Interests and institutions in skilled migration: Comparing flows in the IT and nursing sectors in the U.S.

Jeannette Money and Dana Zartner Falstrom argue that U.S. immigration policy reflects more an efficient political process than an efficient economic competition for skills. In furtherance of this position, Money and Falstrom examine the flows of imported IT and nursing industry labor. The politics of visa categories in the U.S. are a remarkable site of competition between business and societal interests as well as the different scales of local and national interest. The strongly regionalized differences pointed to by Money and Falstrom suggest, too, that politics clearly matter. They declare that the Byzantine U.S. immigration system has created a plenitude of peculiar migration channels sustained by vested client interests, and a veritable alphabet soup of visa categories.