Government policies and international migration of skilled workers in Sub-Saharan Africa

Since a central concern of the geography of international migration is to consider how and why stocks and flows of migrants are variable from country to country, the study of skilled international migration must address policies of individual governments towards local and foreign skilled workers. These policies are most evident in immigration and emigration legislation, regulations and practice, but also, less directly but often of more fundamental significance, in policies in education, manpower planning and towards wages and salaries. In Sub-Saharan Africa there is a wide range of experience of recent skilled international migration, driven by direct and indirect policies pursued by individual governments since independence. At an intercontinental scale the deleterious effects of the global division of labour have not merely been passively accepted; within the continent new patterns of skilled-labour migration have been created by increasingly differentiated economic performance and political relationships. A case study of Kenya, a country of small current net immigration of skilled workers, is used to specify some of the processes that establish the relationships between immigration and emigration policies, and how these have been mediated by conditions for skilled workers. The concluding section of this paper sets the general experience and that of the Kenyan case study in the wider context of the role of the state as a factor in the geography of skilled international migration in the Third World.