ILPC 2027

Despite the growing significance of global skilled migration and their noteworthy presence in the UK, our understanding of skilled migrants and their experiences is rather limited (Al Ariss et al, 2012). Furthermore, the disproportionate focus of existing literature on London and the South-East, with other areas of the UK effectively disregarded. To address this blind-spot, this paper seeks to answer the following question: how do structural factors differentially affect skilled migrants’ careers in the North-East and in the South-East of England?

Drawing theoretically on a critical realist approach to conceptualising careers (see Bhaskar, 1986, 1998) this paper presents careers as evolving relations between the agency and the structure. This paper argues that the specific arrangements of structural factors (Fleetwood, 2014) have causal powers upon agential career strategies, operating as constraints and enablers (see also Elder-Vass, 2010). In other words, the structure defines the ‘room for manoeuvre’ skilled migrants have and efficacy of their actions.

To illustrate how this effect can vary across locations we use an example of the North-East of England, because of its salient economic and social ‘peculiarity’.  For example, ethnic communities in the North-East and resources available through them are not equal to those in London, given the much lower number of migrants and their relative proportion in the total population. On the other hand, the North-East historically has had a high ratio of workers employed in the public sector and was severely affected by the recent recession (ONS, 2013), with skilled jobs being particularly scarce.

The data analysed is a sample of 32 skilled migrants in the North-East. 11 of them had previous career experiences in London and the South-East that was possible to reflect upon and to compare to their current careers in the NE. In addition we interviewed nine London-based skilled migrants in comparable occupations. The results revealed significant dissimilarities between the impact of the structural factors in the North-East and the South:

• ·         Relatively low costs of living in the NE offer more freedom to pursue desired career goals.
• ·         Low buying ability makes some businesses unprofitable in the NE and limits opportunities for self-employment.
• ·         Migrants experience more pressure to assimilate in the NE in order to be accepted by the indigenes.
• ·         Class background of the NE can limit skilled migrants networking opportunities.
• ·         Acceptance by the indigenes is more important in the NE, where migrant communities can hardly be used to compensate for exclusion from the indigenous networks.
• ·         Migrants are far more uncommon in the NE, which makes it easier to present their ‘foreignness’ as a source of rare skills.
• ·         Limited availability of skilled jobs and, especially, senior skilled jobs in the NE is likely to encourage migrants to pursue alternative career paths when possible.  

These findings challenge a contemporary notion of migrants as “disembodied and disembedded from contexts (…) or the wider society” (Kofman, 2000, p. 53). The paper highlights the differences between the effects the location-specific structural factors have on careers of skilled migrants in different regions. The paper will argue this has important practical implications in offering a significant advantage on our understanding of how these factors can impact on availability and efficacy of career strategies in different environments.

Bhaskar, R. (1986) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, London: Verso.

Bhaskar, R. (1998) 'Philosophy and scientific realism' in Archer, A., Bhaskar, R., Collier, A., Lawson, T. and Norrie, A. (ed.) Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London: Routledge, pp. 16-47.

Elder-Vass, D. (2010) The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fleetwood S (2014b). From labour market institutions to an alternative model of labour markets. Forum for Social Economics. ISSN 0736-0932 [In Press] Available from: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26529

Kofman, E. (2000) ‘The invisibility of skilled female migrants and gender relations in studies of skilled migration in Europe’, International Journal of Population Geography, 6(1), pp. 45-59.