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The labels « brain drain » and « skilled migration » seem to imply a similar approach. In both cases, the focus is on the international migration of the workforce to the primary segment of the labour market. Yet the debate on this type of migration takes place within the context of transformation processes associated with global restructuring. Studies conducted on « brain drain » in the 60s and 70s tended to emphasise the loss of human capital that less developed countries were experiencing. Since the mid 80s, within the context of global restructuring, mobility of highly qualified personnel is again on the research agenda. The interest is presently on the institutional setting which results from the emergence of TNC international labour markets. Which role does qualified labour have on the international division of labour ? Does the use of this labour force point out a redefinition of core and periphery ? The transformation of the Eastern and Central European countries into market driven societies has added further questions about the significance of highly qualified labour mobility. For example, which impact Western qualified employees displaced by multinational companies to local branches have had on transformation processes, and how important has been their role in these processes ? Case studies from the food and the telecommunication sectors in Poland demonstrate that the integration of this country into a world-wide market is already taking place through the use of highly qualified personnel from the West, albeit this integration goes parallel with a threefold segmentation of the internal labour market.

The texte presents an analysis if immigrants' insertion within the iltalian labour market. Although the arrivai of foreign workers has been neither formally requested organized by the Italian labour demand, during the nineties in a context of high unemployment rate, several thousand of immigrants have found duly registered jobs. Two main sectors of activites have provided them with such opportunities of insertion : domestic work, mainly concentrated in the metropolis, and work industries, mostly widespread in Lombardia and the the Italian North-Eastern regions. The second part of the paper presents the results of some empirical suveys which focus three aspects : integration in the industrial sector ; « subordinated » integration, concerning the domestic work ; entrepreneurial integration, concerning the emerging phenomenon of immigrants' entrepreneurship.

This article is intended to make a first assessment of the consequences of Indonesian immigration in Saudi Arabia, in particular during the first half of the 20th century and to describe the evolution over time of certain striking aspects of the close relation between the pilgrimage to Mecca and Indonesian migrants looking for work. With revolutionary changes of the means of travel - steamships took over from sailing ships and were succeeded by planes - the number of pilgrims has increased and the time spent on the journey was shortened. The pilgrimage, itself has been transformed into an instance of organized and institutionalized mass travel. This paper consider the methods of hiring labour, the networks involved in recruiting it, the organization of travel, as well as the increasing indebtedness of the migrants through intermediaries who, more and more professionally, arrange these attempts to live abroad, prompted in many cases by the same desire for wealth.

Research in French into the West Indian experience, whether it refers to societies in the actual Caribbean or the contemporary spaces of migration, rarely takes its starting-point from the notion of the diaspora, contrary to writings in English, which are not averse to using this term. In either case, the conceptual choice reflects a particular portrayal of West Indian society, which is not built solely on procedures of theoretical modelization. It also takes into account the researcher's intentions and the values attributed to different interpretations, in terms of the times and places when and where the theories are developed.

The Modem Indian Novel and the New Diasporas Within the British Empire and later within the Commonwealth, populations of Indian origin have often changed country for various reasons: political or economie exile, indentured labour in plantations, brain-drain, trading networks. Contemporary novelists from the subcontinent or the diaspora can now address a wide anglophone reading public in the sub-continent as well as in Western countries. They describe such displacements in a new way. They first feel the need to write down in the long term the history of populations who have often settled for several decades in Africa or the Caribbean, yet keep the memory of successive moves. The writers then define the moment when the decision to leave is reached, either under the pressure of political violence or because of the seductive appeal of richer countries. They then describe the difficult adaptation in a new country, a well-known theme which is given new dimensions because of the paradoxical cultural familiarity of other Commonwealth countries, and of the policy of communalism in countries like Canada for instance which tries to create coherent groupings out of dissimilar immigrants. Finally, all the authors underline the transitory character of the phase when people still feel exiles. The contemporary world allows a simultaneous vision of the adopted land and of the country left behind which it is no longer possible to idealise. Besides, the most essential element of cultural identity, the religious factor, is gradually erased in a materialist cultural environment.