Mobility of High Skilled Professionals: Long-Term and Temporary Trajectories

The literature review allows us to conclude that the traditional perception of the brain drain has no empirical evidence on the aggregate level, being necessary the understanding of the circumstances and factors that influence the process in each country. This research aims to make a pioneering study of this type in the Portuguese context, still innovating in conceptual and methodological terms: first, refusing the logic of globalizing assumptions of human capital theory, guessing that migration can be caused by factors other than not pay gap by analyzing the set of factors of attraction-repulsion; on the other hand, guessing that the international job system is not a space entirely free and therefore is not only dependent on the free play of supply and demand, is also necessary to observe the biographical trajectories in order to understand the reasons and destinations of migration.

The multiple case studies are intended to test the theoretical hypotheses presented in the literature. Our hypothesis consist in assuming that the different migration flows as well as the contexts, projects, the paths of life and how biographical expectations are constructed and therefore can be understood by the concurrent models. The literature identifies five main theoretical hypotheses with different levels of empirical evidence: a) brain drain; b) beneficial brain drain; c) cross fertilization of elites; d) brain circulation by creating networks; e) latent brain drain due to the mobility training.

Using a multiple case methodology we will describe and compare the circumstances, the modalities and the characteristics of the mobility of two types of migration of high skilled Portuguese individuals in Europe: a) long-term migration to a European country for work in primary or secondary segment of the employment system; b) temporary or commuting mobility through European networks of science, production, services or culture.