A growing body of academic research and policy initiatives has addressed the global race for talent against the backdrop of the unprecedented scope and pace of skilled international migration. In this article, we coin the term “intellectual migration” as an analytical framework for international migration to explore how the experiences of students and skilled migrants to the United States from Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the bric countries) complicate notions of brain circulation. This framework not only brings together students and skilled migrants but also takes into account the complex relationship between these migrants’ career aspirations and their connections to their (extended) families, their racialization in the United States, and economic and geopolitical changes in their home countries.

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Based on interviews conducted between 2011 and 2012, this paper examines how highly skilled migrants from Brazil, Russia, India, and China in Arizona have experienced acculturation to US racial norms and heightened anti‐immigration sentiment since 9/11, which in this state culminated in the passage of Senate Bill 1070. We found that negative experiences with incorporation into US racial hierarchies, immigration enforcement at the Mexico–US border, and profiling as ‘foreigners’ had little impact on their deliberations to return to countries that have become new engines for global growth at a time of US economic decline. Interviewees tended to interpret their experiences as having been mistaken for members of other targeted groups, expected exemption from SB 1070 because of their highly skilled and/or documented status, and lacked knowledge of a now defunct provision in the bill that would have affected immigrants by criminalising failure to carry proper documentation. Instead of immigration experiences or the economic downturn in the US, participants were deterred from return because of perceived deficiencies in their countries of origin, which mitigated the attractiveness of the new economic opportunities there. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article explores the historical production of immigrant illegality in the United States as a set of interrelated yet distinct racial projects. The passage of nineteenth and twentieth century immigration legislation, which instituted requirements for immigrant identification, transformed unskilled labor movements from China and Europe into unauthorized or improperly documented immigration. This illegality was differently racialized. Excluded as a group, Chinese entrants became wholesale associated with illegality. In contrast, though it far surpassed the numbers of unauthorized entrants from China, European illegal movement was quickly forgotten. Unauthorized immigration from China and Europe were met with tightened immigration law and enforcement. Set in motion by the regulation of Chinese and European immigration, this “spiral of illegality” created the context for the transformation of Mexican laborers into indocumentados in the twentieth century and continues to shape the conditions under which twenty-first century immigrants arrive and live in the United States. While Mexican nationals have been the largest group to have arrived undocumented in the United States, today they constitute about half of the undocumented population, which hails from everywhere in the world, including nations in Asia and Europe. Recognition of such intersections among undocumented immigrant groups questions widespread assumptions about the existence of sharp distinctions between contemporary and historical immigration, and it also contributes to emerging forms of cross-ethnic activism for immigrant rights that complicate notions of indocumentados as nationals of one particular country.

This article examines representations of the post-Soviet diaspora on US Dancing with the Stars and Ukraine’s version of the US Bachelor to show how their use of diasporic performers conflicts with narratives of national cohesion that are essential to the adaptation of reality TV formats to new markets. The first season of Холостяк starred an emigrant from Odessa who is also a regular on the US version of the British franchise Dancing with the Stars. Cast because his diasporic identity and expertise helped facilitate the adaptation of the two TV franchises, his transnationalism came into conflict with narratives of nationalism that are key to formatting. In an effort to appeal to assumed local audience preferences for conservative versions of national identification, the two shows reduced his post-Soviet identity to that of a ‘Ukrainian’ return migrant or a ‘white’ US immigrant, which also obscured the failures of each national project with regard to migration.