Dossier: Institutions and skilled mobility. Guest Editors: Gery Nijenhuis & Maggi W.H. Leung

The global competition for highly-skilled professionals and their knowledge has grown over the past decades. Cities have increasingly become aware of the importance of highly-skilled labour for their future development. The aim of our paper is to analyse urban policies towards highly-skilled migrants. Our paper is based on empirical research in three German university cities, Aachen, Bonn and Cologne. Our results emphasize that there is a growing awareness of local policy-makers concerning this topic. We found that the cities made efforts to create a welcoming culture in order to attract and retain highly-skilled migrants. However, there are differences between our cities regarding their approaches to attract highly-skilled migrants.