No shortcuts: selective immigration and integration

This paper examines the selective migration policies and assumptions about immigrant integration. Many arguments for selecting migrants on the basis of skills and education, particularly in Europe, have assumed that highly-skilled migrants can be easily integrated, whereas migrants with low skills need extensive public support and targeted integration policies. Does this assumption always hold true? Have countries with selective migration policies—for example, those that have long had point systems, such as Canada and Australia—avoided integration problems among the highly-skilled workers they have recruited? Are immigrants who enter under family reunification necessarily more difficult to integrate than those brought in through high-skill labor migration programs? We examine these questions by comparing immigration and integration policies and experiences of European and North American countries.