International Approaches to Valuing the Professional Skills of Permanent and Temporary Migrants

Abstract

Skilled migration has become a major element of contemporary migration flows. It has developed in scale and variety since the 1930s and now takes many forms, including brain drain, professional transients, skilled permanent migrants and business transfers. It has gone from “brain drain” to the “international exchange of human resources” in fifty years. Originally much skilled migration was forced by conflict or ethnic discrimination, but it has now come to include a search for greater opportunities and better life chances and lifestyles. Globalization and the liberalization of opportunities in newly developing countries mean that there is now also return migration of skilled emigrants and migration of nationals of developed countries to developing countries.