Highly skilled migrants have become an attractive target group for immigration policies under the imperative of international competitiveness. Yet the same migrants often live under poor social conditions and face severe obstacles in their pursuit of professional careers in their destination country. There is a blatant discrepancy between political agenda and social practice. On the one hand, attracting highly skilled migrants is seen by governments as a critical component of preparing modern economies for the challenges of a globalized economy, and the issue has become a prominent feature in current political and policy debates. Highly trained migrants are key elements...

“So I came here in October 28, 2002. To Canada. And, obviously, when I came here, you have to start from somewhere. So I found (2 sec. pause) a job, a security job, just to take care of my kids. And then I decided to like, proceed on with my education, get my credentials recognized in Canada.”¹

These are the words of one of our interviewees, Mr Mehra, age thirty-five, describing his migration to Canada from Pakistan.² For Mr Mehra, as for numerous others, the migration process included caring for a family, earning a living, and last but not least,...

As discussed in the previous chapter, in the course of migration, educational degrees are re-evaluated and their worth is assessed vis-à-vis the expectations in the receiving country. Discrepancies between the status finally achieved in the immigration process and a person’s own expectations – as demonstrated in the narrative of Mr Mehra – are already known in current debates on the immigration of a highly skilled workforce. Yet scholarly explorations of the barriers that migrants face when seeking access to host countries’ labour markets regularly overlook the temporal dimension of the phenomenon under investigation. As this chapter will argue, both failure...

The multidimensionality of status passages and the interconnection of their dimensions become manifest in the life history of Mr Katekar,¹ a construction engineer who had been working in his home country of India, where he became increasingly frustrated with his job situation and decided to enrol in an MBA program. Unfortunately, his application was rejected by all the university programs in India; he expanded his search to include MBA programs in the United States and Europe. Finally, he was accepted by the London Business School and entered the program there in 2000. Thus, although he had already successfully made the...

From a biographical perspective, trajectories into the labour market are formed by migrants’ aspirations as well as by the institutional frameworks in which career, partnership, and migration orientations evolve. In the previous chapter, we focused on migrants with a legal status similar to that of the native population. With this focus, we kept one important institutional factor in the background: migration law and regulations. Especially in the early stages of the status passage into the labour market – the transition phase – the nature of a migrant’s work permit is of key importance, and the impact of legal exclusion is...

It is difficult to separate the “hard,” institutionally reproduced reality of legal inclusion and exclusion from the “soft” dimension of the symbolic evaluation of migrants’ cultural capital. Who is considered “legitimate” and whose skills and qualifications are deemed valuable are determined through a complex process of legally codified and societal recognition. This chapter will reconstruct the symbolic struggle over the “value” of migrants’ cultural capital. How, in the narrative accounts of our interviewees, does their status as newcomers or minorities affect migrants in their transition into the labour market?

As pointed out in chapter 2, our understanding of cultural capital...

As we have seen in the course of this inquiry, the cultural capital of highly qualified migrants is a relational quality in itself. During the multidimensional status passage through which the highly qualified progress when they immigrate, try to find a place in the labour market, and establish a private life, migrants’ academic knowledge and skills are frequently (re)evaluated: when individuals apply for a visa during the pre-migration phase, when they go through the transition from one country to another, and, finally, when they try to secure a qualified position in the labour market. At all these points, the value...

We started our investigation with a few simple research questions: What barriers prevent the successful inclusion of highly skilled migrants into the labour market? Why does this group that has become the primary target for recruitment programs from around the world seldom achieve equitable access to professional opportunities? We also identified one central reason that traditional policy and scholarly debates have failed to fully address the challenges involved in the integration process: the employment of many highly qualified migrants in positions that do not reflect their skills and experience is widely perceived to be a transitory phenomenon, a market imperfection...