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Globalisation has increased the mobility of people while rapid development of the knowledge economy places human capital at the centre of economic progress. Both result in competition for highly skilled labour among states, particularly the more-developed states. The EU has a particular role in this global competition for the highly skilled. It is faced with the ageing of its population. Furthermore, the quest to revitalise the EU's economy by implementing the ambitious Lisbon Strategy requires an additional 700,000 research positions. Lastly, the EU is trying to design a common European policy for economic migration, starting with the Green Paper in 2005. This article aims to contribute to a common policy design in the area of highly skilled temporary migration. It compares the UK and German schemes for highly skilled immigrants (the only two in the EU) with the successful US scheme, still seen as the benchmark for the EU. The findings are twofold. First, there is a set of obligatory characteristics that should be introduced to the schemes to make them more attractive. Second, as the programmes are not the only factors that determine the attractiveness of a respective country, the article argues that an EU common policy for highly skilled migrants would make the EU area more attractive as a whole and therefore increase its competitiveness in the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]