"If you smile, they smile": Explaining highly educated migrants' feelings of being welcome in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine

Creating a welcoming environment is high on policy makers' agendas to attract highly educated migrants. It is unclear, however, which factors contribute to migrants' feelings of being welcome in the host country. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring the factors influencing highly educated migrants' feelings of being welcome in the host country. We develop a conceptual framework that differentiates between the host country's institutional (e.g., public services for migrants) and societal (e.g., tolerance, friendliness) incorporation capacity and the migrants' personal incorporation capacity (e.g., personality traits). The study follows a mixed methods research design using survey data (n = 391) and serial interviews (wave1: n = 67; wave2: n = 49) with highly educated migrants in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, a cross-border region between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that all three indicators of the incorporation capacity framework contribute to migrants' feelings of being welcome in the host country. The societal incorporation capacity emerges as most important in the analysis. Lastly, interview findings emphasise the importance of language across all incorporation capacity dimensions. The paper contributes to the literature on high-skilled migration, and particularly on high-skilled migrants' experiences in the host country.