The global race for skilled immigrants seeks to attract the best global workers. In the pursuit of these individuals, governments may incidentally discriminate on gender grounds. Existing gendered ...differences in the global labour market related to life course trajectories, pay gaps and gendered divisions in occupational specialisation are also present in skilled immigration selection policies. Presenting the first book-length account of the global race for talent from a gender perspective, Gender, migration and the global race for talent will be read by graduate students, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of immigration studies, political science, public policy, sociology and gender studies, and Australian and Canadian studies.
The concept of boundary spanning regimes has emerged to describe activity across policy subsystems that seek to manage 'wicked' public policy problems. This paper examines two existing public policy ...theories, namely those of exogenous shocks and the Advocacy Coalition Framework theories and assesses their capacity to explain why boundary spanning regimes emerge. It argues that broad structural conditions play an important role in shaping boundary spanning activity in the case studies discussed in this paper, indicating limitations in these theories which tend to overlook such conditions. The paper tests the explanations for policy change through original qualitative analysis of incremental convergence across the welfare and immigration policy fields in Australia from 1947 to 1996.
This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine ...countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.
Abstract
This paper utilises a regulatory analysis of skilled visas and insights from labour law scholarship to examine how Australian immigration law regulates ‘skill’ and the implications for ...migrant workers’ employment relationships. While qualifications or ‘hard skills’ act as the formal basis for selection under Australian immigration law, interpersonal attributes associated with ‘soft skills’ often decide who employers recruit. Immigration regulations that allow employers discretion to recruit based on soft skills widen scope for employer misuse and migrant worker exploitation, including for those on high-skilled visas, and for diversity bias against women and ethnic minorities. Our major theoretical contribution is to highlight how immigration laws that give employers discretion over the criteria used in skilled immigration selection intensify power imbalances within the contract of employment. The regulatory definitions of skill constructed by immigration law can thus serve as an additional lever of employer control. The findings indicate that precise regulation of skill is necessary to limit the potential for employers to exert undue control over migrants in worker selection processes.
The shift away from family immigration and towards skilled immigration is one of the most important changes over the past decade in Australian immigration policy. Yet the implications of this shift ...for female applicants have remained largely unexplored. Skilled immigration has slipped by as a genderless story in which the androgynous skilled migrant is the central character and economists do most of the storytelling. This paper discusses the gender equality concerns raised by the policy shift towards skilled immigration. It argues that Australia's skilled immigration scheme disadvantages female applicants through its construction both of economic independence and 'skill.' A comparison with Canada's skilled migration law and regulations, which are audited by gender mainstreaming tools, is considered to ascertain what role, if any, gender-based analysis plays in identifying and rectifying the potential gender inequalities produced by skilled immigration selection.
Increasingly, governments focus on skilled immigration not only to fill labour market gaps but also due to a perceived political preference for such migration. Across debates in major ...immigrant-receiving nations, we observe an assumption that the 'skill' in 'skilled immigration' is clearly definable and easily differentiated from 'unskilled' or 'semi-skilled' migrant labour. Academic research in industrial relations and economics provides a more complex reading of the concept of 'skill' by interrogating the ways in which skill is accumulated. This article reviews concepts of 'skill' embedded in skilled immigration policies in five major Western democratic jurisdictions. It demonstrates the plurality of approaches to defining 'skill' within political and policy debates in these countries, and links these back to the prevailing theoretical perspectives. The article argues that greater attention by policy-makers and scholars of skilled immigration to the theoretical assumptions underpinning their preferred models of skilled immigration would better reveal the gendered and racialised biases of existing approaches to skills definition.
Migrant workers and domestic workers more broadly, suffer multiple forms of exploitation but the interaction of these forms lacks theorisation. The scholarship on exploitation includes modern slavery ...studies, Marxism and aligned accounts of unfreedom that help clarify the position of migrant workers. Yet, none of these accounts exhaust the array of exploitative practices that migrant workers face and these approaches often privilege economic violations over other types. This paper argues that a five-type classification schema - adding criminal infringement, denial of leave entitlements, safety violations and discrimination to economic violations - best encompasses the exploitation that migrant workers experience. Drawing upon a new database of 907 court cases litigated by 1912 migrant workers in four countries, it demonstrates that while economic violations predominate they often interact with these other four types of abuse. It suggests that both policy analysis and theoretical accounts of exploitation and abuse should address a broader array of workplace violations, which may provide a jumping-off point for further empirical studies of exploitation.
Abstract Theories of precarity have emphasized workplace isolation, worker vulnerability and a lack of control over key features of work. Migration status has been viewed as an attribute that can ...exacerbate worker precarity, and sexual violence and bodily injury are viewed by feminist scholars including Violence Against Women scholars as sources of such precarity as well. Nevertheless, how the interaction of workplace conditions, migration status, gender and sexual violence impact migrants needs more attention. A new evidence base, the Migrant Worker Rights Database, explores workplace violations against migrants in 907 tribunal and court cases brought by migrants in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over a 20‐year period. The data collected for this project demonstrates that female migrants experience higher rates of sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual servitude, and sex trafficking when compared with men. Further, while such collectively termed “sexual violence” offenses comprise a small percentage of cases in the Database (1.3%), they are characterized qualitatively by key features that present a heightened form of sexual precarity when compared with citizens: misuse by employers of visa conditions, debt bondage, live‐in arrangements, entrapment and slavery, and the combination of sexual violence with economic infringements such as wage theft and physical assault. Sexual precarity, this paper argues, should be viewed as an overlapping and reinforcing form of workplace precarity that has distinctly sexual and bodily dimensions.
Power imbalances between participants are a central aspect of elite interviews. As feminist social scientists have argued, power imbalances can affect not only the practical structure of interviews ...but also experiential and normative dimensions of the relationship that emerges between interview parties. At present, there are limited means to concretely analyse power differentials in elite interviews. This article addresses this gap by drawing upon feminist sociolinguistics to develop an original “power index” to measure power in the elite interviewing context within the social sciences. The index is applied to interview text to explore its utility and develop a method that can be fruitfully extended in future studies. (108 words).
Over the last decade, skilled immigration has proliferated as a policy preference among governments. Skilled immigration policies target the supply of new immigrants into labour market gaps that ...result from economic shifts and structural ageing. At the same time, skilled immigrants are often viewed as less welfare dependent and more labour market ready that other forms of immigrants, including those entering through family reunification streams. International organizations, including the World Bank and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have also emphasized the growing importance of skilled immigration globally. Notwithstanding this considerable attention by both international and domestic government agencies to skilled immigration, it is notable that to date there has been no single special issue produced on skilled immigration policies in comparative perspective. A number of important collected books have been edited on the topic (Bhagwati and Hanson, 2009; Boeri et al, 2012; Chiswick, 2010; Ruhs and Anderson, 2010; Triadafilopoulos, 2013). Yet, at present, we lack a special issue on this topic. This current special issue, bringing together many of the world's experts on skilled immigration policy, attempts to fill the gap. In the following introductory article, we briefly set out some of the major themes for contemporary skilled immigration policy globally, and discuss how these issues are addressed in the contributions in this Special Issue. Adapted from the source document.
