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This chapter explores how European countries can improve their position in the international competition for talent. It examines existing frameworks on highly skilled migration in three EU states—Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—and compares their frameworks to labor migration policy in the United States, their main competitor. Each EU country has recently introduced immigration policies that target skilled migrants. The analysis finds that these new policies are more favorable than they use to be toward high-skilled workers on eligibility criteria, special provision for young migrants, validity of permits and access to permanent residence, family migration options, employment rights, and social security provisions. The results also indicate that now, in many aspects, these countries are more favorable to high-skilled migrants than the United States. However, these policies are still works in progress, and as a result, the United States continues to be more attractive to high-skilled immigrants, and a more popular destination.

This section evaluates the policy implications of the brain drain. It focuses on policies that specifically address the causes and consequences of the brain drain. In particular, it explores whether sending countries should rethink their education policy in the face of the brain drain, whether immigration policies in receiving countries are at odds with their aid and development policies, and whether international tax cooperation is required (and feasible) in order to allow for a better sharing of the surplus from international skilled migration. Finally, it discusses the likely effects of the current crisis on the future of international skilled migration from developing to developed countries.

The bulk of academic debate has focused on the increasingly restrictive approach to ordinary immigration and naturalization applicants. This chapter argues that equally important lessons about the current state of citizenship can be learned by critically exploring who is treated as “wanted and welcome.” The discussion focuses on the highly skilled, the new breed of desired migrants. It highlights the increasingly common practice of governments “picking winners” through targeted and strategic grants of citizenship for those with extraordinary talent, while at the same time holding other categories of immigration applicants to ever-stricter admission and permission-to-stay requirements. After identifying and formulating these striking developments, the chapter addresses the core ethical and legal challenges they raise. The discussion concludes by exploring whether and how the rise of skills-based selective migration regimes may impact broader debates about mobility and (selective) openness, migration, and global justice.

This chapter discusses the results of my interviews with post-USSR immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona, which place male-dominated highly skilled and female-dominated marriage migration in the context of scholarship on adaptation and return migration. The two migratory forms have been spurred by the interests of US men in creating monoracial families and by the immense growth in the number of contingent academic positions at US institutions of higher learning. Their differential legal status upon arrival provides post-Soviet marriage and highly skilled migrants with divergent access to economic, social, and cultural forms of US citizenship, community building, and opportunities for return. Highly skilled migrants create middle-class lives, appear less interested in participating in a coethnic community, and maintain limited physical transnational connections, while marriage migrants face downward mobility and dependency, experience greater difficulty connecting to other post-Soviet migrants, and more often consider returning. While they are immediately provided with membership in their husbands’ middle-class lives, the globalized form of US whiteness that marriage migrants are assigned even before they leave their countries of origin creates heightened expectations of their complete assimilation to a middle-class whiteness at the cost of their and often their children’s bicultural and transnational identities.