In a globalized economy, knowledge production and exchange, and innovative and creative orientations and aptitudes, are regarded as crucial to economic growth and competitiveness. Hence, people with ‘brains’ and ‘talent’ are in demand by nation states and regional blocs. As a consequence, they are also highly mobile internationally. Certainly, university academics are increasingly mobile. The European Commission is at the forefront of designing and sponsoring mobility programs for academics. Through them, it seeks to promote a sense of ‘European-ness’ and, more importantly, to harness universities and research in Europe’s bid to become a globally dominant magnet economy and culture.[1] In such contexts, questions of hospitality arise. This article engages with the ethics of institutional and intellectual hospitality in an increasingly regionalized and globalized university sector. It is part of our research on the political, epistemological, ontological and ethical dimensions of both national and regional policies on researcher mobility and of mobile researchers themselves.[2] In focusing on hospitality, we move away from macro-considerations of brain–drain–gain and academic diaspora (see Fahey & Kenway, 2009a), and thus from the ethics of national loss and gain (Lowell & Findlay, 2002). Instead, we focus on the everyday ethics of host and guest. We draw loosely on Jacques Derrida’s (1995, 1999, 2000, 2001) ideas about conditional and unconditional hospitality. In his recent work, he discusses hospitality of laws and nations, and focuses on France and on uninvited, unwelcome and powerless foreigners – particularly refugees. In contrast, we are concerned with those who are welcome because of their ‘brains’ or ‘talent’: privileged foreigners and valued guests. Clearly, the ethical issues involved differ dramatically. In common-sense terms, hospitality refers to the relationship between a host and a guest. It also refers to the act or practice of being hospitable, of welcoming guests, visitors or strangers, with liberality and goodwill. However, in focusing on the tangled relationship between ethics and hospitality, Derrida (1999) complexifies this view. When conceptualizing ‘hospitality’, Derrida (2000) acknowledges a fundamental paradox that turns on ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ hospitality (see also Borradori, 2003). When the host of the house, institution or nation extends an invitation to a guest, it is through this invitation that they also demonstrate to the guest that they are in control of the property or territory. In other words, in order to be hospitable, one must have the power to host. However, the host must also have some control over the people who are being hosted. Hospitality fails when the guests take control of the house. If the host is no longer in control, they are not being hospitable to their guests (Derrida, 2000). According to Derrida (2000), this kind of hospitality is ‘conditional’, as it is dependent on imposing certain limits on guests. And he argues that, as hospitality always involves placing limitations on guests, hospitality is inherently inhospitable.