Work in Transition: Cultural Capital and Highly Skilled Migrants' Passages into the Labour Market 9781442668737

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Rules of Transcription
1. Highly Skilled Migrants: A Puzzling Socioeconomic Reality and a Challenge to Migration Research
2. The Relational Character of Cultural Capital in Migration
3. Multidimensional Status Passages: Migration, Labour Market Inclusion, and Private Life Domains
4. Aspects of the Multidimensional Status Passage: Phases, Migration Motives, and Cultural Capital among Foreign-Trained Migrants in Germany
5. Migration Control and Migrants’ Agency
6. Symbolic Struggles over Cultural Capital: Racial Discrimination and Symbolic Exclusion
7. Up- and Downgrading Cultural Credit: A Cross-Country Comparison
8. Conclusions
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

WORK IN TRANSITION Cultural Capital and Highly Skilled Migrants’ Passages into the Labour Market

Despite the fact that many countries target highly skilled migrants for recruitment in the global labour market, few of those migrants are able to take full advantage of their educational and professional qualifications in their new homes. Work in Transition examines this paradox, using extended narrative interviews that focus on the role that cultural capital plays in the labour market. Comparing the migrant experience in Germany, Canada, and Turkey, Work in Transition shows how migrants develop their cultural capital in order to enter the workforce, as well as how failure to leverage that capital can lead to permanent exclusion from professional positions. Exposing the mechanisms that drive inclusion and exclusion for migrants from a transatlantic comparative perspective, this book provides a unique analytical approach to an increasingly important global issue. ARND-MICHAEL NOHL

is a professor of education science at Helmut-Schmidt-

University. KARIN SCHITTENHELM is a professor of sociology at the University of Siegen. OLIVER SCHMIDTKE is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and History and Director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria.

is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

ANJA WEIß

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Work in Transition Cultural Capital and Highly Skilled Migrants’ Passages into the Labour Market

ARND-MICHAEL NOHL, KARIN SCHITTENHELM, OLIVER SCHMIDTKE, AND ANJA WEIß

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2014 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4760-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1568-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. _____________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Nohl, Arnd-Michael, author Work in transition : cultural capital and highly skilled migrants’ passages into the labour market / Arnd-Michael Nohl, Karin Schittenhelm, Oliver Schmidtke, Anja Weiss. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4760-2 (bound). – ISBN 978-1-4426-1568-7 (pbk.) 1. Foreign workers. 2. Immigrants – Employment. 3. Skilled labor. 4. Social mobility. 5. Emigration and immigration – Economic aspects. I. Schittenhelm, Karin, 1957–, author II. Schmidtke, Oliver, author III. Weiss, Anja, author IV. Title. HD6300.N63 2014 331.6’2 C2014-905010-0 _____________________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Rules of Transcription

xiii

1 Highly Skilled Migrants: A Puzzling Socioeconomic Reality and a Challenge to Migration Research 3 2 The Relational Character of Cultural Capital in Migration 3 Multidimensional Status Passages: Migration, Labour Market Inclusion, and Private Life Domains

50

4 Aspects of the Multidimensional Status Passage: Phases, Migration Motives, and Cultural Capital among Foreign-Trained Migrants in Germany 67 5 Migration Control and Migrants’ Agency

92

6 Symbolic Struggles over Cultural Capital: Racial Discrimination and Symbolic Exclusion 7 Up- and Downgrading Cultural Credit: A Cross-Country Comparison 204 8 Conclusions

242

157

23

vi

Contents

Appendix 1

257

Appendix 2

268

Appendix 3

271

Notes

273

References Index

341

299

List of Tables

2.1

2.2

2.3 2.4 5.1 5.2 A1.1

A1.2

A2.1 A2.2 A2.3

Match rates of employed foreign-educated immigrants working in the corresponding occupation, by immigrant type 30 Return on education for post-secondary, non-tertiary certificates and academic diplomas according to migration background and time of certificate acquisition 32 Employment of highly qualified educational locals and foreigners aged 31 to 45, 2009 32 Occupational fields of highly qualified persons with local and foreign degrees, 2009 33 Foreign-born population in Germany, 2009 103 Applications under the 1994 Asylum Regulation, 1997–2005 117 Status group: Immigrants with foreign educational degrees and full legal access to the labour market (40 interviewees in Germany and 31 interviewees in Canada) 261 Status group: Immigrants with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status (25 interviewees in Germany and 20 interviewees in Turkey) 261 Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and full legal access in Germany 268 Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and full legal access in Canada 269 Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status in Germany 269

viii

A2.4 A2.5 A3.1

List of Tables

Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status in Turkey 270 Interviewees with local educational degrees and equal legal status in Germany 270 Cases and interviewers 271

List of Figures

1.1 Status groups of migrants 18 1.2 Selective contrasts underlining country-specific sociocultural practices and institutions 19 2.1 The relational character of cultural capital 48 4.1 Aspects of the multidimensional status passage 70 5.1 Interwoven institutions in the case of persons restricted by professional law 141 7.1 Cultural credit 219 7.2 From knowledge and skills to cultural capital 238

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this research project was formed in response to a call issued by the Volkswagen (VW) Foundation in 2004 for its newly created “Migration and Integration” program. The authors had cooperated in various contexts before, but this call inspired us to pursue our interdisciplinary theoretical discussions more systematically and to use them to design an empirical study of highly skilled migration. We are grateful to the VW Foundation, which awarded a large grant for this undertaking, enabling five years of international research (2005–9). Moreover, Anja Weiß wishes to thank the German Research Association for funding her earlier project on highly skilled migrants to and from Germany, which aided in the design of the project presented here, both by providing empirical insights into the field and by funding Anja Weiß in a manner that gave her the opportunity to work on the VW proposal. We are indebted to the collaborators and the research and student assistants who have worked on the project, often contributing through independent publications: Barbara Pusch, Eleni Hatzidimitriadou, Ulrike Selma Ofner, Sarah Thomsen, Yvonne Henkelmann, Nadya Srur, Niki von Hausen, Mirko Kovacev, Beatrice Marry, Jennifer Bagelman, Steffen Neumann, and Regina Soremski, as well as Hülya Akkaş, Susanne Becker, Flore Biehl, Anja Brosius, Thorsten Hummerich, Selma Kirsch, Kathrin Klein, Stephan Kohlbach, Marina Meyer, Can Mutlu, Sylvia Nicholles, Tania Pastrana, Angela Pohlmann, Meike Prediger, Marcus Riemann, Umut Sacac, Steffi Schmidt, Stephan Schubert, and Julia Strutz. We have, of course, profited from countless inspiring discussions with colleagues, students, and practitioners. Apart from our interpretation workshops, we would like to mention the input we received

xii Acknowledgments

through our project council: Carola Feller, Alişan Genç, Dagmar Maur, Peter Oberschelp, Veysel Özcan, Cem Özdemir, Aygül Özkan, Edwin Semke, Max Stadler, Patrick Wilhelmi, and Hilmi Kaya Turan. In addition, we greatly benefited from conferences organized by the VW Foundation and from projects hosted by Munich University, the University of Victoria, and the Evangelische Akademie Loccum. We are particularly grateful to the colleagues who were willing to comment on our first results in June 2007: Norbert Cyrus, Anne Juhasz, Eleonore Kofman, and Louis Henri Seukwa. We are also greatly indebted to Jillian Shoichet for her superb editorial suggestions and assistance with the manuscript, and we want to thank Stefan Peters for his meticulous editing of our graphs. Finally we would like to express our deep gratitude to the more than two hundred interviewees who were willing to spend several hours narrating their life histories, even though in many cases their lives had not evolved according to plan. Without them, this book would not have been possible. We hope that their life stories will receive the respect that is their due and that our findings will be used in a manner that does them justice.

Rules of Transcription

The interviews were transcribed verbatim following the rules in the table below. Since we worked in several project teams, the transcriptions vary with a view to some technical details. To present the findings in this book, the interviews conducted in a language other than English were translated after the data evaluation had been completed (with the exception of the very few interviews in which the services of a translator were needed during the interview). The originals of the quotations used in this book can be found at http://udue.de/cucapm.

Rules of transcription Verbal account

Transcription

Short pause

(.)

Longer pauses noted according to length

(3 sec. pause)

Non-verbal cues

Enclosed in brackets, e.g., [laughs], [sighs]

Parts that could not be understood by the interviewer or that must be anonymized for privacy reasons

(……)

Incomplete words noted with a hyphen

e.g., permiss-

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WORK IN TRANSITION Cultural Capital and Highly Skilled Migrants’ Passages into the Labour Market

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1 Highly Skilled Migrants: A Puzzling Socioeconomic Reality and a Challenge to Migration Research

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 in the accomplishments and sustainability of modern knowledge societies (Florida 2004). Though European countries have traditionally shown considerable restraint in recruiting foreign workforces, they have recently pursued foreign and migrant workers more vigorously. We are witnessing a movement towards a globalized labour market in which countries around the world compete for the “best brains” (Shachar 2006).1 Highly skilled migrants enjoy a transferability of skills and an international mobility that makes them a sought-after “commodity” in this global market. On the other hand, while integrating migrants into the labour market is an explicit political aim, it is a difficult one to achieve in practice. Recent data suggest that there is a considerable gap between the economic performance and professional achievements of migrants and the performance and achievements of the indigenous population. A socioeconomic survey conducted by Büchel and Frick (2005) demonstrates that the economic performance of migrants varies considerably across Europe, reflecting country-specific institutional arrangements

4

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that regulate labour market integration. While there is variation across Europe, the structural disadvantaging of migrants in the educational system and the labour market is a social reality across the Continent, often well into the second generation (Algan et al. 2010; Bisin et al. 2011; Crul and Vermeulen 2003; Diefenbach 2007; Heath, Rothon, and Kilpi 2008; Kogan 2007; Kalter and Kogan 2006; Lehmer and Ludsteck 2011; Worbs 2003). High unemployment rates and low income levels among migrants are just some of the indicators of this form of social exclusion in the labour market. Second-generation migrants and visible minorities in Canada do not suffer the same degree of disadvantage in the labour market as their counterparts do in Europe.2 But there is clear evidence of a growing gap between the labour market performance of the latest cohorts of migrants and that of the Canadian-born population. The income differential between these two groups is widening and, unlike for previous generations of newcomers, migrants now face an amplified and prolonged income gap (Banerjee 2009; Hou and Coulombe 2010). Adding to this puzzle is the fact that skilled migrants are in no way immune to this development (Picot, Hou, and Coulombe 2008). The insufficient incorporation of highly skilled migrants into key institutions, such as the educational system and the labour market, as well as pertinent patterns of widespread discrimination, has cast a dark shadow on the promises of equal opportunities for newcomers and minorities. From a policy perspective, this development challenges the very rationale for the introduction by many European countries of modern immigration regimes. Highly trained migrants are perceived to address shortages in the labour force and to invigorate economies with their expertise and skills. This potential contribution of migrants to society and the economy is the main legitimization for modern immigration policies. Yet highly qualified migrants are regularly employed in jobs and employment fields for which they are either unqualified or overqualified. The stereotype of the taxi driver with a doctoral degree reflects a reality: in their struggle to establish themselves in the labour market, many of the desired qualified migrants are forced to take jobs that do not make use of their professional skills and knowledge (Kogan 2004, 2007). Recently the Economist3 wrote of Germany’s “scandalous underuse” of immigrants in view of their achievement in the labour market. Alluding to the similar phenomenon of skills underutilization in Canada, Reitz (2011) describes the dimension of the challenge as follows: “The problem is known as ‘brain waste’ and some economists

