Conceptualising Re-Migration: The Case of Post-Soviet Nanoscience Émigrés

This paper examines patterns of the outward migration of nanoscientists from the countries of the former Soviet Union during the period 1989-1994 yrs. This period of scientific migration is characterised by its mass character, very limited return rates, and peculiar patterns of diaspora distribution. The paper will focus on the latter.

It is argued that the numbers of emigrating scientists reached as much as 10 000 people leaving in 1993. (Gokhberg and Nekipelova, 2002) And whereas the primary destinations for emigration included Germany, Israel, the USA and Greece (top-4 in 1992-93), the final destinations featured the USA, Germany, France and the UK (Ibid.). I argue that the conventional approaches to studying scientific migration do not capture the pivotal features of the process tha allow to explain the discrepancy between the first and the final destinations for the scientific migration. I tackle this problem by, first, identifying the (latent) diaspora by the method of surname disambiguation from a nanotechnology publication database, and mapping the general distribution. Second, I explore career trajectories of the migrant scientists and the reasons behind their decisions to stay or move on, by conducting a series of semi-structured interviews during a multi-sited fieldwork in the US, UK and EU.

The main contribution of this paper is theorising migration in terms of a dynamic process, where destinations have organisational, regional and national capacity to attract, extrude, or retain the inherently mobile scientists: there are ‘transit’ destinations, the destinations that ‘capture’ migrant scientists once they come there. A bias towards one discipline can be avoided, as nanoscience stretches over most of the natural sciences disciplines, to which more than 80% of the post-Soviet émigrés belong (Graham and Dezhina, 2008). I also revisit the issue of the reasons for scientific migration, which appears to have mostly been studied using surveys.