ABSTRACT
Introduction Immigration policy in many OECD nations now places a premium on migrants with specific skills that are seen as vital to national development, innovation, and competitiveness (Saxenian 2006; Hawthorne 2008). Nations are in competition for this talent, often reverting to what Shachar (2006) calls a “citizenship for talent exchange,” where those with the needed skills are enticed to settle permanently in select locations through preferential access to citizenship and the rights it entails. The convergence of migration policies that promote greater migrant selectivity and differential access to citizenship rights can be seen in the growing orthodoxy of points-based type immigration systems used by many immigrant receiving states to attract skilled migrants (Duncan 2012). A great deal of the literature on the issue of skilled migration has examined this immigration policy change from the perspective of the policymakers, with less attention focused on how migrant-sending regions respond to changes in immigration policy.