Highly Skilled Migrants

5

estimate its cost to Canada as totalling at least $3 billion a year, not to mention the ruined dreams suffered by the immigrants themselves.” In a more recent article, Reitz and his colleagues estimate this loss to the Canadian economy to be closer to $11 billion (Reitz, Curtis, and Elrick 2014). This paradoxical situation raises fundamental questions for both our conceptual understanding of migrants’ economic incorporation and appropriate political responses. One way of approaching the issue would be to address it simply in terms of policy failure. This line of interpretation builds on Hollifield’s (1992) idea of a “liberal paradox” that at its core can be described as the tension between economic forces pushing for greater openness for migrants, and political forces tending to favour a drive towards greater closure. From this perspective the deficiencies in the economic incorporation of migrants could be blamed on ineffective and misguided policies or, more crudely, on the lack of proper policy initiatives altogether (Barrett et al. 2013; Lahav and Guiraudon 2006; Straubhaar 2006). We shall address some of the broader policy implications of our study towards the end of the book. At this point we contend that different policy regimes of recruiting and incorporating migrants are an important part of the puzzle but not a sufficient one. As Pichler’s (2011) multi-country study based on the European Social Survey shows, there is a considerable variation in migrants’ occupational accomplishments across national contexts, yet it is difficult to attribute these differences to immigration policies alone. An alternative approach to coming to terms with migrants’ skills underutilization and its variation across national contexts would be to focus on the structures of the labour market from a political economy perspective (Ley 2006). This line of research seeks to causally link migrants’ economic incorporation to the structures of the labour market and macro-economic changes in capitalist economies more broadly. Manifestly, the working conditions and the labour market opportunities that migrants encounter are shaped by production strategies, skill expectations, and training schemes associated with different varieties of capitalism (Freeman 2006; for an overview, see Menz 2008; Menz and Caviedes 2010). The practice of recognizing and using migrants’ skills and qualifications reflects these economic processes as well as the regulation of the labour market. Menz and Caviedes identify the transformation of the European political economy in the dual process of the “internationalization of economic production structure and a (neo)

6

Work in Transition

liberalization of public policy regulation” (2). These developments have led to a profound change in the environment in which migrants seek professional opportunities that increasingly cannot be described in terms of distinct national models. The regulatory state managing labour migration has gradually been eroded and partially replaced by subnational levels of government, employer-driven initiatives, and sectorspecific expectations (see also Ottaviano and Peri 2013).4 Our study of migrants’ cultural capital in specific sectors of the economy will shed light on how spatially and professionally specific conditions vary beyond the regulatory framework of national contexts. In this respect our approach moves beyond a neoclassical focus on market mechanisms as the sole regulators of labour mobility (Borjas 1989): The fate of migrants in the labour market is far from being determined only by an income equilibrium regulated by market-driven labour demand and supply. We interpret the labour market inclusion of migrants as a more complex process that is shaped by both the socioeconomic and legal status of migrants and the specific conditions of particular occupational sectors and labour market segments.5 This in turn has an important effect on how highly skilled migrants, in particular, develop strategies to “market” their cultural capital in an international labour market. Building on a theoretical concept by Bourdieu, Harald Bauder (2012) has convincingly argued how, specifically in the qualified sector of the labour market, the value of cultural capital is negotiated in distinct professional “fields.” These fields vary according to institutional infrastructures, social practices, and cultural norms in the labour market (see also Ong 1999). In this respect we find considerable variation in national labour markets in terms of professionally distinctive practices and expectations.6 Similar considerations shape our understanding of migrants’ labour market inclusion from a sociological perspective: The general conceptualization of integration processes is shaped essentially by notions of a given nationally defined and territorially demarcated community in which newcomers are included in social, economic, and cultural terms. Yet are these categories of integration appropriate for a group of migrants that is highly mobile, often operates in transnational contexts, and possesses skills that are transferable across national borders (Chiswick and Miller 2009; Sassen 2004; Schmidtke 2011; Weiß 2005; Zolberg 2007)? Does it still make sense to measure the “integration” of, for example, an IT specialist or a manager of a multinational company by the degree to which he or she learns the local language or identifies

Highly Skilled Migrants

7

with the national community of his or her professional assignment? Migrants can increasingly rely on transnational networks and modes of recognizing their qualifications that, at least for more privileged professionals, change the very parameters within which notions of integration and equality have traditionally been conceptualized (Joppke 2007b, Weiß and Mensah 2011). Essentially, we need a more empirically grounded and theoretically differentiated approach to understanding processes of integration. In contrast to most discussions, which deliberate integration primarily as a top-down, state-imposed framework for accommodating newcomers, our research begins with the life experiences of migrants themselves. By starting here, we assign to migrants an agency that is not often acknowledged in discussions in the field. By reconstructing the life experiences and coping strategies of migrants themselves, we can analyse the effects of political and social structures related to their labour market inclusion. Our empirical research is focused on the “cultural” (as distinct from the “human”) capital of the migrants. 1.1

From Human to Cultural Capital

The (mis)achievement of highly skilled migrants has been discussed primarily within the framework of human capital theory (see ColicPeisker and Walker 2003; Creese, Dyck, and McLaren 2008; Faist 2008; Friedberg 2000; Hiebert 2002, 2006; Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2001; Mattoo, Neagu, and Özden 2008; OECD 2007; Zeng and Xie 2004). When conceptualized as “human capital,” education is seen as a matter of monetary investment and return. In the words of Gary S. Becker (1993, 16), “Expenditures on education, training, medical care, etc., are investments in capital.” The main question for migration research based on human capital theory is whether migrants are able to receive a reasonable return on their investments in human capital. Conversely, within this perspective, the receiving country views immigrants as an investment whose dividends pay off in productivity gains and contributions to social security systems. Behind this question lies the assumption of “an informed, rational person” (91). In this volume we assert that limiting the discussion on the economic performance of highly skilled migrants and viewing their knowledge and skills solely as human capital leads to a dead end. The relation between the knowledge and skills that a migrant has acquired, abroad or in the country, and his or her actual labour market performance

8

Work in Transition

cannot be reduced to the idea of individuals acting rationally vis-àvis actual and potential labour market opportunities (Boswell 2008; Buzdugan and Halli 2009). Instead, the underachievement of migrants is also determined by collective bargaining about the value of specific skills and knowledge. Culturally shaped expectations of both employers and employees – routines and habits in the labour market, as well as practices of inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination based on the construction of ethnic and gender difference (Salaff and Greve 2003; Eberhardt and Schwenken 2010) – play significant roles in the process of labour market integration. It is hardly possible to model these collective struggles over recognition using a framework of methodological individualism – that is, an approach that focuses on the (rational) action decisions of the individual and neglects both the collective structures of practice and its reflexive dimension (Cresse, Dyck, and McLaren 2008; see also Bohnsack and Nohl 2003, 367–70). One critical point is that this approach does not convincingly answer why rational expectations of the migrants and the labour market are often undermined by “irrational” exclusion and employment in underqualified positions. The analytical focus of migrants’ compatibility with market and labour market conditions is simply not multifaceted enough to represent adequately the process of migrants’ labour market inclusion (Erel 2010). We prefer to analyse migrants’ performance using the concept of cultural capital, first introduced by Pierre Bourdieu. According to Bourdieu (1986b), the value of cultural capital is decided in symbolic markets. Individuals experience vastly differing chances for the recognition of their cultural capital, depending on their ethnicity, gender, and other classifications (Weiß 2006a, 2010b, 2012). Bourdieu (1986b) criticizes human capital theory for its failure to develop a “systematic” understanding of the impact of symbolic struggles over the value of cultural capital. Human capital theory treats differential chances for recognition as an exception to the classical market model. By contrast, Bourdieu considers group-specific access to opportunities as constitutive for the concept of cultural capital. We therefore argue that this concept of cultural capital, if applied and adapted to analysing the migration of highly skilled people, will help to explain the paradox of integration that we noted above. Why are migrants’ (mis-)achievements in the labour markets so often at odds with the aims of migration policies that purposely target highly skilled and qualified migrants?

Highly Skilled Migrants

9

As this book will discuss, the form that cultural capital takes is significant for the recognition of cultural capital during migration. Recognition of what Bourdieu (1986b, 243) has termed the “institutionalized state” of cultural capital (such as educational titles) can be formalized in law. National organizations for education normally stipulate, however, that educational titles achieved outside the country are not equal to national titles, or are not recognized at all. The “embodied state” of cultural capital (243), which refers to mental schemes and action orientation, language, value, and competencies) is tied to a particular person, who acquires this cultural capital through long socialization and educational processes. Even if a migrant is able to obtain recognition for his or her educational titles and thus convert them into institutionalized cultural capital, the migrant’s habitual style of working (embodied cultural capital) may not meet employers’ expectations about “etiquette” or “savoir-faire” – for example, how to act in a job interview or how to approach supervisors. The reverse is possible as well, especially in the medical profession, for instance, where migrants’ educational titles are not always recognized while their embodied cultural capital is: although employers might hire foreign doctors, state regulations that hesitate to recognize foreign credentials limit physicians’ access to the labour market. The assessment of cultural capital is also shaped by practices of inclusion or exclusion of migrants. Symbolic struggles and forms of ethnic discrimination can result in, on the one hand, a generalized devaluation of cultural capital but also, on the other hand, the recognition of particular knowledge and abilities that migrants may have developed during migration. Language skills and social networks – which may be professional or among co-migrants – can also help improve the value of cultural capital in the labour market by facilitating a migrant’s access to qualified jobs. In addition, by furthering their education, migrants may improve their economic performance by adapting their knowledge and skills to labour market expectations, such as by learning management strategies specific to the country in which they work. In short, the value of migrants’ cultural capital is determined by its relationship to the context in which it is used (Weiß 2005; Verwiebe and Müller 2006). Social scientific thought about the domestic careers of autochthonous people is based on the assumption that knowledge and skills acquired in educational organizations and the expectations of the labour market “fit together,” at least partially. When educational credentials are from abroad, and when the holders

10

Work in Transition

of the credentials are “foreign,” the preconditions for a fit between knowledge and labour market expectations need further exploration (Weiß 2005). These considerations reveal that cultural capital, as a theoretical concept, is entirely relational. The relational character of cultural capital is not confined to space; it pertains to time, too. If, as Bourdieu (1986b, 244) rightly argues, the acquisition of cultural capital, especially in its embodied state, is “an investment, above all[,] of time,” then the struggle for its recognition is also temporally structured. Migrants go through distinct phases in their migration experience, each shaped by a particular set of opportunities and constraints as individuals pursue their professional careers. From the very beginning – that is, when the first motivation to emigrate emerges – such temporally situated experiences constitute the basis for subsequent phases of the social process. In order to understand the various dimensions of status transitions and their effects on the migrant’s future life experience, the concept of cultural capital is in this study combined with a life course perspective. By analysing status passages of migrants into the labour market, we capture more fully the complexity of those social and cultural processes that structure the integration of highly skilled migrants. 1.2

Status Passages into the Labour Market

Over the past several decades, life course research has grown as an area of sociological and interdisciplinary research and has been particularly fruitful in the analysis of developmental processes, culturally and normatively constructed life stages or biographical meanings, and the outcomes of institutional regulations and policies (see Mayer 2009). A life course perspective has become widespread across the social sciences, and it has been realized both through longitudinal data collections (Mayer 2000) and through qualitative approaches to life histories (see Bertaux 1981; Kohli 2007; Rosenthal 2004). While biographical approaches in the qualitative research tradition have repeatedly turned to migration experiences (see Breckner 2007), for a rather long period the more prevailing approaches to life course research did not appropriately address the effects of migration on contemporary societies. However, many of the subjects discussed extensively in life course research (see Mayer 2009) are highly relevant for current scholarly debates in migration studies. For the purpose of our analysis, career trajectories in education and work (Blossfeld et al.

