Today I realized that I may be more successful by taking a different approach in my searches. I am often putting "skilled refugee" or "highly skilled refugee" into while seeking information from various journals. However, using the term "refugee" may be limiting my results. For example, an Iranian doctor that had has applied for a highly-skilled US work visa in the late 70's because he is trying to escape the political turmoil may not have been registered as a refugee if he were accepted. Instead, he or she may have been accepted as a highly skilled person under a work visa, even though their primary reasons for moving were not economic but because they were escaping a dangerous environment. I will be using terms such as "forced migration" and "high skilled work visa" to avoid limiting my results.

Forced Migration

(http://www.tigweb.org/youth-media/panorama/index.html?IssueID=77)

In doing so, I found an article titled: "The International Migration of Skilled Human Capital from Developing Countries," by Kuzvinetsa Peter Dzvimbo

In short, the article describes how some forms of migration are often mislabled as "brain drain." Brain drain is defined as "the emigration of scientists, technologists, academics, etc., for better pay, equipment, or conditions." Dzvimbo sites many other reasons why many people migrate from developing countries aside from lack of adequate career opportunities including: political instability, civil unrest, armed conflict, and violence. He future explains this point by using the following African countries as his example: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Burundi, Rwanda, Morocco, Algeria, The Ivory Coast, Senegal, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. At the time that this article was written, many of these countries had experienced between 15 to 20 years of what he calls "civil or political strife." Several of these countries still suffer similar conditions, while some have worsen. "...in 1990, there were 125 792 Africans with secondary plus tertiary education in the USA,"Dzimbo states. At that time, South Africa had the highest amount of highly skilled immigrants working in the United States. This is a perfect example, for during this time, South Africa was experiencing much political turmoil due the nature of its remaining years under the apartheid system.

I will also be targeting my efforts to finding government reports and other government information on highly skilled immigrants right before, during, and after an internal conflict. I was hoping to find a surge of Iranian immigrants by scanned Canada's migration reports from the mid/late 70's to the mid 80's, but did not find what I was hoping.