Mobility

Abstract

Debates about global mobility and its links to poverty reduction often take place at a relatively lofty, macro level. This chapter brings us back to earth, focusing first on everyday motives for mobility, from achievement orientation and personality traits like place attachment to the so-called “great eight” competencies that are more closely connected to performance at work. Opportunities at home and in the local work environment interact with these traits to co-influence mobility propensity. Much of the debate about “brain drain” has missed such relatively localized constructs and their measures, choosing instead to imply that IQ is only what moves, and that earning power abroad is ‘the’ chief mover of people. In a similar vein, the policy rhetoric of “migration-development nexus” has overlooked an issue of inclusion once new settlers arrive in their new country. Immigrants skilled and unskilled frequently face incredible hurdles to equality-of-employment opportunity, even though they are perfectly qualified to do the job. Some of the reasons are psychological, including for instance the preference for similarity, social dominance orientation, and realistic conflict between groups for scarce resources (jobs). Without acknowledging such human factors, there may ever be “brain waste” rather than “brain gain.” Migration-development becomes a legitimating myth. The good news is that exclusion can be managed at an organizational level, in partnership with structural means like equal employment legislation. Asking who comes back is a question of “talent flow,” in which countries can attract, select, and lose migrants who are less achievement-oriented but also more afflictive.

Moving abroad not only involves substantial monetary costs for fees and travel… but may also mean living in a very different culture and leaving behind your network of friends and relations, which can impose a heavy if unquantifiable psychological burden.

(United Nations’ Development Program 2009, p. 10, emphasis added).

Various disciplines have been involved in trying to document and understand the issues involved in… global mobility: Psychology and psychiatry, sociology and geography, management science, demography and anthropology. Using different theoretical models and research methods, they have however found similar findings.

(Furnham 2010a, p. 43, emphasis added).