Highly Skilled Migrants

11

2005), the change of transition patterns according to institutional contexts and policy regimes (see Mayer 2009, 419), and the perspectives gained by cross-national approaches to understanding institutional impacts are among the most important issues. Indeed, recent debates address the issue of migration in a life course perspective (Wingens et al. 2011; Schittenhelm 2011; Fuller 2011). Life course research has highlighted the social risks and ambiguities of transition processes. Drawing on analytical concepts of this research, our approach aims to highlight the opportunities and challenges these transitions create and how actors respond to them. However, the outcome of status passages for the life course is not controlled only by individual actors but also by strongly structured by social and institutional contexts (see Heinz 1991; Mayer 2000). Furthermore, and important for the analysis in this book, life course studies offer a promising approach for examining social inequalities by taking into account both macro-structural configurations and the consequences of these configurations for individual life courses over time (Mayer 2000). Because they have an open outcome, transition processes are highly relevant for the (re-)distribution of social status and the (re-)configurations of social boundaries throughout the life course (see Schittenhelm 2005). Furthermore, research from a life course perspective enables us to consider human lives across life domains, such as work and parenthood or partnership (see Mayer 2009), and highlights the competing demands of these domains. Scholars of gender (e.g., Krüger and Levy 2001) have argued that the gendered incorporation in competing domains is central for the gendering of life courses and for understanding emerging patterns of social inequality. To some extent this is true for migrants, too, yet the life courses of migrants not only are gendered but also show the impact of transnational mobility, which is linked to additional transition stages as well. In our study, the integration of migrants into the labour market is conceptualized as a multidimensional status passage (see Schittenhelm 2005), meaning that transition processes of migrants during their entry into the labour market are analysed from three perspectives: (1) as an entry into the labour force – as a change in status between educational accomplishments and professional status, with its imminent social risks and need for reorientation; (2) as a change in private life domains (family, partnership, other lifestyles), followed by the gendered effects of this change for subsequent career trajectories; and (3) as a process of migration – as a change in status that results from a transition between

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Work in Transition

nation states that each has its own specific educational system, labour market, and citizenship regulations. The ability of migrants to make their educational titles or their cultural capital compatible with the demand of the labour market helps determine the way in which the status passage evolves between educational institutions and the labour market. Yet this ability is enabled and constrained by the institutions structuring the multidimensional transition. When we use a life course perspective, we can study the integration of migrants into the labour market as a transition over time, a transition that can be separated into different phases, turning points, and subsequent careers (see Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011). Migrants’ strategies of coping with barriers to using their qualifications in the labour market can be linked directly to specific phases in their career, and they may also result in an accumulation of experience and a more general biographical orientation over time (Bertaux 1981; Bertaux and Thompson 1997). Thus, a biographical approach enables us to observe the temporal structure of status passages and allows us to take a closer look at both the institutional structure of status passages and the way in which migrants themselves perceive, master, and negotiate their individual trajectories. Status passages are embedded in institutions. Migrants with foreign educational titles are confronted with differing residence permits and conditions for the recognition of their educational titles. In this study, we consider how coping strategies, interpretations of transitional stages, and ideas about how to deal with the status passage are generated in interactive processes among highly skilled migrants who are similarly involved in the transition processes. The more they share a similar social understanding, the more likely they are to develop common definitions for their living conditions and similar ideas for coping with them. By considering various subgroups of migrants with differing educational titles and places of residence, our study addresses the diversity of collectivities among cohorts or populations. Migrants are widely dependent on the legal, social, and symbolic recognition of their cultural capital. At the same time, they are actively involved in negotiating the recognition and valorization of their cultural capital during their status passage into the labour market. This book reconstructs the individual and collective strategies developed by migrants to make use of their cultural capital in the labour market, in spite of the risks of exclusion they might face.

Highly Skilled Migrants

13

Individual and Collective Agency and the Attempts of Nation States to Control Migration Two important points in the discussion so far should be reiterated. First, the value of cultural capital depends on the relationship between skills and knowledge and the recognition of both in the labour market, which in turn is structured by interrelated factors such as legal barriers, options for further education, and social networks. Second, these structural factors become relevant over time in the life courses of individuals who simultaneously negotiate status transitions in different social domains. In their attempts to enter labour markets, migrants bridge the gap between (foreign) educational systems and employment, and they often do so at the same time that they are taking part in other important life course events – engaging in long-term relationships, having children, and so on. The many structural factors that shape the recognition of cultural capital are channelled through the biographies and status passages of individuals. In the process of living their lives, individuals react to and act upon structural constraints and thereby shape the processes of labour market integration. A third important point was made but not elaborated upon. Both the recognition of cultural capital in the labour market and the distribution of resources during status passages are mediated by collective struggles of in- and exclusion. In his theory of social closure, Parkin (1979) argues that dominant classes are able to monopolize resources by excluding others from access, and that social closure is institutionalized by the state: “The closure model conceptualizes the state as an agency that buttresses and consolidates the rules and institutions of exclusion governing all relations of domination and subjection. Indeed, a class, race, sex, or ethnic group only accomplishes domination to the extent that its exclusionary prerogatives are backed up by the persuasive instruments of the state” (138). Parkin’s theory did not lead to a paradigm shift in research on inequality, but it has proven relevant in research on differential access to regulated professions (Weeden 2002) and to citizenship (Brubaker 1992). Many highly skilled migrants – those educated as doctors, lawyers, or engineers, for example – are, in fact, confronted with both kinds of barriers. First, access to these regulated professions is governed by state laws, which often raise barriers for migrants. In Germany, for instance, until very recently only EU citizens were allowed to be selfemployed in these professions. As a result, migrant doctors, even those

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whose educational title is recognized as equivalent to that of domestically trained doctors and who are allowed to participate in the general German labour market, faced, at the time of our study, an additional barrier in the form of government regulation. In many other countries, foreign educational credentials are not recognized by the associations that govern access to the professions. Second, and apart from professional closure, which may be viewed as a problem particular to subgroups of highly skilled migrants,7 all migrants are also confronted with more general forms of civic and symbolic exclusion. This exclusion is experienced not only by newly migrated persons but also by the children of migrants, individuals who are legal citizens and whose cultural capital often is identical to that of their peers, both in its institutionalized and embodied aspects. The macro-social context for integration therefore varies, depending on whether a particular group is publicly seen as “equal without doubt” or whether it must justify its being in the country, as do many children of labour migrants, some of whom are highly skilled, naturalized, and barely visible, but still confronted with stigmatization (Goffman 1963). Differences of this kind highlight the main shortcoming of the human capital approach. The value of cultural capital results from both its productivity and the recognition it receives as an outcome of social, political, and symbolic struggles (Weiß 2006a). Both aspects are so entwined that it is impossible to clearly demarcate the extent and effects of discrimination. The outcomes of collective struggles over access are institutionalized in systems of civic stratification (Lockwood 1996; Ong 1999) and in the fact that the nation state system controls the rights of access to a particular national community (Brubaker 1992; Weiß 2006a) and to recognition on a global scale (Fraser 2007; Nussbaum 2008; Isin and Wood 1999). States determine access to their territory, and most states offer unequal entitlements to those who are allowed to enter. It is worth noting that the practice of legal exclusion may differ substantially from policy intentions and public discourse (Castles 2007). Very often, loopholes are found and tacitly accepted by authorities, resulting in a legally precarious situation for many migrants, who are wanted or needed in informal labour markets but not given rights to settlement (Düvell 2006). Sometimes openness is declared to be a policy goal and is put into national law; at the same time, administrative procedure and the governmental regulation of the professions act as effective agents of closure. The debate about the (in-)ability of nation states to effectively control their borders (Hollifield 1992; Cornelius et al. 2004) is extensive, but it is

Highly Skilled Migrants

15

rarely applied to the situation of highly skilled migrants (who are, after all, invited to enter and should not need to be controlled). Yet many highly skilled migrants do not enter on a visa for the highly skilled; even when they do, they still face problems of integration much like those faced by their lesser-skilled compatriots. European states have only recently changed their policies in order to attract highly skilled migrants, and they still tend to view “wanted” immigration as an exception to the rule of exclusion. This results in policies that create “holes” in the barriers but do not have a significantly modifying effect on a system whose general aim is to prevent immigration. In many European countries, the meso- and macro-social institutional context that frames integration continues to be hostile, even for the highly skilled who are invited to immigrate. This includes a public discourse that supports symbolic exclusion (Schmidtke 2008) and welfare systems that disadvantage newcomers (Mohr 2005; Sainsbury 2006) or de facto exclude them from support structures, but it also includes the institutionalized tendency to view the majority of highly skilled migrants in legal terms, not as highly skilled migrants but as spouses, refugees, or members of specific ethnic groups. Integration is not viewed as a process of mutual adaptation and continued change; instead, a top-down governmentalist approach (Joppke 2007a, 2007b) ignores migrants’ individual and collective agency. In sum, the integration of highly skilled migrants is not only structured by the productivity of migrants’ (foreign) knowledge and skills in labour markets. It is also subject to, on the one hand, symbolic struggles over recognition of credentials and individuals, and, on the other hand, access to state institutions. These struggles can become visible in blatant racism or in limited access to non-ethnic labour markets. They can result in significantly delaying migrants‘ careers and biographical projects, as migrants may have to apply more often than natives in order to find a job, and they may lead to the reduced aspirations of individuals who must cope with such discouraging situations. Commonly, symbolic struggles are institutionalized in state structures8 that implement universalistic principles through particularistic closure (Weiß 2006a, 2010b). And primarily they manifest in “practical difficulties” during migrants’ status passage into the labour market. In Germany, for instance, some groups of migrants receive state support as they adjust their skills to labour market demand, but this support is for vocational education, which results in engineers “adjusting” their skills to qualify as car mechanics, for example, and similar scenarios. In other cases,

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recognition of educational titles is granted in principle, but migrants lack the time and resources to deal with the red tape and the waiting periods. There are many examples of difficulties in the labour market integration of the highly skilled that prevail, despite migrants’ full (formal) access to the labour market. These examples cannot be fully understood without a broader understanding of migrants’ agency and the meso- and macro-social contexts of integration. 1.3

