Introduction: Fluidity and Friction in Talent Migration

In this introduction to the special issue of JEMS on The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in Asia, we note the movement in the academic literature from a narrow focus on the economic rationalities and corporate logics of transnational mobility among professional, managerial and entrepreneurial elites, to a greater interest in these elite transnational subjects as embodied bearers of culture, ethnicity, class and gender. We draw out two key themes that inform the arguments advanced by the papers in this special issue. First, instead of hyper-fluid global nomads who move effortlessly across frictionless global space, the papers show that moving and belonging are not simply motivated by economic logic but are folded into broader social, cultural and political considerations and conditioned by the power geometries of race, nationality and gender. Second, different groups of talent migrants are attracted to and positioned differently in specific spaces of encounter within cities, generating a politics of identity that influences everyday life. Taken together, these two themes highlight the need to avoid artificially bifurcating the lives of talent migrants into the economic and social/cultural spheres, and instead to argue for interweaving them within the same frame in understanding the mobility of the highly skilled.