Highly-Skilled Migration: Between Settlement and Mobility by Agnieszka Weinar & Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels

Author:Agnieszka Weinar & Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030422042
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Limited access to native professional networks outside of the ethnic/national group. This is the case with many highly skilled migrants from the Global South, who have limited access to opportunity structures favouring mobility. Migrants from Global North in general have more exposure to non-ethnic professional networks and their situation can differ: this is tackled in more depth in Chap. 4.

There are a few meso-level solutions to meso-level barriers. In fact, these issues can be tackled through public education campaigns and through people-to-people contacts. The difficulty to apply policy solutions top-down, leads migrants to find different ways of coping with them.

Some scholars have brought to light the importance of the way the “treasure chest” is viewed by the migrants themselves. In this sense, we cannot conceptually separate immigrant from his country of origin, as the cultural capital is built in the certain habitus, denoted by social and cultural norms, beliefs and values (Bourdieu 2017). The way skills are defined, acquired and valorised in the country of origin influences the future activities and gestures the immigrants will perform on the host labour market. The habitus of origin defines how the immigrants perceive their skills and their position on the new labour market (Bauder 2005). These views may change after exposure to the host country social norms, values, and beliefs about skills. In a way, this is the recognition and acknowledgment of the exogenous and endogenous country labelling at play by the migrants themselves, which leads to a variety of adaptation strategies.

This aspect has been studied by Nowicka, who examined the narratives and practices regarding labour market performance of skilled and highly skilled Polish immigrants in the UK. On the surface, these migrants faced no soft barriers to employment on macro-level, as EU framework assures recognition of educational attainment. However, the gap between home education and the host education blocked them from working on their nominal skill level. They also were bound by the meso-level ethnic networks. Nowicka identified two complementary strategies that the migrants used to deal with this situation (Nowicka 2014). First, the narrative on “useless higher education,” which served as an explanation of underemployment or over-skilling of all her interviewees. All the respondents felt that the Polish educational system values general education and knowledge, but does not provide practical labour market skills needed to succeed in the British labour market at their skill level. They still valued Polish education, as giving more illuminated view of the world, its history, culture and politics, but conceded it to the private sphere. Second, in the work sphere, Polish skilled migrants only used this set of non-practical skills to impress the employers as intelligent and possibly able to perform more complex tasks than other low-skilled workers, building thus employer’s trust and soliciting the opportunity to learn new practical skills and thus enter the outer labour market with credible skilled experience. Nowicka conceptualises this adaptive strategy as “migration skills”. These are skills related to general education that are used only in the context of migration to improve one’s standing on the labour market.

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