High-Skilled Migration Revisited: Foregrounding the Multinational Enterprise in Migration Infrastructures

In this article, we extend migration-infrastructure scholarship by foregrounding multinational enterprises (MNEs) as structural actors that both co-produce high-skilled mobilities (direct effects) and reshape the broader conditions that render such mobilities feasible and attractive (indirect effects). On the direct side, we theorize three interlocking channels through which MNEs shape high-skilled migration: (1) recruiting, hiring, and relocating international talent; (2) generating organizationally mediated migration networks, shaped by senior corporate actors and enacted through international human resource management policies and practices; and (3) reinforcing the spatial concentration of global talent by strengthening clusters around global innovation and business hubs. These mechanisms are connected by a shared organizational logic—knowledge internalization—which links the three direct channels into a coherent account of firm-driven mobility. On the indirect side, MNEs influence the broader possibility space of high-skilled migration by reshaping political, economic, and sociocultural environments through corporate political strategies, global factory dynamics, and processes of forward and reverse diffusion. In this sense, MNEs may transform the contexts that, over time, orient and sustain subsequent high-skilled mobilities. Given their global reach and orchestration capacity, bringing MNEs more squarely into the analytical frame also matters beyond theory. It can inform policies better aligned with the organizational realities shaping contemporary migration.