Most developing societies are ageing rapidly, and the sharp decline in fertility is further accelerating the multifaceted social and economic challenges (Kiss et al., 2022). High-skilled migration is being pursued by many countries as an essential solution to these challenges (Adezza & Pazzona, 2022; Kvashnin, 2022; Zimmermann, 2009; Kahanec & Zimmermann, 2010; Ruhs, 2011). Highly-skilled migrants (HSMs) can fill labor market gaps across sectors, contribute to pension funds, and bring valuable expertise and innovation, as well as enrich the sociocultural life in the host societies (Kahanec & Zimmermann, 2008; Bonin et al., 2008). HSMs’ contribution is critical to the long-term viability of vital public services and social welfare systems, while enhancing productivity and competitiveness across various sectors. However, the overarching legal frameworks for attracting skilled professionals, often approach the social and geographical mobility of the skilled workers with a narrow vision. Mobility is typically seen as driven solely by the HSM's career goals, without consideration of the broader social and cultural contexts HSMs exist within. Such views are critical for attracting migrants; however, they fall short in addressing the retention of HSMs, which is much more complex as it deeply entangled with the migration experience. HSMs are not simply a resource, they are complex individuals with career, social, cultural, and personal aspirations, wishes, and desires.

HSM are typically perceived as part of the middle class in host countries with their merit, career success, and earnings thus considered as a “non-threatening” category of migrants particularly to ultra-nationalistic perspectives and views (Winter, 2024). However, at the organizational level, diversity can still be overlooked for the sake of keeping “normality” against the “risk” of hiring someone culturally different (Risberg & Romani 2022). Such organizational logics translate into lived experiences that prompt HSMs and their spouses to respond to these challenges (e.g. subsequent mobility or return migration) to ensure better harmony between themselves and the context they are embedded in.  

Laws that facilitate the mobility of migrants are important but not sufficient to ensure a satisfactory migration experience that allows for balancing work, family, and social domains (Frykman et al., 2016). For example, the current problem-centered migration narrative disregards migrant workers arriving with their families or bringing them over later. Moreover, employer organizations and policymakers overlook the skills and qualifications of spouses and children. Understanding the interplay between these realities is vital for the labor market performativity, welfare, overall needs in society, and at its best, it enables migrants to build sustainable careers and healthy lives in the host country.

To understand the complexities of HSMs’ lived experiences in the host countries, it would be critical to examine highly skilled migration from a multidimensional perspective. As a major actor, the state (macro level), with its laws and regulations, integration programs, and labor laws can aspire to protect the rights of migrant workers including the skilled. Despite all the measures by the state, structural discrimination based on the ascriptive inequalities (inequalities based on gender, ethnicity, age, class etc.) can be reproduced at the meso level, via non-recruitment, devaluation (Annisette &Trivedi, 2013) or occupational downgrading (Fernando & Patriotta 2020). At the meso level, organizations through their practices, logics, and discourses play a critical role in the successful or failed inclusion of the HSM and their spouses in the sociocultural and socioeconomic structures of the host country. At the micro level, positive and negative experiences around employment, family, society, and personal life impact HSM’s identities, their prospects of building sustainable careers, and their imaginaries of remaining in the long run in country home.

In this symposium, we aim to reimagine and rework the retention of HSMs but look at the migration experience as a process from a multidimensional perspective. It is advancing our holistic and humane understanding of the complexities involved in migrants' professional and personal lives. This means examining the individual level, where personal attributes such as skills, motivations, career aspirations, and psychological well-being are considered alongside the organizational level, focusing on workplace practices, organizational culture, professional networks, and support systems that affect further inclusion and career advancement. This does not happen in a social vacuum but requires exploration in the broader socio-economic, political, and legal domain in connection with the larger cosmopolitan context in which the migrants exist: work-life balance, membership to communities, and status and condition of their families.