Social and economic integration of highly educated/high-skilled migrants in East and Southeast Asia: Overview of the Special Issue

Attracting highly educated/high-skilled migrants has been a major policy issue for many East and Southeast Asian economies. Highly skilled migrants do not necessarily have higher levels of education, but highly educated migrants have usually acquired higher levels of skills. Over the past few decades, a growing number of economies in East and Southeast Asia have implemented policies to attract or retain highly educated/high-skilled migrants, including nurses, highskilled technicians, computer scientists, engineers and financial analysts. We define highly educated individuals as those with university education or above-average education in their local labor market, while the highly skilled is broadly defined as those with high level of training, special skills, or those who acquired both. At the same time, economies in other parts of the world have been actively recruiting similar highly educated/high-skilled groups. Therefore, economies in East and Southeast Asia compete not only with other economies in the region, but also with developed economies in other parts of the world. In response to the high demand and potentially high rewards, welleducated migrants have become very mobile. According to Czaika (2018), in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)