Abstract
AbstractThere is now a large literature on skilled migration, which uses multiple definitions, concepts, theories and understandings of skilled migrants. However, this research has not adequately considered the geographies of skills—the spatial and temporal relations through which skills get meaning, are accrued and claimed and their outcomes and how these shape and are shaped by skilled mobilities and migration. This paper explores sites and networks as two interrelated elements of a geography of skills in order to highlight how they have prescribed, produced, prevailed and precluded who attains the skills to migrate. The paper goes on to outline how and why the geographies of skills and skilled migration matter in contemporary knowledge capitalism and the ethical issues they raise for a renewed research agenda on skilled migration. Crucially, it suggests that the spatio‐temporal configurations of skills raise not only empirical and analytical questions but also normative ones about the politics and ethics of skilling.
Highlights
Skilled migrants are one of the few migrant groups welcomed globally as they are seen as adding economic value, occupying jobs that cannot be filled nationally and able to ‘integrate’ locally (Cranston, 2017)
Investigating the sites, networks and spatio-temporalities of skills acquisition and reproduction, I argue, enables skilled migration researchers to reorient their work beyond the body of the skilled migrant or even of skilled migration policies and to include the structures and conditions in which skills are acquired and deployed
Whereas this section has explored some of the hierarchies of skill manifested through sites and the networks through which the geographies of skills are produced, the section outlines four ways in which power operates in entangled ways to shape skills
Summary
Skilled migrants are one of the few migrant groups welcomed globally as they are seen as adding economic value, occupying jobs that cannot be filled nationally and able to ‘integrate’ locally (Cranston, 2017). Investigating the sites, networks and spatio-temporalities of skills acquisition and reproduction, I argue, enables skilled migration researchers to reorient their work beyond the body of the skilled migrant or even of skilled migration policies and to include the structures and conditions in which skills are acquired and deployed. The state and its intermediaries such as accreditation boards and professional certification authorities define skills in particular ways, shaping both migration and labour market outcomes for skilled migrants.
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