Conference Agenda

The proposed paper takes a transnational lens to studying Chinese education migrants, notably internal migrants in China between urban areas, and overseas migrants in Canada. Scholarship on internal migration and on international migration tends to develop on separate paths. Further, scholarship on China's internal migration has emphasized rural to urban migration, rather than urban-to-urban migration. This research focuses on Chinese students with urban hukou who migrate to China's first-tier cities (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) for postsecondary education and first-tier city hukou status; it equally considers Chinese students who migrate to Canada for post-secondary education and for permanent residency. China's household registration system grants differentiated citizenship benefits to residents according to whether they hold local urban. This profoundly influences the lived experiences of education migrants (i.e. employment, social relations, visions of their futures) in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, which have more opportunities for their own hukou-holders. Similarly, citizenship status influences the lived experiences (i.e. employment, social relations, visions of their futures) of Chinese education migrants in Canada.

Education migrants in China and Canada are considered more privileged than China's rural migrants and temporary foreign workers in Canada in terms of pathways to local urban and Canadian permanent residency. Governments in first-tier cities in China and Canadian governments (both federal and provincial) have been engaged in the global race to attract talent; so as to remain competitive in the so-called knowledge economy. Both systems use points-based migration assessment to filter out undesirable migrants and select ideal ones. (Zhang 2012; Abu-Laban, Tungohan and Gabriel 2022). However, initial evidence shows that Chinese education migrants in both China's first-tier cities and Canada face challenges in navigating local labour markets and in acquiring permanent status in their new locations (Zhang 2012; Wang 2021; Vosko 2022). The project uses the concept of 'differential inclusion' (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012) to shed light on the similarities and differences of the lived experiences of these two groups of education migrants and what accounts for them. This concept enables analysts to describe and analyze 'how inclusion in a sphere or realm can be subject to varying degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination and segmentation' (Mezzadra and Neilson 2012, 67) Empirical data will be drawn from document analysis and critical discourse analysis.

While there has been significant discussion in political science about the emergence of a multipolar world where the United States (and the West at large) is no longer the only dominant power, there has been less discussion within migration studies about what a post-West world would look like from a migration perspective. We use the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to explore the contours of a post-West world of high-skilled migration, where viable alternatives to Westward migration exist for select migrants from the Global South. Drawing upon an original survey of over 1,000 high-skilled migrants from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa currently working in the UAE, as well as interviews with more than 50 high-skilled, multinational migrants, we explore the reasons why these migrants chose to move to the UAE. A significant proportion of our interviewees had moved from a Western country to the UAE or had turned down offers to move to a Western country in the past. We investigate their multifaceted reasons for choosing to stay in the UAE and not move onward to the West. These reasons include the lifestyle benefits, increased sense of safety, and the proximity to their home countries, and religious acceptance they enjoyed in the UAE, relative to what they imagined they would encounter in the West. Their accounts highlight shifting imaginaries of the West in the minds of high-skilled, non-Western migrants with significant mobility capital. Through these accounts, we de-center the West as the sole dream destination of non-Western migrants and offer a glimpse into a potential post-West world of migration.

The second half of the 20^th century saw the emergence of the migration regimes that control migration and sort migrants through “skill levels”. In contemporary international migration, few other criteria are as powerful as the measure of skill in determining an individual’s ability to move, where they can live and work, what they are allowed to do, and for how long. However, social scientists have strongly critiqued such skill-based migration governance and pointed out that skill is far from the objective and observable attribute the government would like the public to believe. Skill is but a politics of language (Iskander 2021) and a concept socially constructed by a constellation of actors in specific local, national, transnational, and global contexts (Liu-Farrer et al 2021).

This paper surveys recent theoretical development and empirical insights generated in research related to skill construction in the international migration process with the perspectives anchored in the Global South. It includes three sections. The first section examines practices of skill construction in the Global South by considering the Global South’s varying positions in the process of international migration: as the labor sending regions, as the migration destinations, and as the place of talent return. It also pays close attention to skill mobility within the so-called global south. The second section highlights the critical issues manifested in the skill regime in the labor migration into and out of the global south. It reveals that skill is both an embodied and disembodied power. Skill is embodied in the sense that, owing to colonial legacy and patriarchal structure, individuals’ descriptive characteristics, such as gender, race and nationality, become signifiers of skill, leading to different migrant groups’ divergent labor market and mobility outcomes. On the other hand, skill is disembodied: It is detached from the human body and has nothing to do with the migrant person’s actual ability and skill. Rather, it is determined by the economic positions individuals are forced into. The final section discusses the treatment of skill in the migration-development nexus. How state and institutional actors in the Global South have facilitated and hindered the effective skill building, skill transfer, and skill utilization, and subsequently have been of varying successes to alter their own positions in the global economic and political landscape.