Research Design

Migration research has been criticized for treating ethnic groups as a given unit of comparison (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002; Brubaker 2004). Indeed, migrants may be better described by their gender, profession, age, and other attributes than by ethnicity (McCall 2005; Phoenix and Pattynama 2006; Yuval-Davis 2006; Kofman and Raghuram 2006). And fixed categories of this kind may fail to capture the differences between scientific categories and lived experience, which may include self-identification and collectively ascribed identities as well as implicit and practical experiences of a multidimensional character (see Bohnsack and Nohl 1998; Nohl and Ofner 2010). We avoid premade scientific classifications by developing our analytical concepts on the basis of a qualitative research design with a multilayer approach (Nohl et al. 2006). Instead of risking the pitfalls of methodological nationalism (Amelina et al. 2012; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002), our comparative perspective focuses on concepts such as cultural capital and the status passage into the labour market, thus also referring to units of analysis below and beyond national contexts (see Nohl et al. 2006). These are central concepts in research on labour, education, and inequality, issues that concern migrants and non-migrants alike. We use these concepts as a point of departure, which is then adapted to the specifics of migration and clarified on the basis of our empirical material. For instance, migrants acquire cultural capital like everyone else, but often they have done so in a national setting other than the one in which they are (currently) putting this cultural capital to use. Therefore, our analytical approach also considers that the cultural capital of migrants may not be recognized in the same way as the cultural capital of other highly skilled persons, and that migrants may be subjected to symbolic exclusion. In order to provide insight into the recognition and non-recognition of cultural capital, our research considers status passages in their mesoand macro-social institutional contexts (see Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel

Highly Skilled Migrants

17

1981; Reitz 2007). As has already been pointed out in classical studies on trajectories (Strauss et al. 1985) and status passages (Glaser and Strauss 1971), a qualitative approach aims to understand transitions with regard to institutional expectation patterns and biographical action schemes (see Riemann and Schütze 1991; Schütze 2006). Accordingly, we investigate action practices in the emergence of up- and downgrading dynamics during the transition into the labour market (see Schittenhelm 2010). Since we are interested primarily in the utilization of cultural capital during a biographical status passage, above all we focus on the method of the narrative interview (see Schütze 1983, 1992, 2006; Rosenthal 2004). Following an initial question intended to generate a narration, we asked migrants to tell their life story in great detail. Our follow-up questions then focused on themes relevant to our study. In the research of the international study group “Cultural Capital during Migration,”9 more than two hundred narrative interviews were conducted, and many of them were interpreted with the documentary method (see Bohnsack 2010b), a procedure of data analysis based on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1952, 1997). The documentary interpretation of narrative interviews (see Nohl 2010, 2012) not only aims to reconstruct explicit aspects of the life story as related by the interviewees themselves. The method also enables us to understand the implicit set of knowledge (Mannheim 1997, 67) and routines that shape and are embedded in daily practices.10 Narrative interviews give us a good understanding of socialization and learning processes, and we can reconstruct sets of knowledge and competence that are not yet, or no longer, recognized in the form of institutionally accepted cultural capital. By analysing life stories, we can understand the complex relationship between macro-structural (in particular legal and political) conditions of labour market integration on the one hand, and the action strategies and orientations of migrants on the other (see Favell 2008).11 We have therefore defined various status groups of migrants as the focus of our research. These status groups differ in the quality of their cultural capital and the barriers they face, thereby enabling meaningful empirical comparison. In this book, our main interest is in highly qualified persons whose most recent educational title was acquired before migration.12 We distinguish systematically between the group of foreign-trained persons with a right of residence, which makes them formally equal in the labour market to members of the autochthonous population, and

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Figure 1.1 Status groups of migrants Migration status

Location of (last) academic title Abroad

Formally equal access to labour market

Education abroad and full access

Legally subordinate access to labour market

Education abroad and legally restricted access

In the country of residence Local education and full access

migrants whose residence permits offer limited rather than full access to the labour market. In order to compare the options, strategies, and action patterns of foreign-trained migrants, who are the main target group in this book, we have also included in our study indigenously trained persons whose last educational title was acquired after migration. Comparative analysis is fundamental to our approach. Our procedure for data analysis, the documentary method (see Bohnsack 2010a), aims to understand typical orientations and experiences of migrants by comparing different cases. Findings can then be captured in types and typologies in order to distinguish specific trajectories, along with the immigrants’ orientations and action schemes. However, in our analysis of the narrative interviews conducted with members of the above-mentioned status groups, we employ various levels of comparison (see Nohl et al. 2006; see also Wimmer 2009, 262; Nohl 2009) in order to identify typical patterns of status passages and to understand their preconditions. In the first level of comparison we interpret the individual cases alongside other cases within their respective status groups. In the second level we compare the different status groups of immigrants mentioned above with each other. While this level of comparison does enable us to develop a more accurate understanding of the complex relationship between structural factors and migrants’ agency, it is still restricted to one nation state – Germany – where we conducted most of our research. The third level of comparison that we employ goes beyond the nation state. Here we consider equivalent status groups across countries and analyse how their status passages are affected by the context of the respective country (see Nohl 2013, 121–9; Weiß and Nohl 2012; Smith and Favell 2006).

Highly Skilled Migrants

19

Figure 1.2 Selective contrasts underlining country-specific sociocultural practices and institutions

CANADA Education abroad full access

CANADA GERMANY

Education local full access

Education local full access

Education abroad full access

Education abroad restricted access

TURKEY Education abroad restricted access

We contend that migrants are situated in or between several countries and that it therefore would be methodologically nationalist to treat them as belonging only to one country. We then go on to look at migrants “in” Germany, “in” Canada, “in” Turkey, and so on. The main goal of our country comparison is not to create typologies of countries but to better understand the significance of country-specific sociocultural practices of exclusion and institutional conditions (such as migration and labour market policies, as well as regulations for educational titles and residence permits) by contrasting status passages in Germany with those taking place under other structural conditions. With this purpose in mind, we have identified a country that offers a maximized contrast for each of our status groups. By observing the status groups created in Germany in conjunction with similar status groups in contrasting national contexts, we are able to cover a wide range of meso- and macro-structural settings.13 The selection of contrasting macro-social contexts is determined by the specific features of our status groups. For instance, in Canada our

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comparative perspective focuses on highly qualified migrants who received their education both in their country of origin and in Canada as their new host country. Many of them are selected for immigration on the basis of a highly sophisticated point system that responds to Canada’s economic and labour market needs. In contrast to Germany, which has only recently and reluctantly opened her borders to highly skilled migrants, Canada actively targets these migrants for recruitment and has for a long time provided equitable legal access to the labour market. In Turkey, we focus our attention on the highly qualified migrants who received their most recent educational title abroad but who lack a residence permit in Turkey or have only a subordinate permit, which affects their access to the labour market. In Germany, migrants without legal access to the labour market face substantial pressure by migration control agencies. In contrast, attempts to control migration politically are relatively recent in Turkey and are often prompted by aspirations of EU membership. This means that highly qualified migrants with legally limited access to the labour market may nevertheless be able to enter the Turkish labour market informally because Turkish authorities are reluctant to implement effective migration controls. 1.4

The Structure of the Book

In the tradition of an empirically grounded theorizing (Glaser and Strauss 1967), the book discusses conceptual innovations together with empirical findings. Starting with an overview of research previously conducted on highly qualified migrants, chapter 2 develops our analytical concepts about the relational character of cultural capital as contrasted with the “human capital” approach. This chapter focuses on the forms in which cultural capital is generated and converted in the labour market. Chapter 3 then focuses on the concept of the “status passage” and how this approach provides a fruitful interpretative framework for studying the challenges faced by highly skilled migrants. This part of the book conceptualizes the migrant experience and its impact on labour market inclusion as long-term biographical and societal processes, beyond the immediate situation of the migrant’s move from one national context to another. Our investigation into the formation and utilization of cultural capital across national contexts in the empirical chapters is developed in close conjunction with a discussion of the temporal aspects of the status passage. This latter aspect takes into consideration the fact that the value of cultural capital changes through

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21

a lengthy process of recognition, which often involves the migrant’s acquisition of additional education and his or her flexible adaptation to the requirements of the labour market. The next four chapters examine particular aspects of highly skilled migrants’ trajectories in the labour market on the basis of our empirical findings. Chapter 4 presents empirical findings on the multidimensional status passages of foreign-trained migrants into the German labour market. Against the background of specific migration motives and in different phases of the status passage, these highly qualified people follow distinguishable strategies to capitalize on their knowledge and skills. We identify typical patterns of entering the labour market in their relation to other dimensions of the status passage. While chapter 4 focuses on cases in the German macro-social context, chapter 5 contrasts the German migration regime with that of Canada and Turkey. Our institutional analyses highlight the differences between country-specific migration regimes and offer contextual information for the interviews of legally excluded migrants, who are the focal point of this chapter. While migration law (and some migration research as well) assumes that migrants are propelled by one main reason, which remains stable over time, migrants themselves often show multiple biographical motivations, which change over time. If their migration motivation is deemed to be illegitimate by the receiving state, migrants do not necessarily give up their intention but may try to adapt. It is in the interactive effects between (legally exclusive) migration regulation and migrants’ agency that we can identify unintended effects, which help to explain why countries that try to attract highly skilled migrants often fail to integrate these migrants fully into the labour market. Chapter 6 considers an aspect of migrants’ labour market inclusion that seems to be of critical relevance empirically but is difficult to conceptualize in research: the role that racial discrimination and symbolic exclusion play in the labour market inclusion of migrants. Identifying how this dimension shapes the recognition of cultural capital helps to reveal the processes at work in the reproduction of the social inequalities that “visible minorities” in particular often have to face. Our biographical data indicate that symbolic exclusion and discrimination are experienced across the different status groups. In this dimension of cultural capital recognition, the matter of where an educational title was acquired is relatively unimportant. Variation across the status groups is more distinct with respect to national contexts and recurrent modes

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of experiencing discrimination, and the effects they have on migrants’ labour market inclusion. Chapter 7 directs its attention to those foreign-trained migrants who did not experience stringent legal or symbolic exclusion that impeded their labour market inclusion. However, these migrants, once they landed in Germany, Turkey, or Canada, had to adapt their knowledge and skills to the expectations of the labour market. Comparing migrants’ experiences in these countries, the chapter shows how trajectories are shaped by the peculiarities of (transnational) professional fields and by country-specific expectations towards qualified labour. In chapter 8 we summarize the empirical findings of our study by relating them to our core theoretical concepts. Against the background of a relational understanding of cultural capital, the documentary analysis of narrative interviews revealed status passages of foreign-trained migrants, which are evidence for both their vigorous and successful endeavours and the informal as well as institutionalized barriers they may encounter. If immigration policies wish to target these highly qualified persons, they are advised to reconsider institutions governing trajectories into the labour market in their complexity, which results in unexpected and sometimes even unintended impediments to successful labour market inclusion.

