Introduction

Selective towards ‘high skills’, contemporary migration and mobility favours the well-educated, a growing share of whom move within globally integrated and expanding labour markets. Understanding this mobility is crucial because of its assumed impact on the global economy, politics and society. Attracting and retaining professionals is seen as a new tool for improving economic competitiveness and growth: young, highly educated, professional migrants add value to the economy through their supposedly high productivity rates. It is for this reason that countries are in competition for human resource skills perceived as representing national economic resources (see Salt 2005).

Yet, relatively little is known about the labour market incorporation practices of foreign professionals and graduates. Upon arrival to their destination they often become statistically, occupationally and socially ‘invisible’ (see Salt 1992; Findlay, Li, Jowett & Skeldon 1996; Favell 2004), making it difficult to research into the social practices of their labour market incorporation. What kinds of jobs do they actually obtain? How and why do they get those jobs? How are their credentials and work experiences recognised? Is the cross-border transfer of their human capital a seamless market process? On the one hand, the human capital approach assumes unproblematic labour market incorporation of ‘highly skilled’ migrants, mostly because of the assumption on which it operates: perfect transferability of human capital and its constant value on all markets (e.g. Sjaastad 1962; Becker 1964; Todaro 1976). If such an assumption is made, it is difficult to explain, for instance, why people with high human capital end up in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs at their destination. Sociologically orientated approaches to labour market incorporation, on the other hand, point out the existence of barriers to the cross-border transfer of human capital. Various host institutions such as the labour market, educational and social welfare institutions or immigration policy may limit foreign professionals’ and graduates’ chances of gaining employment suitable to their formal education and training (see Reitz 1998; Zulauf 2001; Reitz 2002; Waldinger & Lichter 2003; McGovern 2007). Furthermore, compared to semi-skilled and unskilled migrants, social networks play a different role in facilitating the search for employment by the highly skilled. Meyer (2001) found that professionals tend to rely more on extensive, diverse networks of colleagues, fellows and relatives who they can mobilise for their recruitment, rather than addressing their own kinship networks.