Highly Skilled and Educated Immigrants (HSE)

HIGHLY SKILLED AND EDUCATED VENEZUELAN IMMIGRANTS (HSE) The Project “International Migration of Talent and Highly Skilled and Educated to the U.S.” began in 2010 under the direction of Douglas Massey and Magaly Sanchez R, with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and Princeton University. Known in abbreviated form as the Highly Skilled and Educated (HSE) Immigrants Project, it was organized as a sub-project of the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP). Its design included two separate data collection efforts: the application of the LAMP’s ethnosurvey questionnaire to a selected sample of Venezuelan immigrants and in-depth interviews conducted with a sizeable number of HSE immigrants from Venezuela. The first data collection effort used a snowball sampling strategy and applied an adjusted ethnosurvey schedule to Venezuelan immigrants located in areas of Venezuelan settlement throughout the United States. Respondents were screened and selected based on their high levels of skill and education. After the ethnosurveys were completed, a second phase of in-depth interviewing began. The interview guide sought immigrant’s views on the causes that motivated their departures, their perceived competitiveness in international markets and foreign workplaces, their relative integration into the host society, the degree of social and economic mobility they had experienced, and the extent to which their diverse cultural knowledge was valued and appreciated by others. Public Use Data : Quantitative Data from the Ethnosurvey All data made public here has been fully anonymized prior to submission to the Harvardata server. The quantitative Venezuelan databases were drawn from the ethnosurveys and contain an initial file with general demographic and migratory information for each member of the household (PERS). More detailed information on the migratory experience of each migrant household head is included in a second file (MIG), while more general characteristics of the household, its members, and its holdings are found in a third file (HOUSE). Detailed labor and family life histories were compiled for each household head and spouse, and these provide the basis for the two final files in which the units are person-years (LIFE and SPOUSE). Please note that four appendices are provided: B - places, C - states, D - occupation and E -calculation of total international experience. There is no Appendix A for this study. Qualitative Data from in-depth Interviews will be released a posteriori and after a fully detail and anonymized process.