Governing the mobility of skills

About the book: This book offers a critical examination of the way in which the nature and governance of international labour migration is changing within a globalizing environment. It examines how labour mobility and the governance of labour migration are changing by exploring the links between political economy and differentiated forms of labour migration. Additionally, it considers the effects of new social models of inclusion and exclusion on labour migration. Therefore, the book troubles the conventional dichotomies and categorizations – permanent vs. temporary; skilled vs. unskilled; legal vs. illegal -- that have informed migration studies and regulatory frameworks. Theoretically, this volume contributes to an ongoing project of reframing the study of migration within politics and international relations. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, drawing on examples from the European Union, North America and Asia, Governing International Labour Migration will be of interest to students and scholars of migration studies, IPE, international relations, and economics

Thinking UK's medical labour market transnationally

About the book: This volume provides the first detailed overview of the growing phenomenon of the international migration of skilled health workers. The contributors focus on who migrates, why they migrate, what the outcomes are for them and their extended families, what their experiences in the workforce are, and ultimately, the extent to which this expanding migration flow has a relationship to development issues. It therefore provides new, interdisciplinary reflections on such core issues as brain drain, gender roles, remittances and sustainable development at a time when there has never been greater interest in the migration of health workers

Asian women medical migrants in the UK

Introduction: The volume and geographical spread of Asian female migration as well as its impact on the sending countries has led to a rapid growth in research on such migration (Limand Oishi 1996; Yamanaka and Piper 2003). Broadly speaking, there are two strands to this literature, that which focuses on intra-Asian migration (Huang and Yeoh 2003; Wickramasekara 2002; Chin 2003) and that which follows the broad contours of brain drain migration, from countries of the Third World to the First (Parreñas 2001; McGovern 2003). The extent of intra-regional migration in Asia, the conditions under which much of this labour is performed and the new forms of political and civil engagements that have emerged as a result have all evoked feminist attention (Yamanaka and Piper 2003; Piper 2003; Barber 2000). Research on the movement of women from Asia to work in OECD countries, particularly the US (Espiritu 2002; Parreñas 2001) and the U.K. (Anderson, 2000) echoes many of the same concerns. In much of this literature female labour seems to primarily involve body work, work where the female body or 'femininity' are implicated in the nature of work provided (see for instance, Gulati 1994). For instance, most Asian women labour migrants move to take up jobs as domestic workers, sex workers and nurses, professions that are defined by notions of femininity. As Bowlby, Gregory and McKie (1997) argue such notions can act in oppressive ways to structure women's entry into occupations but also shape the form of international female migration. However, women who move from the Third World to the First as well as within Asia also take part in the less feminised sectors of the labour market such as IT where gender exclusivity and male dominance are the norm, although such participation has received much less attention (but see for instance, Yeoh and Willis 2004; Raghuram, 2004a; Raghuram 2004b). Shortages in these sectors in many First World countries have reawakened debates about brain drain and more recently of 'brain circulation' (Saxenian 2001). These forms of migration are also encompassed in the burgeoning literature on highly skilled migration (see for instance, Iredale 2001) yet much of the literature on these topics does not acknowledge the presence of Asian women in skilled migration streams (but see Kofman and Raghuram 2004; Raghuram and Kofman 2004). As more and more countries use labour market needs and the ability of migrants to fill skills shortages as important principles for selecting migrants, it is important to examine the ways in which Asian women too are significant players in skilled migration streams. Recognising the presence of Asian women in skilled migration expands the way in which we think of migrant Asian women and highlights the variations between women who migrate in different ways and through different routes. In this paper I take some tentative steps towards this by highlighting the presence of women doctors who migrate from the Asian subcontinent to the UK, working in a sector where the discourse around migration is relatively ungendered, but often implicitly masculinised. I suggest that migrant women too play an important part in UK's professional labour markets and explore how recognising the presence of Asian women in medical migration can alter the ways in which we think of the presence of Asian women in the UK.1 The rest of the paper is divided into three sections. The first section looks at some debates around migrant women's participation in the labour market and contrasts that with contemporary debates on the broader literature on women's participation in the professions. The following section outlines the extent of migrant women's participation in one sector, i.e. the medical sector of the labour market and the final section outlines some of the implications of these patterns for the way we think about Asian female migration

Locating Care Ethics Beyond the Global North

In care ethics, caring is seen to be embedded in practice and locally contingent. However, despite a large and thriving literature on care practices as they vary across the globe, the implications of the different meanings and geohistories of care for the ethics of care have hardly been addressed. Rather, most theorisations of care ethics have implicitly conceptualised care as a universal practice or drawn on care as practised in the global North. This paper argues that care ethics needs emplacing, and that this emplacement should extend beyond sites in the global North so that feminist theories of care can take account of the diversity of care practices globally. Moreover, given the increasing globalisation of care, different notions of care are often and increasingly in dialogue with each other. As care is relational and enacted across space, the differences in care ethics between places have to be negotiated. This paper, therefore, calls not just for recognising multiplicity in care ethics or even multicultural care ethics, but for theorising the relations between different kinds of care and the ethics that drive them. Finally, both care relations and understandings of care are dynamic; they alter as people migrate, which also needs consideration. This paper argues that a relational and dynamic understanding of varied care offers new theoretical, political and empirical agendas both within geography and for feminist theory

