Exploring the trajectories of highly skilled migration law and policy in Japan and the UK

Japan and the UK appear to have few commonalities in terms of their history of and approach to migration law and policy. However, strong similarities in their contemporary approaches can be detected. Migration sits at the very top of the national political agendas and both have undertaken successive, major policy reforms over the past decade. Both have governments publicly committed to policies to attract ‘highly skilled’ migrants, with a restrictive approach towards ‘unskilled’ migrants. This article draws out the similarities and differences of migration law and policy in Japan and the UK via their respective legislative structures and policy trajectories on highly skilled migration. The article argues that Japan and the UK promote a market-driven model which enables highly skilled migration to be ‘sold’ to publics believed to be hostile to increased migration. Yet, the rapid changes in policy and revising of applicable rules often prevents the successful recruitment of highly skilled migrants to both countries.

Ambivalent Strategies: Student-Migrant-Workers’ Efforts at Challenging Administrative Bordering

Migrants’ struggles against borders have been examined extensively among refugees and undocumented migrants, whereas the everyday struggles in contexts of administrative bordering have remained insufficiently examined within the framework of so-called highly skilled migration. Drawing on in-depth interviews (N=34) with migrants holding a student residence permit in Finland, this article addresses the means of challenging administrative borders in a constrained situation produced by the border regime. I argue that student-migrant-workers employ pragmatic strategies by making use of the legal framework to secure their right to residence. However, the efforts at circumventing the constraints of the border regime often become re-inscribed within the framework of capitalist production, displaying the ambivalence of migrant practices. This article contributes to the scarce sociological literature on the struggles around administrative borders and the vague scholarly inquiry into student-migrants' efforts at challenging migration control.

How much can you take with you? The role of education in explaining differences in the risk of unemployment between migrants and natives

This paper looks at how migrants with different skill profiles make use of their education in order to avoid unemployment compared with natives in three European countries with significantly different labour markets and policies for attracting highly skilled migration: France, Spain and the UK. The paper also explores the role played by the quality of the education migrants and natives received in accounting for these differentials, an explanation rarely tested in the literature due to a lack of appropriate data. We here use PIAAC data (OECD), which for the first time offers an interesting proxy of the quality of education, namely the cognitive skills of a representative sample of adult workers in our selected countries. The paper reaches three clear conclusions. Firstly, that it is among the most educated that inequality in obtaining returns to education by migrant status reaches a maximum. Secondly, that there are important differences in how this happens across countries, with the UK minimizing migrant-native differentials when compared with France and Spain. And that thirdly, and most surprisingly, differences in cognitive abilities, our proxy of the quality of education, are somewhat irrelevant in explaining this inequality.