John Salt

The foreign-born population

At the 2001 Census, there were 4.9 million people living in the UK who had been born overseas. They represented a snapshot of an ongoing migration process. Both the timing of immigration and the prevalence of emigration (return or onward) will affect the profile of the foreign-born population and, in particular, the balance between those foreign-born people who are very recent immigrants and those who have been in the country for many years.

Trafficking and human smuggling: a European perspective

The article reviews the empirical evidence for trafficking and human smuggling in Europe. It argues that a market for irregular migration services has emerged, in which the mechanisms and forms of organization are still relatively unknown. Irregular migrants using these services are exposed both to unscrupulous service providers and to the immigration and policing authorities, thereby generating a dependence on safeguards provided by the trafficking networks. Thus a symbiosis has developed between trafficker and trafficked. The enormous interest and concern for trafficking and human smuggling in governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, in the media and popular opinion, is running ahead of theoretical understanding and factual evidence. This has implications for policy measures designed to combat trafficking and human smuggling, which may not work and also have unintended side effects. The article begins with a discussion of the main conceptual and definitional issues confronting researchers and politicians. This is followed by an assessment of the main theoretical approaches that have been developed and an evaluation of current statistical knowledge. Information on the organizational structure of trafficking organizations is then reviewed, followed by a summary of the characteristics of migrants involved, based on empirical studies that have been carried out. The article concludes by indicating some of the main research priorities.

International Movements of the Highly Skilled

In recent years there has been a growing recognition of the importance of international recruitment and movement of the highly skilled. Modern industries and services increasingly rely upon the acquisition, deployment and use of human expertise to add value in their operations. When this expertise is not available locally, employers frequently import it from abroad. This takes place in the context of two fundamental and interrelated processes: the development of internal labour markets by employers, on the one hand, and of the institutional framework by governments to facilitate the global interchange of skills, on the other.The principal flows of highly skilled workers today reflect the global expansion of world trade, the international expansion of trans-national corporations, and the activities of institutions such as governments and recruitment agencies. Although not straightforward, there appears for example to be a positive relationship between flows of skilled labour and ...

International migration report

This is the first of what is hoped will be a regular series of articles in New Community addressed to contemporary patterns and trends in international migration. The aim will be to provide a largely factual update on the situation in major world regions, or on specific systematic issues. This report focuses on Europe, principally Western Europe. After a brief comment on data problems, it presents the latest available statistics on trends in stocks and flows of international migrants, including asylum seekers.1 It suggests that officially recorded movements are now slowing.

Migration processes among the highly skilled in Europe.

This article seeks to show that the migration process for highly skilled workers in contemporary Europe is part of the structuring of European business. It focuses on the employers perspective and role in articulating movement, using data from various official sources as well as survey evidence from the United Kingdom. It suggests that the increasing importance of this form of mobility is related to the process of internationalization by large employers and that the particular form of movement is dependent on the evolution of corporate business structures.

A comparative overview of international trends and types 1950-80.

This article provides a general overview of international migration trends and types during the postwar period. Its thesis is that international migration consists of a set of spatial networks which share many of the processes that create them, but that the networks are characterized by factors which vary geographically and distinguish one from another. Fuller analysis of these requires a systems approach to provide a framework within which to study the processes that produce flow patterns. It concludes that our ability to forecast future world patterns of international migration must be based on an assessment of the likely behavior of the component macro-regional systems we can recognize.

The Future of International Labor Migration.

The article reviews the nature of international labor migration today and the economic and political rationale for its occurrence. It suggests that while the developed economies will continue to attract and exchange highly skilled labor, they will have little need for mass immigration by those with low skill levels. In contrast, poorer countries with rapid population growth and low living standards will encourage emigration, except by the highly skilled. One consequence will be more illegal immigration. Geographical patterns will continue to be dominated by a set of macroregional networks, among which the Asia-Pacific region is the most recently developed. China and the former Soviet Union (as senders) and Japan (as receiver) constitute the main enigmas.

Migration between labour market areas in Great Britain, 1970–1971

Flowerdew R. and Salt J. (1979) Migration between labour market areas in Great Britain, 1970–1971, Reg. Studies 13, 211–231. Using a set of 126 areal units (Standard Metropolitan Labour Areas) intended to represent labour markets, this paper describes and analyses 1970–71 migration flows. It begins with a description of the most important flows between labour market areas, in both absolute and relative terms. The effects of labour market size are removed by a transaction flow analysis, and the effects of distance and size are evaluated by a gravity model. The largest residuals from the gravity model are then identified and discussed in terms of economic and other explanatory factors.

High level manpower movements in Northwest Europe and the role of careers: an explanatory framework.

This article works towards a theoretical explanatory framework for analyzing the geographical patterns of labor flows between the industrial countries of Western Europe. The framework proposed is based on the disaggregated nature of the modern labor market, in which specialist skills and training result in a workforce segmented into self-contained noncompeting groups. It is applied to the migration within Northwest Europe of high level manpower, especially those moving within multinational organizations.

Staffing UK University Campuses Overseas: Lessons from MNE Practice

This article suggests that as their internal labor markets become more multinational in scope, UK universities may acquire similar staffing characteristics to commercial multinational enterprises (MNEs). Comparing evidence from four UK universities with several surveys of MNEs it concludes that, although there are broad similarities in the challenges posed by international operations, there are also several key differences: universities lack the infrastructure to manage overseas staff requirements; have different approaches to career development; view the role of secondments differently; and have a different attitude to dealing with contingency. It argues that, as the size and variety of overseas campuses expand, the staffing models applied in the early days of establishment will not work. If overseas developments are to become core functions of UK universities, mobility portfolios based simply on ad hoc secondments and business travel, international staff recruitment, and electronic communications will not sustain the quality-driven business model being adopted by UK universities. The human resource ethos of the home institutions will also have to change.