Adrian Favell - The Human Face of Global Mobility

Series Editor, Michael Peter Smith

Volume 1 Power, Community and the City

Volume 2 Pacific Rim Cities in the World Economy

Volume 3 Breaking Chains: Social Movements and Collective Action

Volume 4 After Modernism: Global Restructuring and the Changing Boundaries of City Life

Volume 5 Marginal Spaces

Volume 6 Transnationalism From Below

Volume 7 City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity

Volume 8 The Human Face of Global Mobility

First published 2006 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006040414

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The human face of global mobility : international highly skilled migration in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific / Michael Peter Smith and Adrian Favell, editors.

p. cm.(Comparative urban and community research ; v. 8)

ISBN 1-4128-0520-1 (alk. paper)

1. Brain drain. 2. Professional employees. 3. Skilled labor. 4. Emigration and immigration. I. Smith, Michael P. II. Favell, Adrian. III. Series.

HT110.C65 v. 8
[HD8038]
[331.12791]

2006040414

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0520-9 (pbk)

Jeanne Batalova, Migration Policy Institute, Washington DC

dl Bozkurt, PhD Candidate in Sociology, UCLA

Paula Chakravartty, Assistant Professor of Communication, UMass, Amherst

Dana Zartner Falstrom, PhD Candidate in Political Science, UC Davis

Adrian Favell, Associate Professor of Sociology, UCLA

Miriam Feldblum, Faculty Associate in Humanities and Special

Assistant to the President, Caltech

Gary P. Freeman, Professor of Government, University of Texas, Austin

David K. Hill, PhD Candidate in Government, Cornell University

Sandra Lavenex, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Bern

B. Lindsay Lowell, Director of Policy Studies, Georgetown University

Jeannette Money, Associate Professor of Political Science, UC Davis

Ettore Recchi, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Florence

Michael Peter Smith, Professor of Community Studies and Development, UC Davis

Katalin Szelnyi, PhD Candidate in Education, UCLA

Thanks also are due to the several other regular or occasional members of the UCLA working group on global mobility, who contributed papers, ideas and commentaries during our two years of meetings.

Rafael Alarcn, Sociology, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte

William Clark, Geography, UCLA

Jorge Durand, Anthropology, University of Guadalajara

Rubn Hernndez-Lon, Sociology, UCLA

David Jacobson, Sociology, Arizona State University

Marian Katz, Sociology, UCLA

Harlan Koff, Political Science, University of Lille

Ivan Light, Sociology, UCLA

Marianne de Laet, Anthropology, Harvey Mudd College

Mingang Lin, Sociology, Suchong University

Steve Loyal, Sociology, University College Dublin

Paul Ong, Urban Planning, UCLA

Philip Martin, Agricultural Economics, UC Davis

Roger Penn, Sociology, University of Lancaster

Renee Reichl, Sociology, UCLA

Sabeen Sandhu, Sociology, UC Irvine

Kristin Surak, Sociology, UCLA

Roger Waldinger, Sociology, UCLA

Takeo Yamamoto, Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University

Min Zhou, Sociology, UCLA

Xiaolei Wu, Anthropology, UCLA

Thanks also especially to Leah Halvorson, UCLA, for help with logistics throughout. Additional papers and commentaries are available on our wesbite:

http://www.isop.ucla.edu/ccgr/mobility.asp

Favell Adrian, Feldblum Miriam and Peter Smith Michael

Talk of globalization by political economists has familiarized us with the idea that the continued liberalization of world trade, and the movement of goods, capital and services on which it is based, is also leading to a spectacular liberalization of the free movement of persons. Authors such as Saskia Sassen (1996, 2001) link these developments with a consequent decline in the control powers of nation-states over population movement, something seen as the fulfillment of a new age of migration (Castles and Miller, 2003). The discussion is, of course, controversial. Despite market forces, the control functions of states do continue to pose obvious obstacles to poorer international migrants. Labor, for other political and cultural reasons, is often not as mobile as other factors of production. Political scientists are also right to remind us that political and institutional factorsthe drama of international relations, variation in national policy approaches, attempts to coordinate border control or the policing of movement, and evolving modes of international governanceall pose significant constraints and boundaries on unfettered movement, at all levels of the economy (Zolberg, 1999; Freeman, 1995: Money, 1999; Guiraudon and Joppke, 2001).

In most of these discussions however, labor migration is undifferentiated. Distinctions are rarely drawn between the processes, policies or politics shaping highly skilled or professional migration, as opposed to those behind unskilled migration. To be sure, when the focus turns to the movement of highly educated and talented migrants, many assume there are likely to be fewer barriers of all kinds to these forms of global free movement and that the phenomenon is growing in magnitude and significance. To put it in the parlance of global city theorists (Castells 2000; Taylor, 2004), the virtual space of flows on which new global networks of capital and trade are based, must also be peopled by mobile persons who, it is assumed, are embodied by the worlds growing cadre of international highly skilled migrants (Beaverstock, 2001c). Some authors even speak of the emergence of new global elites or a transnational capitalist class, with unprecedented mobile and cosmopolitan lifestyles, presaging dramatic social change to the national order of things (e.g., Sklair, 2001). These heroes of global free movementtop ranked employees of multinational corporations, international finance, IT companies, scientific research agencies and so onare, presumably, the human hands, brains and faces behind the impersonal dynamics of global markets and nation-state decline.