Modelli interpretativi e politiche di accoglienza delle migrazioni qualificate

The scientific debate concerning the representative model of skilled migration started about half a century ago, but it is still far to be concluded. Two schools of thought are confronting each other, one claiming that the concept of "brain drain" is still valid, the other sustaining the thesis that, in the present "knowledge based society" skilled migration must be considered as a "brain circulation", bringing positive effects to both to the host and the sending country. Though recent studies revealed that, in the present day, the classic push and pull analysis of skilled migration is no more valid, on-field researches have demonstrated that the "brain drain" model of skilled migrations is still the one that better describes the migration of intellectuals and professional (mainly in the health care sector) from a developing country to a developed one, even when positive effects on the sending country, such as economic and cultural remittance are taken into account. Despite of the scientific debate, it is a matter of fact that the immigration policy of most of the developed countries are presently tuned to maximize the arrivals of skilled immigrants. Two strategies are applied in order to obtain this result: a demand-driven one, where the selection of the immigrants is basically left to the employers or an offer-driven one, where the would-be migrants are encouraged to apply and then selected on the base of a scoring system. However, it has also been shown that there is no way to ensure the complete compliance between the demand and the offer of foreign skilled work: the increasing flows of skilled migrations are thus also generating the increase of the so-called "brain waste" phenomenon.