Publication Summary
This academic manuscript from 2020 is one of several that emanated from my doctoral thesis on ‘Maintaining Competitiveness in the Global Market for Skilled Migrants’. Key insights include that: Immigration should be reaffirmed as a long-term objective in the post-COVID-19 era; economic geography should advance empiricist investigation of international migration, independent of theoretical migration study; economic migration policy should encompass economic, family and humanitarian streams, and re-categorise as ‘emigrational, transitional, educational and preferential’; future narratives on skilled migration should be more holistically repositioned as dialogues on economic migration; future research could better articulate the positive case for immigration, recouple with population policy, explore preferential migration pathways, and decouple from skill as a bedrock construct.