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Abstract
This paper presents a comparative political economy theoretical framework of high-skilled immigration (HSI) policies in advanced industrial countries. It seeks to explain the differences between countries' policies in terms of HSI openness. I take from the traditional partisanship approach that political parties will pursue policies consistent with the preferences of their major constituencies. I have divided labour and capital into high- and low-skilled sectors. I argue that, despite converging policy goals for more open HSI in order to fill labour market shortages, there continue to be differences between countries' HSI policies. No consistent HSI position between left and right parties exists cross-nationally because different coalitions between sectors of high-skilled labour, low-skilled labour and capital take place. I analyse more open or restrictive HSI outputs by portraying actors' preferences, aggregated in coalitions and intermediated by institutional constraints (labour market organization and electoral system) across advanced industrial countries.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2007 WPSA Annual Meeting, the 2007 MPSA Annual Meeting, the 2007 EUSA Biannual Meeting, and the Graduate Political Economy Colloquium at the University of Oxford. I would like to thank Alexander Caviedes, Gary Freeman, Andrew Geddes, Simon Hix, Sara Hobolt, James Hollifield, William Hynes, Desmond King, Adam Luedtke, Cathie Jo Martin, Martin Ruhs, Eiko Thielemann and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to David Rueda for his encouragement and constructive feedback. For financial support, I thank the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford, and Jesus College, Oxford.
Notes
I focus on the ‘usual suspects’: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
They can be classified under ‘Human Resources in Science and Technology’ (HRST), extending to everyone who has successfully completed post-secondary education (or is working in an associated occupation) (OECD Citation1995: 8). Sectors include information technology (IT), mathematical sciences and engineering, life and physical sciences, and medical sciences.
Most European Union (EU) member countries experience labour market shortages. HSI policies increasingly target ‘third-country nationals’ (from outside the EU).
I concentrate on policy outputs (‘the policies adopted by a government’) to distinguish from the commonly used term ‘policy outcome’ i.e. ‘the actual effects of a policy in terms of goal achievement’ (Holzinger and Knill Citation2005: 776). Thanks to Andrew Geddes for this reference.
‘On the surface, highly skilled foreign professional and business people present much less of a problem than manual labourers … Immigrant scientists, engineers and physicians reinforce the nation's supply of scarce talent and mix easily with the domestic population by becoming dispersed throughout the country’ (Portes and Rumbaut Citation1996: 293). Thanks to Timothy Hatton for this reference.
Even though there is no direct evidence to measure the preferences for HSI policies of high- and low-skilled sectors of labour and capital, I work those out deductively by basing them on the distributional consequences for these groups and assuming no cross-national variation of distributional preferences.
IT sub-sectors prone to outsourcing are: application maintenance, custom application development and system integration. IT consulting, traditional IT outsourcing and sales and marketing have lower outsourcing potential and constitute about 50 per cent of all sector employment; the overall IT outsourcing potential is unlikely to increase (Farrell et al. Citation2005: 147, 25).
‘Restrictive’ means any limitation of HSI on any or a combination of these dimensions: (1) mechanisms, (2) selection, and (3) rights. ‘Open’ is defined as the opposite (see Ruhs Citation2006).
Facchini et al. indicate that for H-1B visas that ‘sectors with 10 per cent higher lobbying expenditures by business groups are associated with a 2.4 per cent larger number of H-1B visas approved by the DHS; while a one per centage point increase in the union membership rate is associated with 4 per cent lower number of visas’ (2007: 26).
The ceteris paribus assumption is necessary since the mentioned institutional interactions are not necessarily the only ones. Other indicators can influence a country's HSI need, such as the unemployment rate in high-skilled sectors, the type of higher education system or the evidence for real shortages in particular sectors.