L’intégration des migrants de retour sur le marché du travail
The labor market incorporation of return migrants
Intervenante : Liz Jacobs (sociologue, post-doctorante à l’institut Max Planck en Allemagne au département de démographie numérique et informatique) ; discutante Ariane Pailhé (économiste, chercheuse Ined des unités de recherche 08 & 09)
As many as half of the world’s 280 million migrants will return home within five years of migrating. Skilled migrants return with advanced knowledge and capital that can make major contributions to the “brain gain” of origin countries. Despite the volume and economic importance of return migration, little is known about the economic reintegration of return migrants. Return migrants might experience a career boost after developing skills abroad, or migration might disrupt employment trajectories.
This paper examines the hiring and promotion of highly skilled migrants who return to the Indian labor market after working in the United States. About a third of skilled Indian migrants in this study return to India for work. Using a novel dataset of 7,177 cross-country employment histories created from LinkedIn, I explore how prior U.S. work visa status relates to job mobility in the Indian labor market. I find that while work visas constrain job mobility for migrants in the U.S. labor market, prior H-1B visa status is associated with increased employer changes and promotions for return migrants in the Indian labor market.
The paper offers a novel digital data source to make an important empirical contribution to the literature on return migration, which has long been constrained by data limitations. The findings contribute to our understanding the labor market trajectories of highly skilled immigrants and its important implications for the global recruitment of talent.
Biographie de Laz Jacobs :
Dr. Elizabeth Jacobs is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in the Department of Digital and Computational Demography. She earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University in collaboration with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
Her research agenda asks how institutions – state, corporate, and academic – shape the economic, social and spatial mobility of immigrants and refugees. Using computational techniques, she constructs and analyzes novel data sources to study the institutional reproduction of inequality in global contexts. Her scholarly interest encompass the areas of migration, race, gender, education and work.