This paper draws on research conducted in New Zealand from 2009 to 2011 with overseas-qualified social workers as members of a global profession experiencing both great international demand for their skills and unparalleled flows of professional transnationalism. In line with the international social work literature, this cohort of migrant professionals offers a range of needed skill and expertise as well as unique challenges to local employers, client communities, and the social work profession as a whole. With a specific focus on mixed-methods data dealing with participants' induction experiences and engagement with professional bodies, this paper argues that migrant social workers have created in New Zealand a transnational professional space that demands a response from local social work stakeholders. 1. Introduction Through the 1990s, the migration studies literature began to address what was then interpreted to be an emerging phenomenon of transnational migration, in which “migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders” [1, p.ix]. The early work in the field, championed by Schiller, Portes, and their respective collaborators focused primarily on the movement of people from the less developed countries to “centres of capital” (ibid., p.x). Since that time the field has expanded dramatically, as scholars documented the transnational practices of “South-North” flows, as highlighted above, and “South-South” flows (as in studies of the flows of domestic and construction workers across Asia), as well as movements of educated professionals across multiple markets. Flexible regimes of immigration and incorporation [2], and an increasingly open and flexible global financial system, have allowed growing numbers of highly educated professionals and business entrepreneurs to pursue and maintain professional and personal ties across national borders in a variety of family arrangements—including multilocal families [3], either via the “astronaut” strategy of the main breadwinner returning to the origin society or with members of the 1.5 or second generation leaving the destination society to return or on-migrate in search of career or further educational opportunities, leaving parents and other siblings behind [4]. The argument put forward by in this literature is that, as transnational migrants engage in such patterns of intense contact and exchange between both sending and receiving societies (and perhaps others as well), the engaged social fields merge and create opportunities to pursue alternatives to the
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