“One Improves Here Every Day”: Occupational and Learning Journeys of “Lower-Skilled” European Migrants in London

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 15. Life Course and Historical Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines narratives of learning and occupational advancement amongst migrants employed in “low-skilled” jobs, based on 37 in-depth interviews with secondary-educated East and South Europeans living in the London region. Contrary to common expectations, we show how many participants achieve varying degrees of professional gratification, progress and skills development within occupational sectors typically associated with unattractive conditions, limited benefits or opportunities to get ahead. Migrants’ experiences thus sit at odds with perspectives that view occupational mobility and skills development as the terrain of the “highly skilled”. Furthermore, we examine how migrants make sense of their work opportunities and success. We discuss two discourses, centred on “hard work” and “creativity” respectively, through which participants challenge and reconfigure traditional “high”- “low-skilled” divides. Our findings contribute to critiques of traditional understandings of migrant human capital and simplistic “high”-“low-skilled” distinctions in two ways: by offering a more nuanced picture of migrant skills, learning, and occupational mobility than individual qualifications or jobs might suggest, and by calling attention to subjective understandings of occupational mobility and the new symbolic boundaries around skills, broadly construed, that migrants redrew in their attempts to explain and evaluate career progress.

Authors

• Laura Morosanu, University of Sussex

• Russell King, University of Sussex

• Aija Lulle, University of Loughborough

• Manolis Pratsinakis, University of Oxford