ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the under-recognized and hence under-researched connection between migration and international human resource management (IHRM). The intrinsic meaning of migration will be different in different contexts: in a large country like Japan, with a homogeneous population, migrants have seen as exotic and strange. The lack of qualification recognition by employers during the hiring process may be due to a lack of knowledge of the immigrant's overseas-based work experience. Low-skilled migrants face specific obstacles in the process of integration. The case of the European Union (EU) is useful to illustrate the complexity of migration at the macro-social level. A failure of the literature on international HRM has been that it has paid real attention to only a limited part of multinational enterprises (MNEs) human resources, sometimes just the assigned expatriates, sometimes both expatriates and local employees. Even though migrants may require specific HRM policies, those policies need to be fully integrated in the global HRM of the organizations.