2 The Relational Character of Cultural Capital in Migration

“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 thirtyfive, 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, seeking recognition for the education he had received before his migration. As Mr Mehra went on to tell us, he was given an immigration visa as a result of his professional background as an engineer: “So, but before coming here when I applied for immigrations from Pakistan, they gave me the immigration based on my qualification, being a professional, in the professional category. And when I came here and I took my credentials to ICES, that’s what they call it. International Credential Evaluation Services. And (2 sec. pause) a kind of evaluation on my degree, but they said that you have to (1 sec. pause) not to upgrade, but they said, ‘This is equal to what we have in Canada.’” In the course of migration, educational degrees are re-evaluated, their worth assessed vis-à-vis labour market expectations in the receiving country, a process for which organizations like the ICES are responsible. Although Mr Mehra’s credentials were recognized by the state, this did not guarantee that he could capitalize on them: “Having my bachelor background, eight years of experience, I did apply to different companies, in Calgary, I know, my background is like petroleum engineering so I applied in Calgary, through Internet, even in Vancouver, up

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north. But I got a couple of interviews, but both of them just suddenly, only question they asked me (1 sec. pause), ‘Do you have any Canadian experience?’” Mr Mehra’s attempts to secure himself a qualified position in the labour market were in vain. His education was, apparently, overshadowed by his lack of “Canadian experience,” a term that we came across frequently in our interviews with study participants. Although Mr Mehra had worked in his profession for many years, his overseas job experience was ignored in this informal evaluation process. As a result, he had to start his career again from scratch. This life history, like many others that we collected throughout our research, is evidence of the intricacies of education. In Mr Mehra’s case, knowledge and skills accumulated over a long period of time had been certified and rewarded with a diploma and had been useful to him in securing employment in the petrol engineering industry in Pakistan. As soon as his diploma was transferred to another country, however, its value in the labour market was severely challenged. What had once been the key to obtaining skilled employment was devalued when “Canadian work experience” became crucial. The fact that knowledge and skills depend on recognition in biographically changing and socially constituted spaces (Weiß 2005) is one of the primary aspects of the concept of “cultural capital.” Chapter 2 explores the relational character of cultural capital from various perspectives. First we present some statistical analyses of foreign-educated migrants’ labour market performance. We focus on the circumstances of highly qualified immigrants in Canada and Germany, though we also touch on the experiences of immigrants in other countries. Almost all these studies use the term human capital, an economic concept that focuses on one’s financial investment in one’s education and a return on that investment. We argue that the term is subject to severe limitations when it comes to the social and cultural contexts within which knowledge and skills are applied. Instead, we employ the concept of cultural capital in our empirical research, underscoring its relational character. 2.1

The Economic Value of Foreign Credentials in Canada, Germany, and Elsewhere

The transition from the educational system to the economic system – that is, the move from a university setting to the labour market – is, under most circumstances, a difficult status passage. Migrants face

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25

particularly severe challenges. In its annual International Migration Outlook, the OECD in 2007 devoted a chapter to the situation of highly qualified foreigners. Distinguishing between the foreign-born (not the equivalent of the foreign-educated) and natives, the report states, “In all of the countries considered, at least 25%, and on average nearly 50%, of skilled immigrants between 15 and 64 years of age are inactive, unemployed or relegated to jobs for which they are over-qualified” (OECD 2007, 149–50). The report has determined that the situation of newly arrived immigrants is even worse than that of immigrants who have been in the country for a longer period (during which time they may have obtained educational titles within the host country’s educational system). The OECD researchers then detect two important though less obvious factors that may explain the differences in the experiences of immigrants and natives. First, the International Migration Outlook report finds that “people originating from the EU15, from Canada, or from the United States, are on average no more over-qualified (i.e., relegated to jobs below their qualification) than persons born in the country in which they reside.” In contrast, the report shows that “immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and European countries from outside the EU, and Asia as well, are particularly exposed to over-qualification” (OECD 2007, 141). The report does note that this difference between Western and other immigrants may be due to several factors, most notably the varying quality of education in other countries but also employers’ ignorance, assumptions, and prejudices vis-à-vis highly qualified foreigners from non-Western countries. With this first factor in mind, OECD researchers then gathered “information on some generally unobserved aspects of skills, such as the place where the diploma was obtained, cognitive skills, or proficiency in the host country language” (143). For some OECD countries, the authors of the report were able to take into account the results of the International Adult Literacy Survey (which measures the prose literacy, document literacy, and mathematical literacy of highly qualified migrants, among others) and relate these results to the labour market success of this group. The authors suggest that “some of the aspects of human capital, which are not included in the level of education, may affect over-qualification” (146). The complex indicators collected for the OECD report allude to the difficulties of evaluating “human capital.” In addition to the unobserved aspects of skills, it is difficult to differentiate between the effect of employers’ prejudices, assumptions, and expectations on the one

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hand and the effect of immigrants’ deficiencies on the other. These elements suggest not only the problematic nature of the term human capital, which does not systematically include aspects such as prejudice or “intrinsic skills” (OECD 2007, 146), but also the limits of a statistical survey in which the value of credentials is measured without taking into consideration the fact that the credentials themselves are a consequence of interaction and negotiation.3 Statistical surveys like that undertaken by the OECD are not able to differentiate between “domestic- and foreign-source human capital” (Friedberg 2000, 222). As Friedberg states, economic research predominantly notes differences only between “immigrants” and “natives” and asks “whether immigrants ever attain earnings parity with natives and, if so, how long this process takes” (222). As Friedberg points out, however, one country, Israel, maintains statistical data that allow researchers to differentiate in detail between foreign and domestic education as well as to control for cohort effects. Inquiring into a sample of “fulltime, salaried, non-agricultural workers reporting earnings of between 5,000 and 500,000 Israeli shekels per month” (228), a sample in which we find a notable two-thirds of the population to be foreign-born, Friedberg comes to the conclusion that there “is a 10.0% [financial] return to domestic schooling for natives, an 8.0% return to domestic schooling for immigrants, and a 7.1% return to foreign schooling for immigrants. The results for experience show a similar pattern: native earnings rise by 1.7% for each year of domestic experience, while immigrants gain 1.1% for each year of domestic experience and just 0.1% for years of foreign experience” (234). The statistical data given for Israel allow for measuring the impact of additional domestic schooling received by foreign-educated migrants in Israel. In general, this impact is positive, with an increasingly positive effect for those groups whose foreign education is least acknowledged in Israel (i.e., immigrants from Asia and Africa) (see Friedberg 2000, 236). However, for these immigrants from Asia and Africa (primarily the Sephardic Jews), the impact of additional domestic labour market experience seems to be less significant (see 238). Friedberg therefore concludes that these findings “are consistent with a model in which destination-country human capital enables immigrants to translate the skills they accumulated in their countries of origin into terms rewarded in the host labour market” (247).4 The empirical result, that knowledge and skills are valued variously, depending on the country in which they were obtained, may be

Cultural Capital in Migration

27

interpreted in several ways. First, one can reasonably argue that the quality of education differs from country to country, and that immigrants who had received a low-quality education would have to improve their knowledge and skills by taking part in high-quality education opportunities (as Friedberg implies). Second, employers may find it difficult and time-consuming to judge the value of foreign education and hence avoid employing foreign-educated personnel. Third, while education certificates inform us (albeit incompletely) about the level of an individual’s knowledge and skills, they also carry a symbolic value. This is especially so if these certificates have been obtained abroad. Studies such as those by Friedberg and the OECD, which are based on human capital theory, usually neglect to incorporate in their assessment the symbolic value of education.

Foreign-Educated Migrants in Canada An important issue in the research on immigrants’ labour market success is connected to cohort effects. For example, immigrants who arrived in Canada between 1995 and 1999 received a lower proportion of the country’s average earnings than immigrants who had arrived thirty years earlier (Aydemir and Skuterud 2005). With a descriptive finding of this kind, the question posed is – generally speaking – whether this differential in the financial return on education can be explained with historic contingencies of the labour market or with variations over time in the immigrant population. Canada, one of the countries considered in our study, has a long-standing tradition of statistical surveys on migration, which allows for the study of immigrants’ labour market performance over a considerable period of time. Investigating the entry earnings of immigrants, which decreased between 1966 and 1999, Aydemir and Skuterud (2005, 668) demonstrate that about one-third of the decline in immigrants’ entry earnings can be explained by the decreasing value placed on foreign labour market experience (as opposed to foreign education). Another third of the decline can be attributed to the weaker language skills among recent immigration cohorts.5 Both results are related to major changes in the immigrant population, which has shifted from a traditionally Western European composition to that of various “non-traditional” countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. According to Aydemir and Skuterud, all remaining entry earnings differences between cohorts “can be explained with reference to the broader deterioration in entry earnings

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experienced by native-born labour market entrants” (669), that is, by historical contingencies in Canada’s labour market or in Canada in general (see Li 2003a). Following this and other studies (e.g., Frenette and Morissette 2003), Ostrovsky (2008) has compared the earning differential within immigrant cohorts. He concludes not only that entry earnings decline the more recent the immigration but that the earning inequality within the immigrant cohort increases. This again has to do with the composition of the immigrant population, as Ostrovsky states, insofar as “the place of birth, which may be thought of as a proxy for cultural, religious and ethnic characteristics of immigrants, has the strongest impact on immigrants’ earnings inequality; however, fluency in English or French, as well as a foreign education, also play important roles” (24). We must also ask, however, if “cultural, religious and ethnic characteristics” are themselves explanatory variables for labour market inclusion, or if symbolic exclusion plays an important role. Both the place where educational degrees were received and the social identity of the immigrants (their visibility) may be labelled as less suitable, less promising, or, simply, “inferior.” All in all, the situation of recent immigrants in Canada is worse than that of individuals who migrated before 2000, although Canada’s immigrant population is increasingly well educated: In 2008, almost 45 per cent of all newcomers had a university degree; among the skilled worker category this number reached 72 per cent (Houle and Yssaad 2010, 18). (Only about 25 per cent of the Canadian-born population holds a university degree.) Yet at the same time, numbers from Statistics Canada indicate that two-thirds of these newcomers work in occupational fields that do not normally require university degrees – compared to 55 per cent of established immigrants and 40 per cent of native Canadians (Gilmore 2009).6 A similar discrepancy is prevalent in the unemployment statistics. In 2007, as Gilmore (2008) shows, 10.7 per cent of those between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four who had immigrated in the previous five years (and who could be assumed to be foreigneducated migrants) were unemployed, compared to 2.4 per cent of the same age group within the Canadian-born population. In addition to the difficult empirical differentiation between quality of education and symbolic exclusion and the consideration of cohort effects, some further aspects must be taken into account in the empirical analysis of foreign-educated migrants’ labour market success. One aspect, important for our research as well (see chapter 5), is the relation

