1 Is Migration a Stressor for the Most Talented? Non-specific psychological distress among Chinese students in Tertiary Eduction in China, Germany and the UK Hector Cebolla-Boado (UNED, Spain), Jinming Liu (Tsinghua Univ, China), Dorothée Schneider (Essex, UK) & Yasemin Soysal (Essex, UK) Introduction The so-called Healthy Immigrant Paradox suggests that migrants generally benefit from better health outcomes than comparable natives (Teruya y Bazargan-Hejazi 2013). Despite of this general pattern, its is still debated whether it also applies to mental health.. The relation between migration and mental health is a complex one since there are many ways migration can impact mental outcomes. On the one hand, it is known that migration is a very selective process and that emigrants are not a representative sample of the population in the country of origin. It is thus believed that there could be a selection of migrants in terms of characteristics that can also impact their mental outcomes. Since Odergaard’s seminal research (1932) showing that migrants could be selected in their predisposition to certain mental conditions including psychosis, selection has been a common explanation. In this case, mental health problems are not a consequence of migration but underlie the very decision to migrate. Besides, migration is a stressing life event, which can of course impact negatively on mental health. This second kind of argument makes causal claims between migration and mental wellbeing. Researchers do not always agree in whether migration is harmful for mental health (He and Wong 2013; Breslau 2011; Maggi et al. 2010; Adhikari, Jampaklay, and Chamratrithirong 2011; Banal et al. 2010) or not (Mood, Jonsson, and Låftman 2016; Stillman, Gibson, y McKenzie 2012). The growing literature studying the association between migration and mental outcomes suffer from a number of limitations. On the one hand, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of selection from a causal influence of migration on health. Successful studies have looked at natural experiments (Stillman, Gibson, and McKenzie 2012) which are difficult to find and generalize for obvious ethical reasons. Alternatively, high quality data combining samples of migrants in destination and non emigrants in origin is required. Unfortunately, this alternative is not often available, despite of the ongoing shift in migration studies from developing comparison between migrants and natives in destination to an origin-destination perspective which expands the comparisons to natives in origin (Garip 2016). Another common limitation of this literature is that it generally looks at deprived migrant populations. Indeed, unskilled economic migrants are the most vulnerable population and they could be more exposed to stressors associated to migration. However, it is definitively important to expand the focus to skilled and advantaged populations who, by definition, are selected, so as to evaluate the potential harming effect of migration.