecting the influence of colonial legacy, global inequality as well as social stratification. Finally, this special issue emphasises the complex, and frequently reciprocal, relationship between skill and mobility.

Labelled as the third wave of migration out of post-reform China, the recent emigration of wealthy Chinese has attracted worldwide attention. Although this form of mobility involves primarily the richest 0.1 per cent of the Chinese population, the high profile of the people who move and the amount of wealth implied have made it a sensational social phenomenon. Through interviews, participant observation and media reports, this paper searches for the social meanings of this trend of emigration. Journalists generally attribute the exodus of the rich to a desire to secure their wealth, an aspiration for a different education for their children, or concerns with air pollution and food safety. What this paper argues is that underneath these stated motivations, emigration is in fact a form of class-based consumption, a strategy for class reproduction, and a way to convert economic resources into social status and prestige. “Emigration” (yimin), a form of mobility that may not entail settling abroad, is a path created by wealthy Chinese striving to be among the global elite.

This article examines the education‐migration industry that has channelled students from China and Viet Nam into Japan over the past three decades and discusses the conditions for the emergence of such an industry, the major actors and the reasons for their changing roles and practices. It argues that the education‐migration industry in Japan emerged because of the discrepant institutional logics. Japan's reluctance to open the door for labour import, despite its acute labour shortage, has turned international education into a sanctioned channel of labour migration and thereby created opportunities for international education to become a thriving migration industry. As long as this institutional gap remains, government regulations will only create new sources of power and profits for brokers who can navigate complex regulations and employ illicit means to satisfy the legal requirements. The education‐migration industry is therefore a derivative of Japan's immigration regime and actively interacts with government policies.