Current Policy Trends in Skilled Immigration Policy

Highly skilled migration between the Global North and South: gender, life courses and institutions

“…Labour market policies keep adapting to the economic fluctuations in the host countries. There has been considerable attention to the role of policies in shaping skilled migration from a macro perspective (Boucher and Cerna 2014;Cerna 2011Cerna , 2014. Migration policies change depending largely on the political climate and to some extent on the economic regulations that govern the market (Cerna 2014).…”

“…According to a joint paper released by the OECD, World Bank and ILO (2015), the share of skilled migrants compared to all other migrant groups has been continuously increasing and by 2010/ 2011, nearly one-third of all highly skilled migrants in the OECD came from Asia and one-fifth of all tertiary educated migrants in the OECD area are from countries such as India, China and the Philippines. Many of the skilled migration programmes are geared towards attracting the skilled workforce from the Global South (Boucher and Cerna 2014). For example, in the EU many skilled migration programmes are geared towards third country nationals, as citizens of the EU countries have no mobility or residency restrictions within the EU.…”

“…This value or impact is measured in terms of the improved productivity, higher innovation potential and a wider range of skill sets. Boucher and Cerna (2014) highlight that skilled migrants are more attractive for countries compared to other immigrant groups as they are often viewed as less welfare dependent and have a skill set that is ready for the labour market. From a human capital perspective, the countries in the Global North benefit from the skills that they did not invest in developing.…”

Going up or going down? Occupational mobility of skilled migrants in Australia

“…Migrants are increasingly entering the major settler societies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand as well as the United Kingdom through skilled migration programs. Based on a human capital approach, these programs use points systems to select immigrants according to a mix of skill, education and language levels, age and occupational experience (Anderson ; Boucher and Cerna ). The points system is a Canadian innovation, first introduced in 1962 and adopted by Australia in 1973 (Papademetriou and Sumption ; Walsh ).…”

“…More recently, greater emphasis has been placed on using such programs to fill skill gaps in local labour markets, and therefore immigration flows have increased in the skill‐based streams. Canada and Australia are often considered exemplars of such policies (Boucher and Cerna ). Australia led the way in 1979 with a system focusing on the economic attributes of migrants (Walsh ) and in 1996 introduced two new programs, the independent skilled and the employer‐nominated programs (Wright ).…”