University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Getting The Best Of Us: Multinational Corporate Networks And The Diffusion Of Skill-Selective Immigration Policies Vivienne Born University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the International Relations Commons, and the Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons Recommended Citation Born, Vivienne, "Getting The Best Of Us: Multinational Corporate Networks And The Diffusion Of Skill-Selective Immigration Policies" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3359. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3359 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3359 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Getting The Best Of Us: Multinational Corporate Networks And The Diffusion Of Skill-Selective Immigration Policies Abstract Populist backlash has emerged as an alarming trend shaping immigration policy across the developed world in recent years. At the same time, a less-sensationalized pattern has appeared in the form of policies designed to attract the highly skilled. In the face of so much anti-immigration sentiment, how can we understand this push for global talent? One possibility is that these seemingly divergent agenda are but two sides of the same coin. Policymakers and members of the business community point to labor shortages and a global war for talent as justifications for skill-selective policies. Yet some in the academic community contest that the evidence for these concerns is lacking. This gives rise to a two-pronged question. Is there really a competition between states? And how can we understand the role of corporations in advancing the international mobility of the highly skilled? This dissertation offers a theory of the multinational corporation (MNC) as the instrument of international policy diffusion.