EU management of high skill migration

Developed industrialised economies have been competing for highly skilled migrants for over 50 years. First policies on the matter date from the 1960s in Canada and the 1970s in Australia while the USA selective migration programme dates back to the early 1950s. However, competition among developed industrialised countries for highly skilled migrants has taken up new urgency in the last 15 years with the onset of the knowledge based economy and society. The UK was the first European country to develop an open high-skill migration policy in the late 1990s already, but other EU countries like the Netherlands or Germany followed suit in the mid 2000s.