Migration of International Academic staff and Researchers to Germany

Abstract

Abstract This paper uses both the descriptive and comparative approaches to provide an overview and an in-depth analysis of migration of international academic staff and researchers in Germany using secondary data on migration of international academic staff and researchers in Germany. We add to the existing studies in the international literature by presenting an interesting analysis of migration of international academic staff and researchers in Germany and adding valuable contribution to the increasing debate in the international literature concerning the increasing interaction between migration and increasing internationalisation of higher education. We provide new contribution by explaining the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on migration of international academic staff and researchers in Germany. We examine the first hypothesis that the size of migration of international academic staff and researchers in Germany increased substantially over the period (2008-2023), but the distribution showed considerable variation between universities and non-university research institutes. We investigate the second hypothesis that during the COVID-19 Pandemic period (2020-2021), despite borders closure policies migration showed slight increasing trend for international academic staff and international professors in Germany originated from all world regions; except Western Europe and North America regions, implies that the COVID-19 Pandemic has not affected the flow of migration of all international academic staff and researchers in Germany originated form all world regions, but only affected academic staff and researchers from Western Europe and North America regions through Erasmus guest lecturers programme in Germany (2019-2022). Our findings in this paper seem consistent with our previous results regarding increasing diversification accompanying increasing migration of international students and international academic staff and researcher in German universities, including both increasing geographical diversification that demonstrated by the fact that the international academic staff and researchers coming from different world countries, and increasing specialisation diversification that demonstrated by specialisation in various specialisation fields.