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Working GroupThe human face of global mobility: Exploring international skilled and professional migration in Europe and the Asia-PacificConveners: Faculty Members: Meetings IntroductionA key part of the package of ideas sustained by political economists of globalization, such as Saskia Sassen, is that the continued liberalization of world trade – and the movement of goods and capital by which this is measured – has been matched by a spectacular liberalization of the free movement of persons, and hence a consequent decline in the control powers of nation-states over population movement. This is, it is frequently said, a new “age of migration”. And even if the control functions of states – despite market forces – continue to pose obvious obstacles to poorer international migrants, few doubt that barriers are down globally for the most educated, skilled and talented migrants, and that such free movement is growing in magnitude and significance. Some even speak of the emergence of new global elites, with unprecedented cosmopolitan lifestyles, presaging dramatic social change to the national order of things. These heroes of global free movement – top ranked employees of multinational corporations, international finance, IT companies, scientific research agencies, and so on - are, presumably, the human hands, faces and brains behind the impersonal dynamics of global markets and nation-state decline. The goal of our working group is to examine the human reality behind this high rhetoric. For all this quick talk about mobility and the global information society, the actual physical movement and resettlement of people – with families, cultures and complex social needs – is nothing like the instantaneous relocation of money within an international computer network, nor even the transport of goods around the globe. International skilled and professional migrants may fulfill a key theoretical role in the so-called “connectivities, flows and networks” of the global system, yet the details of this migration remain largely unexamined. Demographic sources on its volume and originality are far from conclusive; the migration patterns and qualitative reasoning of those who choose to move (and those who do not) continue to defy the predictions of economic theory (for example, the spectacularly low rate of free movement in the EU). At the same time, the political science and sociology of the global remains dominated either by an unreconstructed focus on the institutions of the nation-state, or conversely, by idealist normative concerns (ideas on global governance or global citizenship and such like). On an ethnographic level, the shape and narrative of lives lived out on a global, or even cross-national regional scale – the costs and benefits, the human consequences of life beyond the nation-state – are even less well known. And the nation-state apparently remains the primary source of social identity of the vast majority of mankind, including expatriates! Our CCGR working group offers a fresh opportunity to bring together hitherto unconnected scholars from the various disciplines mentioned above, and a variety of regional specializations to take a closer look at global mobility. We aim to examine the evidence on international skilled and professional migration, and seek to define a more sustained, interdisciplinary research agenda on the subject. Specifically, we will be working towards defining a research template (specifying leading questions, bibliographic overview, data sources, and research methodologies) for this patchy area of research, before working towards an integrated edited volume in the second year. MeetingsSix meetings in all are planned:
Members of Working GroupConveners Adrian Favell, Sociology, UCLA (EU free movement, professionals
in global cities) UCLA faculty Ivan Light, Sociology (immigrant entrepreneurs, Koreans in LA) California faculty Michael Peter Smith, Political Science, UC Davis (transnationalism,
migrants in Silicon valley) Visiting faculty Gary Freeman, Political Science, University of Texas, Austin (comparative
immigration politics) Graduate and post-doc researchers Ödül Bozkurt, Sociology, UCLA (migration within multinationals,
Europe)
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