S5 – Skilled migration and local development

Papers

(Listed in order of presenters above)

• Conflict – induced skilled migration: evidence from the Americas

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  Skilled mobility has been pictured as a best scenario of emigration, in which individuals actually get to choose the place where they want to live, and they even prepare their leave through education in foreign languages. However, there are cases when skilled migrants are forced to migrate in the same way as the unskilled ones; wars, poverty and violence may cause sudden or half planned decisions to migrate. Alternative hybrid actors, such as Talent Beyond Boundaries and Refugee Point have emerged to complement the activities of traditional institutions in displacement diplomacy, such as ACNUR. Their role is to match the skills of refugees with employment needs in some OECD countries.

  This paper explores political and economic approaches to deskilling and skills mismatch in skilled professionals, based on the experience of Syrians in Canada and Venezuelans in Mexico. These two countries may be considered as second options of resettlement in North America, at a time when the US image as a historical asylum receiver was damaged by the populist anti-migrant discourse. The role of hospitality in the Canadian identity has been widely studied including its outcome on the integration of new migrants (Roberts 2015). At the same time, Mexico has shown an ambiguous position towards refugees and asylum seekers. With Central American transit migration taking the lion´s share in the media discourse on refugees, Venezuelans are less discussed and studied, with some exceptions (Gandini, Prieto, and Ascencio, 2020).

  In Canada more than in Mexico, skilled refugees were shown to have difficulties in their integration to the job market (Enns, 2017; Nichles and Nyce, 2018). Many displaced professionals do not carry their diplomas and even when they do, they lack local experience and knowledge of the culture of reception; furthermore, the definition for certain skills in their country of origin is not the same as in their country of destination. As a matter of fact, these differences in skills definition are quite common among various knowledge economies (Lo, Li and Yo, 2019).

  This paper adopts a comparative methodology to analyze the alternative actors that complement official public policies meant to integrate skilled refugees in Canada and Mexico in the last five years. I consider various levels of intervention on the international, national and local levels. My work proves that skilled displacement may be an opportunity to rethink the classical separation between economic and forced migration, when economic pathways are created to integrate certain refugees.

• The effect of Romania’s EU accession on regional emigration and development

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  Emigration has varying effects on the development of sending countries: while outflows of skilled labor or heightened inequality can be harmful, these phenomena can be offset by increased remittances, investment, and productivity from return migration. Romania is the source of the fifth largest diaspora worldwide. As a country with a long history of emigration, Romania has experienced heterogenous effects of migration outflows at the regional level. These effects have only intensified since Romania joined the European Union in 2007. This paper uses an event study methodology with a heterogenous migration treatment effect to measure how the event of Romania joining the EU affected certain outcome variables at the county level. I find that Romanian regions with pre-EU accession emigration rates above the national median saw a 12% higher increase in educational enrollment rate after joining the EU than other regions. Additional regressions show that high-migration regions in Romania experienced a 34% stronger increase in real GDP per capita and an 8% stronger increase in monthly real net earnings than low-migration regions after Romania’s 2007 EU accession. This suggests that emigration can indeed be a positive mechanism for economic development at the regional level, and that Romania’s EU accession has stimulated positive economic and educational outcomes via migration. This study contributes to the theoretical debate on the effects of emigration on development, adds to the literature on the economic effects of EU enlargement on Eastern Europe, and examines migration and its impacts at the regional level which has not been done in previous related studies.

• Europe’s essential workers: migration and pandemic politics in central and eastern Europe during COVID‐19

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  How do countries navigate the tradeoffs between public health and economic reopening? What explains variation in state responses to COVID-19? Historically, governments have tackled pandemics as external, nonconventional secu- rity threats, restricting immigration to protect citizens from contagious outsiders. Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries could not frame COVID-19 this way because European integration and free-movement migration blur the line between insiders and outsiders. This article examines the conditions and coalitions that shaped policy outcomes, and argues that migration systems played a double role in policy change: as structures for policy diffusion and as venues for migrants’ agency. Governments learned from one another's experiences, but diffusion occurred unevenly according to countries’ position within migratory systems.

• Local matters: the local turn in emigration policies

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  In this article, I introduce the concept of local emigration policies and provide an example to illustrate their increasing relevance and urgency of analysis. Although local governments in origin countries have become increasingly active in devising their own strategies in response to emigration, all of the research and theorising on emigration policies has so far focused on the actions of national governments. I make the case for the expansion of our field, to include local emigration policies too. My case rests on three main arguments: 1) the effects of emigration are most felt at the local level; 2) local governments are uniquely suited to tackle the (positive and negative) effects of emigration, and 3) local governments do not necessarily pursue the same objectives and goals as national governments when concerning emigration. This line of research has multiple (theoretical and policy) implications, including for our understanding of local development and migration, transnationalism and integration in host societies.

• Regional differences in nurse migration – self-sufficiency and resilience in the aftermath of health and labour market shocks

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  The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the worldwide nursing shortage, emphasising the need for countries to attain health-workforce self-sufficiency as an alternative to dependence on overseas nurses. A higher reliance on active international recruitment is negatively associated with nursing labour market resilience. By investigating in our study disequilibrium forces acting on nursing labour markets, we provide evidence that migration outflows of nurses increase during health shocks in origin countries, but abruptly decline in the next period. Whilst economic recession in source countries acts as a push migration factor for nurses, economic turmoil in destination countries reduces their attractiveness, and consequently also migration inflows. Given that both health and economic shocks cause disruptions to nursing flows, this also affects labour market resilience in the aftermath of shocks.