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between the visa categories under which the respective immigrant enters the country and labour market performance. In a Statistics Canada report, Houle and Yssaad (2010) show that during their first five years in Canada those immigrants who do not come as the principal applicant in the skilled worker category are particularly affected by the misrecognition of their educational credentials: “The recognition rates for principal applicants in the skilled workers category (38% for credentials and 51% for work experience) were higher than for any other group, including spouses and dependents in the skilled workers category. The recognition rates were particularly low for refugees – less than 15%” (22). In addition to differences in visa status, research on foreign-educated migrants in Canada has also taken into account differences between non-regulated professions and those regulated by state law and professional bodies.7 As for “foreign-educated immigrants with fields of study that typically lead to regulated professions,” they “were less likely to work in these professions compared to the Canadian-born. Among those employed in 2006, 62% of the Canadian-born were working in the regulated profession for which they trained compared to only 24% of foreign-educated immigrants” (Zietsma 2010, 15).8 Among these regulated professions, however, there are again significant differences. As Zietsma (16) reveals, the match rate of education and employment may be similar between Canadian-born and foreign-educated immigrants, as in chiropractic, for example, but it also can differ significantly, as in optometry (see table 2.1). These differences among regulated professions may have to do with the respective education (for example, in law we may assume that foreign-educated immigrants have not been educated in Canadian law prior to landing) but also with specific mechanisms of labour market closure and with excess or shortage of human resources. Similar to the situation of foreign-educated immigrants in general, the regulated professions are also characterized by match rates that can differ considerably, depending on country of origin. According to Zietsma, the highest match rates (60 per cent) are reported for Ireland and New Zealand; for countries such as Bosnia (27 per cent) and Germany (24 per cent), only about one-quarter of immigrants in the regulated professions work according to qualification, and in countries such as Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Morocco, this figure is under 10 per cent (Zietsma 2010, 18). It remains unclear, however, whether these differences should be attributed solely to the language of instruction and

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Table 2.1. Match rates of employed foreign-educated immigrants working in the corresponding occupation, by immigrant type

Canadian-born

Field of study

Total

Match rate (%)

Foreign-educated immigrants

Total

Match rate (%)

Chiropractic

5,745

87

345

84

Occupational therapy

9,345

82

560

65

Medicine

31,040

92

12,865

56

Nursing

78,880

73

13,150

56

Pharmacy

18,760

84

6,020

45

Physiotherapy

12,310

82

2,165

44

Dentistry

10,465

90

3,750

44

Optometry

2,760

95

340

38

Veterinary medicine

6,580

83

2,225

29

Architecture

13,860

56

7,695

26

Accounting

85,410

50

29,445

24

408,795

62

35,860

20

3,225

60

435

20

167,260

42

157,930

19

Law

82,615

69

11,295

12

Total

937,050

62

284,080

24

Teaching Diet/Nutrition Engineering

Source: Zietsma (2010, 16), drawing on Statistics Canada, Census of Population (2006)

the assumed proximity of the respective education system (as Zietsma does), or if other factors influence the inclusion of these foreign-educated immigrants in regulated professions. In general, it is worth noting that, although Canadian official statistics are much more differentiated than those in Europe, it is still difficult to draw a clear picture of the situation of foreign-educated migrants (as compared to that of immigrants in general). An integral part of the interpretative framework in this book is to cast doubt on oversimplified interpretations of these empirical findings. The widening gap in income levels between the Canadian-born population and more recent immigrant cohorts raises the question of how

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much of the labour market response is rational (i.e., due to legitimate reservations about degrees and qualifications from other, perhaps “less familiar,” countries), the result of discriminatory practices, or both. In other words, to use the conceptual framework on which this study is based, do we see a decline in skills and knowledge that triggers the relative worsening of the professional situation of recent immigrants, or do we witness a devaluation of migrants’ cultural capital due to forms of non-recognition and symbolic exclusion or a change in labour market conditions? This chapter prepares the conceptual groundwork for this discussion.

A New Subject of Migration Research in Germany: Foreign-Educated Migrants In contrast to their counterparts in Canada, researchers and official statisticians in Germany have only recently considered foreign-educated migrants to be a relevant subject of study. The micro-census of 2005, with a sample of approximately 1 per cent of the population, was the first national statistical survey that enabled identification of statistically significant figures for highly qualified foreign-educated migrants (see Statistisches Bundesamt 2012). On the basis of these census data, the authors of the Bildung in Deutschland 2008 (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2008) point out that the return to education for foreign-educated migrants is significantly lower than for immigrants with German degrees and for natives (see table 2.2). The authors suppose that “a possible reason” for the lower return to foreign education “may be seen in the inadequate employment or in an education which does not meet the expectations prevalent on the German labour market” (Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung 2008, 209). Indeed, a special analysis of micro-census9 data from 2009, which was conducted by the German Federal Statistical Office on our recommendation, reveals the difficult situation of foreign-educated migrants in the country. Among those between thirty-one and forty-five years of age (which is the most active group economically), these migrants obtain less employment than their peers trained in Germany (see table 2.3). A considerable portion (28.87 per cent) of the population of highly qualified foreign-educated migrants in Germany does not seek or does not have employment. The non-employment rate of women is even higher (40.38 per cent). The employment rate of migrants with German academic degrees is still lower than that of Germans. Our analysis also

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Table 2.2. Return on education for post-secondary, non-tertiary certificates and academic diplomas according to migration background and time of certificate acquisition Persons with migration background Obtained certificate Obtained before or during certificate migration after migration

Kind of certificate

Total

Higher vocational education*

15.2%** 10.7%

Graduation from 36.2% academic education Number of cases (000s)

Persons without migration background

23.7%

21.7%

30.2%

48.8%

49.2%

6.562

6.664

83.650

13.226

* Graduation from a school for master craftspeople or technicians ** Percentage pertains to additional return, compared with a reference group who completed standard vocational education or a secondary school (high school) diploma. Source: Table I2.12web, Autorengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, http://www. bildungsbericht.de/daten2008/i2_2008.xls

Table 2.3. Employment of highly qualified educational locals and foreigners aged 31 to 45, 2009

Germans Total

Women

Foreign-educated migrants Total

Women

Migrants with German academic certification Total

Women

Total (000s)

2.785

1223

291

156

189

89

Employed

2584 (92.78%)

1070 (87.49%)

207 (71.13%)

93 (59.62%)

161 (85.19%)

70 (78.65%)

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt 2012 based on the 2009 micro-census; authors’ own calculations

shows that those men and women who are employed are more likely to be employed on a fixed-term contract and/or part-time basis than are their peers with academic certification obtained in Germany. A similar disparity can be noted in the nature of employment: among those who are actually employed, more foreign-educated migrants are employed in areas for which they are overqualified, or for which no educational

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Table 2.4. Occupational fields of highly qualified persons with local and foreign degrees, 2009 Fields of occupation (only employed persons considered) Total (000s) Basic occupations

Germans with German degrees 2.584

Persons with foreign degrees

Migrants with German academic certification

207

161

71 (2.75%)

41 (19.8%)

10 (6.21%)

Qualified occupations for which academic degree is not needed

639 (24.73%)

62 (29.95%)

43 (26.71%)

Technicians/engineers/ semi-professionals

910 (35.22%)

51 (24.64%)

52 (32.3%)

Professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc.)

496 (19.20%)

25 (12.08%)

31 (19.25%)

Managers

430 (16.64%)

22 (10.63%)

22 (13.66%)

38 (1.47%)

6 (2.9%)

3 (1.86%)

Other

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (2012), based on the 2009 micro-census; authors’ own calculations

qualifications are needed, than are Germans with a German university degree (see table 2.4). The fact that fewer foreign-educated migrants work as managers, technicians, engineers, semi-professionals, and professionals could be due to differences in the areas of expertise in which migrants and locals have obtained their educational degrees. But it is important to note that 19.8 per cent of migrants with foreign academic degrees work in “basic” occupations, while only 2.75 per cent of Germans and 6.21 per cent of migrants with German degrees do so. Foreign-educated as well as locally trained migrants are more often seen in qualified occupational fields that do not demand an academic education. Both of these findings point to the marginalized position of migrants with foreign degrees in the German labour market.10 The micro-census data have made it possible to differentiate analytically between migration background and place of education. As table 2.3 and table 2.4 indicate, the poor performance of foreign-educated migrants cannot be explained by their immigrant background alone, because migrants who were educated in Germany typically perform much better. This statistical comparison with migrants trained in Germany

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shows that the underachievement of foreign-educated migrants in the labour market is related primarily to the fact that they have obtained their academic certification abroad. Yet it is also telling that even those migrants who do hold German university degrees are slightly less integrated into the labour market and hold lower job positions than their native counterparts. Based on the analysis of data from the micro-census and other statistics, Kogan (2011, 109) shows “that the higher the level of education, the larger the gaps between natives and immigrants. More educated immigrants, and above all those coming from outside the EU, are more likely than comparable natives to be employed in [the] unskilled sector.” The 2009 micro-census is the second survey in Germany that supplies well-differentiated data on migrants’ country of origin and year of entry as well as, for a considerable number of respondents, data on education and employment status.11 The survey has some limitations, however. First of all, we cannot obtain statistically meaningful results that differentiate countries of origin and year of entry, because there was only a small number of survey participants in these categories. Second, although the 2009 micro-census was the second to account for immigration status and place of education, it was a rotating panel based on households and an area sampling. Because of this non-coverage of residential mobility, the micro-census is considered to have only a limited analytical potential for longitudinal information. For example, on the basis of micro-census data it is not possible to follow trajectories of individual migrants into the labour market, and we can assess the distribution of labour market status only at a given time. This gap is narrowed by the largest panel study, the German socioeconomic panel (SOEP), but despite oversampling specific groups of migrants, this longitudinal data set still surveys only very low numbers of highly skilled migrants, so we cannot account for cohort effects as, for example, researchers in Canada are able to do.12 Third, immigration permits in Germany specify a wide range of legal statuses. Some migrants are completely excluded from legal labour market access while others are treated neutrally or even receive additional support. These differences in immigration status are not taken into account for all migrants in the micro-census, but only partially for newcomers. Hence, refugees who were refused asylum and hold only an exceptional leave to remain in the country are included in the survey in the same category as those who, for example, have German spouses and gain full labour market access as soon as they enter the country.

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Indeed, Englmann and Müller (2007) underscore the complexity of the legal framework for the recognition of foreign education titles. Not only do different professions use different recognition procedures (and in some cases, none are required at all), but specific migrant groups are entitled to apply for legally binding procedures that test the compatibility of their educational certificates while others had no way of gaining formal recognition for their education prior to a 2011 change in legislation. For example, ethnic Germans who come from the former Soviet Union had the right to have their foreign educational titles acknowledged (if they met German standards), whereas refugees and non-EU citizens did not have this right until 2011 (Englmann and Müller 2007, 91–9). And for those who do undergo formal recognition procedures, various standards may apply, depending on whether the individual is an ethnic German or an EU citizen who is judged favourably, or if he or she belongs to other categories of immigration. Hadeed’s (2004) study suggests that the labour market situation of refugees in Germany is appalling. Using a survey that included 260 refugees in the state of Lower Saxony, Hadeed shows that even after refugees had secured a stable legal status, only 11 per cent of this group, 60 per cent of whom had received university education abroad, were employed in their profession. In general, unemployment prevails, with only approximately 20 per cent of this population working full-time. The situation of Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union also seems to be difficult, even though they were given a stable legal status on entry into the country. In an evaluation of 1500 files of the social services of the Jewish community in Berlin, Kessler (1996) found that 80 per cent of the Soviet Jews who migrated to Berlin and completed any kind of vocational training are unemployed. Of those who are employed, only “25% … are employed in their profession,” and all others work predominantly in different and/or lower-level professions. Kessler assumes that the high numbers of academically trained Jewish migrants are one reason for this poor labour market performance. According to the same source, members of this group are often academically educated and their educational degrees are not recognized. These results were largely confirmed by Kogan and Cohen’s (2008) analysis based on the German micro-census. Kogan and Cohen emphasize the difficulties that Jewish refugees face in getting their Soviet-based knowledge and skills acknowledged in Germany, although, as the authors concede, social welfare helps Jewish refugees to endure long periods of unemployment until they find an adequate job.