Situating women in the brain drain discourse: discursive challenges and opportunities

Most literature on migration of women from the Global South posits them in feminised roles either within their own households (family migrants) or in the workplace (as sex workers, domestic workers etc.). Even studies that focus on skilled migrant women largely highlight the processes through which they are deskilled (Man, 2004; Salaff and Greve, 2003) so that it is the narrative of migrant women taking up much greater domestic responsibilities in the destination countries that comes to occupy academic research imaginations. It is true that for many women then, femininities very often underwrite the conditions in which migration occurs (Boyd and Greico, 2003) while for others migration ends up becoming a feminising process (Ho, 2006) but these stories do not encompass all the possible ways in which migrant women from the Third World experience migration. At the same time, brain drain discourses and brain circulation discourses that are central framing devices for research on migration rarely recognize gender differentials in these processes of migration. This paper draws on research on women doctors and IT workers to suggest that including the experiences of women in these debates presents a strong challenge to feminist theorizing of migration from the Third World

Which migration, what development: unsettling the edifice of migration and development

Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Zusammenhang von Migration und Entwicklung unter besonderer Berücksichtung verschiedener entwicklungstheoretischer Diskurse. Im ersten Teil wird aufgezeigt, wie die Verbindung zwischen Entwicklung und Migration im Allgemeinen dargestellt wird. Im Anschluss daran zeigt der Autor dann einige Methoden, die dieses Verhältnis erschüttern. Die nächsten beiden Abschnitte bieten erste Ansätze für eine Neudefinition der Begriffe Entwicklung und Migration. (ICD

"Without racism there would be no geriatrics": South Asian overseas-trained doctors and the development of Geriatric Medicine in the United Kingdom', 1950-2000

The long history of medical migration to the united Kingdom is relatively well known. however, until recently the story of the contribu-tion of South Asian doctors to specific fields has been less discussed. in this chapter we address this gap by focusing on the contributions of migrant doctors to the geriatric specialty. We begin with a history of geriatrics in the united Kingdom and go on to outline our methodology before describing the process by which South asian doctors came to be working in geriatric medicine, what barriers they encountered, and how networks worked both for and against them, before conclud- ing with a consideration of how certain regional centres of excellence played a part in their professional development and careers as consult- ants in the specialty

International study in the global south: linking institutional, staff, student and knowledge mobilities

The international mobility of institutions, staff, students and knowledge resources such as books and study materials has usually been studied separately. This paper, for the first time, brings these different forms of knowledge mobilities together. Through a historical analysis of South African higher education alongside results from a quantitative survey of academic staff in three international branch campuses in South Africa, the paper suggests three things. First, it points to the importance of regional education hubs in the global South and their role in South–South staff and student mobilities. Second, it points to the importance of reading these mobilities as outcomes of historically attuned policymaking – educational, migratory and political. Finally, the paper points to the theoretical possibilities that arise by bringing institutional, staff, student and knowledge resource mobilities in place and suggests new avenues for further research

New racism or new Asia: what exactly is new and how does race matter?

This special issue offers important insights into race in Asia, insights first shared in a workshop “New Racism and Migration: Beyond Colour and the ‘West’”. My concluding commentary begins by positioning debates on race within the literature on “new racism”. The workshop enhanced existing thinking on race pointing to the legacies of racial thought and of migration in Asia, the nature of comparison in racial thinking, and the ways in which race is entangled with class. It then outlines what is distinctive about Asia – the different histories of settler colonialism by European migrants and the indigeneity of racial thought but not of indigenous people. The paper ends by suggesting three ways forward in conceptualizing racism in Asia: engaging the materialities of race in Asia, recognizing how Asian race debates are influenced by global discourses and the need to draw on anti-racist politics to theorize race

Interjecting the <i>geographies of skills</i> into international skilled migration research: Political economy and ethics for a renewed research agenda

There is now a large literature on skilled migration, which uses multiple definitions, concepts, theories and understandings of skilled migrants. However, this research has not adequately considered the geographies of skills—the spatial and temporal relations through which skills get meaning, are accrued and claimed and their outcomes and how these shape and are shaped by skilled mobilities and migration. This paper explores sites and networks as two interrelated elements of a geography of skills in order to highlight how they have prescribed, produced, prevailed and precluded who attains the skills to migrate. The paper goes on to outline how and why the geographies of skills and skilled migration matter in contemporary knowledge capitalism and the ethical issues they raise for a renewed research agenda on skilled migration. Crucially, it suggests that the spatio‐temporal configurations of skills raise not only empirical and analytical questions but also normative ones about the politics and ethics of skilling