Skills, Migrants and Cross-Border Labour Markets

Policymakers and many migration scholars sustain the idea that highly skilled migrants are a better kind of migrant and should be privileged in migration programmes. Furthermore, the possession of desirable skills seems to be restricted to labour migrants and not ascribed to family migrants or asylum seekers and refugees. However, it is unclear what high skills mean and how they can be assessed, particularly within transnational and cross-border contexts.

The paper offers a framework for understanding and researching the labour-market-related knowledge of migrants. Prevalent political approaches equate high skill with labour market success, especially the ability to earn a high income, hence the imposition of income thresholds to enter through skilled migration routes in many OECD countries. However, this simple equation of the value of labour fails to investigate what makes up transferable knowledge.

We argue for three approaches that take knowledge seriously. Firstly, knowledge should be seen as politically contested within regimes of legal-technical recognition as well as race and gender (Bourdieu). Recognition regimes de-couple from what we term the use-value of knowledge in the second aspect: non-recognized knowledge, including embodied, may still contribute to the solution of socio-material problems (Dewey). Thirdly, knowledge is not only situated but also embedded in (post) colonial geographies and networks of (non-)trust (Raghuram, Sommer).

Our paper builds on and engages with the pertinent debate on skills and migration and uses examples from our own published and ongoing research (Kofman 2014; Nohl et al. 2014). We identify research lacunae and provide sensitising concepts for further study.