The Education‐Migration Industry: International Students, Migration Policy and the Question of Skills

Abstract

This special section specifically focuses on student‐migrants and the way they are being catered to by an emerging education‐migration industry. The articles included build upon the observation that especially within the Asia‐Pacific region there is an increasing conflation and entanglement between categories of international students and skilled migrants. This has led to an emerging “industry” that facilitates study‐abroad trajectories and acts as broker for two‐step migration pathways. This Introduction aims to situate the research presented here within the broader context of a burgeoning field of research which examines the growing popularity of international education across the Asia‐Pacific region; the way its emergence is increasingly entangled with specific ambitions that skilled migration programmes cater to; and the way highly regulated skilled migration programmes have given rise to a migration industry in general.

COVID-19 Migration Policy Measures for International Students and Graduate Job Searchers: A Lost Round in the Battle for Brains

“…The brain drain is only mentioned on the side, the need for a new well-trained work force seems key. This fits with the observation on the Asia-Pacific region where student migration and high-skilled migration are increasingly entangled; opportunities for onward migration have become one of the deciding factors for international students to pick their destination country and university (Baas, 2019).…”

Toward a Framework for (Re)Thinking the Ethics and Politics of International Student Mobility

“…Again, questions of ethics and politics are germane to these perspectives, yet they have so far remained implicit and relatively underexplored. For instance, research on educational intermediaries seems only burgeoning (see Baas, 2019), and more questions can be asked about the ethicality of intermediary or brokerage. Similarly, the Bourdieusian analysis of the role of ISM in re/producing privilege and inequalities is also a deeply political perspective, yet it has seldom been considered under a common framework with existing discourses on ethics and politics in the international student literature.…”

Temporary migration and inequalities in the Asian–European migration system

“…(2017, 2019), which compiled diverse studies on the two-way migration processes between Asia and Europe, are a notable exception. Some other studies have probed TM of specific migrant categories in the Asia-Europe migration system: European expatriates in China (Cai and Su, 2020), mobile academics returning to China (Wang, 2020), international students moving from Asia to Europe (Aksakal et al., 2019) and from Europe to Asia (Baas, 2019), or Thai berry-pickers working seasonally in Sweden and Finland (Niyomsilpa et al., 2017), have been scrutinized. Despite these efforts to understand the reasons for and the outcomes of TM, the question remains: what exactly is temporary migration ?…”