Skills offer one of the most important passports to mobility in the contemporary world. As a result, skilled migration has become the object of considerable empirical and policy analysis. However, theorisations of skilled migration have lagged behind policy analyses. In this presentation, this lacuna is addressed by exploring three ways in which skilled migration may be theorised spatially: through comparativism; as a set of constitutive relations; and as topological twists. This talk suggests that skills should be seen not as pre-given but as produced at particular spatio-temporal conjunctures. The presentation ends by asking the question – how do these spatial analytics alter the politics of ‘migration talk’?