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Although Kessler and Kogan and Cohen point to “Soviet training” as a primary factor – among others – in refugees’ poor labour market performance, we might assume that ethnic Germans who were similarly trained in the Soviet Union and then migrated to Germany perform much better in the labour market because they enjoy German citizenship and the right to enter a recognition procedure for their foreign degrees, and because their German language skills may be somewhat better developed. This is not entirely true. Studies recurrently show a significant degree of overqualified employment specifically in this group (Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2001; Brück-Klingberg et al. 2011). For example, on the basis of data of the socioeconomic panel from 1998, Kreyenfeld and Konietzka (2001, 14) have discovered that “only 47 percent” of male ethnic Germans with a post-secondary degree from former Eastern Bloc countries “work in jobs that require a vocational or college diploma, compared to 77 percent of the male West Germans” with a similar educational background. Accordingly, the return to education is comparatively low among ethnic Germans as well. With a degree from a German university (or a university of applied science), a German is paid 50 per cent more per hour than a German without any vocational certificate, whereas the income per hour for an ethnic German who received a university degree from abroad is only 25 per cent higher than for uneducated ethnic Germans. Kreyenfeld and Konietzka, who also compare the situation of ethnic Germans to that of non-German migrants, conclude that despite “their better endowment with human capital, ethnic Germans resemble foreigners in their labor market performance” (2001, 12; emphasis added). Most of the research on the economic return on education explicitly or implicitly resorts to the notion of “human capital”13 and discusses primarily problems of data quality and operationalization. Kreyenfeld and Konietzka (2001), who adopt this term as well, discuss its opportunities and restrictions succinctly: According to human capital theory, they write, “wage differences of foreigners, Ethnic Germans, and West Germans should be largely attributed to differences in their human capital endowment.” However, as “the productivity of a worker cannot be observed directly, in particular not prior to hiring,” the employer must rely on other indicators, especially educational diplomas. According to this revised human capital approach, “employers pay foreign employees less or might not even employ them, because they cannot value the expected productivity of a migrant as precisely, since the employer is not familiar with the schooling and vocational training certificates

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obtained in a foreign country” (2001, 5–6; emphasis added). Kreyenfeld and Konietzka here draw on classical human capital theory, developed mainly by Gary S. Becker (1973, 1993), but then revise it, referring to works by Arrow (1972, 1973) and Spence (1973). 2.2

“Human” or “Cultural” Capital?

“Human capital” was first discussed by Adam Smith (1776), who wrote that the “improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.” According to Smith, “human capital” denotes all investment in a person that yields a (financial) return. Gary S. Becker states that “expenditures on education, training, medical care, etc., are investments in capital. However, these produce human, not physical or financial, capital because you cannot separate a person from his or her knowledge, skills, health, or values the way it is possible to move financial and physical assets while the owner stays put” (1993, 16). Although this definition seems to transform education into a measurable indicator, Becker cautions us about the difficulties of ascertaining the relationship between the investment period and the amount of the investment: “The most important single determinant of the amount invested in human capital may well be its profitability or rate of return, but the effect on earning of a change in the rate of return has been difficult to distinguish empirically from a change in the amount invested. For since investment in human capital usually extends over a long and variable period, the amount invested cannot be determined from a known ‘investment period’” (Becker 1993, 59). Empirically, human capital theory often operationalizes “investment” in terms of the time spent on education. In the excerpt above, Becker justly points out that investment also depends on motivation and other factors, so it is difficult to distinguish changes in rate of return to human capital from changes in the intensity of investment. The problem with the conception of “human capital” is that it does not account for cultural differences in society. For example, if the school is dominated by teachers from the middle classes who apply their standards and expectations to the educational process, pupils who come from families with roots in different milieux (the working class, perhaps) may find themselves at a disadvantage. Although Becker acknowledges the importance of education within the family, that is, “the influence of

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families on the knowledge, skills, values, and habits of their children” (1993, 21), he tends to gloss over the interplay of school expectations and familial preparation, both of which are influenced by everyday cultural practices. When he states that “large differences among young children grow over time with age and schooling because children learn more easily when they are better prepared” and that “even small differences among children in the preparation provided by their families are frequently multiplied over time into large differences when they are teenagers” (21), he paints a picture of both the family and the school as entities that are not influenced by any cultural traits or expectations. This criticism reflects more general problems of Becker’s concept of “human capital”: Becker’s reasoning is in line with dominant economic theory: “An informed, rational person would invest only if the expected rate of return were greater than the sum of the interest rate on riskless assets and the liquidity and risk premiums associated with the investment” (1993, 91). In this “rational actor” approach, rational actors are juxtaposed with rational organizations acting on the labour market (companies, for example). As rational actor models generally assume that actors and organizations need to know or guess the relationship between investment in human capital and return, their only concern about the relationship between human capital and labour market returns is a lack of, or limited, information. (In the human capital approach, there is no room for a “rational actor” who is embedded in cultural, collectively shared everyday practices.) Yet since the marginal productivity is known to neither the employee nor the employer, Becker speaks of “uncertainty” (91) and introduces residual categories such as “tastes or attitudes” (92) – the result being that the assessment of knowledge and skills is far less objective than the rational actor model implies.

“Human Capital” between Unlimited and Bounded Rationality If “uncertainty” is involved in assessing the future productivity of human capital, then this is highly relevant to our inquiry into foreigneducated migrants’ labour market performance. One reason given frequently for migrants’ poor achievements is the uncertainty surrounding their educational titles. Spence (1973) gives special attention to this issue, pointing to the fact that hiring a worker whose “capabilities are not known beforehand makes the decision one [made] under uncertainty” (356). Yet this uncertainty does not mean that the employer has

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no personal data that allude to a worker’s potential future productivity. Among these personal data, Spence differentiates between “unalterable attributes,” that is, “indices” such as gender and race, and “signals,” which he reserves “for those observable characteristics attached to the individual that are subject to manipulation by him,” such as, for example, education (357). One of these signals may also be local or “Canadian” work experience, as we have seen in the case of Mr Mehra in the introduction to this chapter. Arrow (1973) carries this proposition forward by arguing that graduating from educational organizations does not necessarily result in an increase in one’s economic productivity (as is assumed by human capital theorists). Rather, Arrow postulates that “higher education serves as a screening device, in that it sorts out individuals of differing abilities, thereby conveying information to the purchasers of labor” (194). Hence, for the employer, colleges function “as a double filter, once in selecting entrants and once in passing or failing students” (195). Arrow does not deny that a college education may also lead to an increase in productivity as a result of investment in education, but he wishes to present his thesis in this “dramatic” (1973, 194) way for the sake of argument. He does not depart from the human capital model but intends to further define it, turning the rational assessment of human capital into an assessment bounded by the constructed images of the school (e.g., “good student,” “failing student”). If we also take Spence’s “indices” into account, we can easily argue that the appraisal of human capital is bounded both by school constructions about the student and by broader social constructions that promise to define the person (e.g., race, gender). These amendments broaden in such a significant manner the assumptions underlying the concept of rationally bounded action that Arrow (1998) has expressed doubt as to whether or not economic theory alone can address satisfactorily such social phenomena as discrimination.

The “Human Capital” Discourse Challenged The human capital approach has recently been criticized in a more radical way. Proposing a combination of neoclassical economic theory and sociological approaches, Boswell (2008, 552) criticizes the “methodological individualism,” the “utilitarian ontology of the self,” and the “uniform concept of rationality” underlying this economic theory. Against these assumptions, she argues that “individual preferences are

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in a very profound sense shaped by the social context.” Hence, social ties, for example, should not be conceptualized as an intervening variable modifying individual choices: “Rather, shared beliefs, norms, memories, conceptions of collective identity or social roles influence the very definition of an individual’s welfare, interest or utility” (557). These social meanings are constitutive both for the migrant’s agency and for the labour market in which he or she seeks employment. As for the migrants themselves, family and other social ties may be or become an important basis for developing a motive to migrate as well as for strategies for inclusion in the labour market of the destination country. The “notion of the autonomous ‘flexible’ immigrant of human capital discourse,” however, is not able to “adequately recognise the binding of a particular immigrant within complex household relationships and resources” (Cresse, Tsuda, and McLaren 2008, 272). As for gender, methodological individualism, which also underlies the “human capital” discourse, is criticized for interpreting and legitimizing “existing gender inequalities in the labour market as a result of voluntary choice” (Eberhardt and Schwenken 2010, 103). Doing so, human capital approaches ignore the fact that “men and women have gendered education and careers, but the ways they are gendered differ” from country to country (Salaff and Greve 2003, 455). For this reason, careers in professions such as engineering, which were started in a country where this profession is equally accessible for men and women (e.g., China), cannot be easily continued when a woman migrates to a country where engineering is male-dominated (e.g., Canada). In general, career paths are often institutionalized by the respective country. Labour markets informally or formally expect specific educational certificates (usually from domestic universities) and privilege working experience from inside the country (Parkin 1979, 138; Weeden 2002). For this reason, “migration breaks a career path, and it may be difficult to connect a foreign career to an institutionalised career in another country” (Salaff and Greve 2003, 450). To sum up, the “human capital” approach, while achieving important quantitative insights into the financial return on education and other more individual and decontextualized, individual-based features, does not seem to be suitable for conceiving of highly skilled migration as a matter of context-based complex practices involving the social constitution of both migrants’ agency and the structures they find in the country of their destination.14 For this reason, we turn to an approach that conceptualizes the value of knowledge and skills within a theoretical

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model that allows us to take into account aspects and practices beyond the individual actor.

