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As part of a multi-stranded process of globalisation, migration, always an 'engine of history', has now become a central feature of international life. Immigration relates to the first two of the Sector Skills Development Agency's priorities and strategic objectives and one of the post-Leitch Report goals is to understand the links between skills issues and migration. The challenge is to think across, and to act generically across, sectors. Migration has a direct bearing upon a wide range of current debates, including national competitiveness and skills development, technological and economic development of the UK, the geographical dispersion of work and offshoring, and indeed the rights and interests of UK citizens. Migration policies also need to send coherent signals across the whole range of issues that the phenomenon creates. Skills policy clearly needs to incorporate the phenomenon of immigration - but to attempt to cost the economic or skills impacts around the role and use of immigrants and their relative level of skills is naive. For highly-skilled employees from overseas, the reason why an organisation may need them can only be seen in the context of the overall range of global resourcing strategies that are possible - immigration being just one route. The availability or not of such high skilled migrants, and their contribution to the organisation, i.e. the value and costs associated with their employment, can only be assessed by understanding the impact they have as part of a coherent internal knowledge transfer strategy. Policy options, therefore, have to be based on an analysis of the wider developments taking place at the level of the organisation in terms of their international resourcing strategies, and not just on the more immediate and newsworthy headlines seen in relation to immigration.