From “Human” to “Cultural” Capital French social anthropologist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has proposed a theory of class-based inequalities that differs fundamentally from human capital approaches. He thinks of actors as embedded in collectively shared cultural and symbolic practices. In Bourdieu’s argument, as well as in human capital theory, human productivity and exchange follow market principles, but Bourdieu (1998a) also points out that gifts and recognition are “traded” in markets, in a manner similar to money and goods, but along more symbolically logical lines.15 Bourdieu criticizes the notion, key to human capital approaches, that the boundedness of the actor is a mere exception to his or her rationality. Rather, he conceives of such educational capital as an integral part of the market of cultural practices, with all its social inequalities, which cannot be expressed as a monetary function only. Referring to Gary Becker and his colleagues, Bourdieu argues that their measurement of the yield from scholastic investment takes account only of monetary investments and profits, or those directly convertible into money, such as the costs of schooling and the cash equivalent of time devoted to study; they are unable to explain the different proportions of their resources which different agents or different social classes allocate to economic investment and cultural investment because they fail to take systematic account of the structure of the differential chances of profit which the various markets offer these agents or classes as a function of the volume and the composition of their assets. (Bourdieu 1986b, 243–4; emphasis in original)

The important point here is that human capital theory fails to set the stage for a “systematic” understanding of the “structure of the differential chances of profit,” since these differential chances are exceptions to the human capital approach rather than the norm. In contrast, for Bourdieu these differential chances are constitutive for developing the concept of cultural capital. In a society structured by differences in economic and cultural capital, Bourdieu expects human beings to develop different “habitus,” which function as matrices of “perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (2003, 83) acquired throughout socialization. These

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habitus affect the individual’s attitudes to education and chances of acquiring a large quantity and a high quality of cultural capital. Schools, for example, typically promote middle- and upper-class values, which makes it very difficult for children from the lower classes to succeed. Their disadvantage may not be due to their receiving less support from their families – as predicted by human capital approaches – but to the fact that their familial support does not match the school’s dominant expectations. Thus the habitus can appear to be characteristic of individuals, but it is in fact structured by a system of social reproduction that perpetuates social inequalities and power differentials in society. Bourdieu first developed his concept of cultural capital as a “theoretical hypothesis which makes it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from the different social classes” (1986b, 243). He assumes that the domestic transmission of cultural capital and the recognition of cultural capital in schools implicitly serve the goal of class reproduction. By ignoring the habitus and skills of children from the lower classes, schools disable these children; however, this collective “depreciation” of skills is viewed by schools as an objective judgment of the “intelligence” of children. Children from the lower classes soon learn that they are “less intelligent”; this effect helps to veil what is actually the misrecognition of their skills and motivations. The cultural capital approach differs from the human capital approach in that the value of cultural capital results not only from its productivity but also from its recognition in organizations (such as the school) and in symbolic struggles. Bourdieu has not used the concept of cultural capital with reference to migration, but it is easy to see that migrants may be in a position similar to that of children from the lower classes: they may be motivated and productive, but their cultural capital may not suit expectations that appear to be “normal” but in fact privilege those for whom they were tailor-made.

The Forms of Cultural Capital Since the value of capital is based on diverse social processes, Bourdieu (1986b) defines three forms of capital. Economic capital “is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights.” “Social capital” and “cultural capital” are forms convertible into money only under “certain conditions” (243). By differentiating a form of capital that is fully convertible to money from less easily monetizable forms, such as social and cultural capital,

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Bourdieu systematically takes into account the cultural (as opposed to economic) aspects of the market. In order to also shed light on the domestic transmission of cultural capital and appraise fully the relationship between school and family education, Bourdieu then further defines cultural capital: “Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee” (243; emphasis in original). Within these parameters, the school is an organization in which pupils not only acquire certain skills and knowledge as embodied cultural capital but also receive titles or documentation (e.g., a diploma) that claims to certify skills and knowledge. However, the knowledge and skills a pupil acquires within the school system are not independent from the embodied cultural capital with which the pupil is endowed by his or her family. For instance, a child early acquainted with books (as a form of objectified cultural capital) by his or her parents will have easier access to, or be more familiar with, reading and writing exercises at school.

Embodied Cultural Capital and Habitus Embodied cultural capital – for example, an affinity for reading books – is “external wealth converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus” (Bourdieu 1986b, 244–5). Indeed, the habitus is an “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (Bourdieu 2010, 56). Through “individual and collective practices” the habitus becomes established as “schemes of perception, thought and action” (54), with which the bearer of the habitus faces his or her present life. This habitus – and likewise the embodied cultural capital – cannot be changed or transformed easily, as it has evolved in socialization and learning processes over the individual’s entire lifetime. As “embodied cultural capital” refers mostly to implicit knowledge and skills,16 the habitus is lived rather than reflected upon. One’s “modus operandi” (Bourdieu 2010, 52) in approaching the world is a habitualized pattern, an implicit orientation that structures one’s

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actions. According to habitus theory, the actor knows how to handle everyday tasks and to solve problems, although he or she might not easily be able to access this knowledge upon reflection (Bohnsack, Nentwig-Gesemann, and Nohl 2007, 11).17 The concept of habitus has become popular since Bourdieu first used it as a major analytical tool in his classic “Distinction” (1984). In “Distinction,” Bourdieu reveals how the habitus (plural), formed in different social classes, shaped aesthetic preferences and taste in France of the 1960s, allowing him to shed light on the logic underlying the reproduction of French society’s class structure. This ground-breaking analysis has since guided the research of numerous scholars (see, e.g., Lamont 1992, 2000; Gunn 2005; Peterson and Kern 1996; and Lahire 2008), among them Bennett et al. (2009), who added ethnicity, age, and gender as dimensions under scrutiny when the authors studied the cultural field of Britain. The popularity of “Distinction” has, however, encouraged researchers to think of cultural capital mainly as a matter of aesthetic judgment, shaped by the habitus. But Lareau and Weininger (2003, 568) argue that we risk misunderstanding the concept of cultural capital if we interpret it as denoting only “knowledge of or competence with ‘highbrow’ aesthetic culture” – that is, as embodied, unobservable “soft” skills that merely add to “human capital.” Cultural capital is not simply an addition to more functional (e.g., technical) skills but, rather, a more comprehensive concept that points to the interconnectedness of cultural knowledge and skills and their recognition.18 2.3

Cultural Capital as a Relational Concept

The research in which Bourdieu, together with Passeron (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), developed the concept of cultural capital was indeed concerned with the interconnectedness of knowledge and skills taught in school and its school culture, “expressed in things such as cultural codes, modes of conduct, and use of language” (Van de Werfhorst and Hofstede 2007, 393). According to Bourdieu and Passeron, children from working-class families are only rarely able to graduate from a university-track high school because of their cultural distance from the dominant (middle-class) culture of the school. Teachers implicitly foster middle-class-dominated expectations towards students; hence, children from middle-class families find the “code” of the school easier to access than do children from working-class families. Especially for

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children from working-class migrant families, it is difficult to adapt to the code of the middle-class-dominated school.19 The research on this topic is extensive (see, among others, Lareau 2000, 2002, 2003; Steinbach and Nauck 2004, 2009; Gunn 2005; Nauck 1999; Silva 2005; and Van de Werfhorst and Hofstede 2007). However, one should be cautious about simply equating education and cultural capital. For example, Steinbach and Nauck’s conception of “educational participation and educational success as the acquisition and availability of cultural capital” (Steinbach and Nauck 2004, 21) is rather misleading: It blurs the fact that it is not any education that can be capitalized on but specific knowledge and skills that provide “access to scarce rewards,” are “subject to monopolization, and, under certain conditions, may be transmitted from one generation to the next” (Lareau and Weininger 2003, 587). Hence, the value of education in terms of cultural capital is ambiguous. Even primary-school diplomas, which in Germany serve as a basis for selecting pupils for different educational pathways,20 do not indicate objectively the social value of education. While middle-class native German pupils with better-than-average school performance are frequently referred to the “highest” educational pathway (leading to academic education), working-class and migrant children with the same performance face exclusion from higher education (see Kronig 2003; Bos et al. 2004; and Wagner, Helmke, and Schrader 2009). Thus, it is both the skills that students learn in school and students’ social background that are taken as “indices” for evaluating performance (Spence 1973). For example, one of our interviewees told us that, as a child, she discovered that although the teacher had previously complimented her on her successful learning, she was refused access to university-track high school and was recommended only for a lower educational pathway because her family spoke only Turkish. Outside the school system, the value of education is even more disputed, especially in the labour market. The knowledge and skills of Mr Mehra, to whom we referred at the beginning of this chapter, are recognized by the state, but employers do not take them into account because he lacks “Canadian work experience.” While even within the school system educational performance is strongly connected with struggles over its symbolic dignity, the value of knowledge and skills is even more in dispute when they are capitalized on in the labour market (Erel 2010, 649). This is especially true when these knowledge and skills were acquired abroad. As Robbins (2005, 23) has rightly pointed out,

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“Cultural capital does not possess absolute value which is quantifiable. It only possesses value in exchange and the exchange is a social struggle as much as a struggle of cultural value judgment.” Hence, Bourdieu’s notion about the relationship between academic qualification and what he terms “social alchemy” – that is, the “transformation of arbitrary relations into legitimate relations, de facto differences into officially recognized distinctions” (2003, 195; emphasis in original) – needs to be more clearly circumscribed. According to Bourdieu, along with the “academic qualification,” which he defines as “a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect of culture,” “social alchemy produces a form of cultural capital which has a relative autonomy vis-à-vis its bearer and even vis-à-vis the cultural capital he effectively possesses at a given moment in time” (1986b, 248). But “social alchemy” (i.e., the arbitrarily hierarchical but symbolically legitimated structure of society) may also introduce fundamental differences between social groups. For example, a hierarchical difference between the majority (whose members are perceived with fundamental trust) and (specific) ethnic minorities (whose members are commonly approached with suspicion) may have been established, which modifies the ways that education can be capitalized on (e.g., members of that ethnic minority would have to struggle for the recognition of both their education and their person as a whole). The second point that Bourdieu makes – that there is a difference between the cultural capital that one “effectively possesses at a given time” and the cultural capital constructed by “social alchemy” – alludes to an important function of educational titles. Because educational titles certify a competence that its bearer may or may not now continue to display in his or her performance, these society-acknowledged titles tend to provide the workforce with “autonomy” in the “free game of economic necessities” (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975, 98; translated by the authors). As Bourdieu and Boltanski (98) write in an early article on the difference between “title” and “position,” the employer perceives academic titles with mistrust because the academic title – “analogous to money” – gives the employee a right that the employer has to respect. This important function of institutionalized cultural capital is all but guaranteed for migrants, especially if they have obtained their last academic titles abroad. Therefore, any consideration of the concept of cultural capital must also include a close examination of the transnational realms of social alchemy.

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Cultural Capital in Transnational Contexts

It is not by chance that knowledge and skills are evaluated primarily within the frame of a nation state. When Bourdieu and his colleagues considered France as a unit of analysis for their inquiries into the education system and into class-differentiated aesthetic judgment, the choice could be justified because of the strong connection between the French education system and the nation state. Modern education and compulsory schooling have emerged partly as a reaction to industrialization, with its growing need for an educated workforce, and – predominantly – as a part of the nation building process (see Müller, Ringer, and Simon 1987; Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992). Since then, most educational systems have been structured nationally. Gellner (1993) has convincingly argued that industrialization has depended on the generalization of reliable cultural standards in larger areas, which in turn prompted the development and success of the nation state. Henceforth, the nation state has become the unquestioned frame within which struggles over the recognition of knowledge and skills as cultural capital are fought and within which the results of these struggles are institutionalized as certificates and entitlements (Parkin 1979). While research on the value of education in a particular society may legitimately use the nation state as a framework, scholars who study the value of knowledge and skills that originate abroad need to scrutinize this very framework (see Neiterman and Bourgeault 2012). If cultural capital is dependent on context, not only in its functionality but also in its recognition, then we must ask how knowledge and skills are evaluated as cultural capital in a (national) context that differs from the (national) context of their acquisition, and we should consider the possibility that cultural capital is evaluated in other, more transnational contexts (see Iredale 2001; Pries 2008; Weiß and Nohl 2012). In theoretical terms, Weiß (2005) has distinguished between transnationally recognized cultural capital and location-specific cultural capital. The latter is connected in content to specific – often national – locations. However, some location-specific cultural capital has become hegemonic. For example, a native knowledge of English is valuable in many locations beyond English-speaking countries. Mostly, however, the value of location-specific cultural capital (e.g., language skills in Farsi) is marginal beyond the limits of the specific location.

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The empirical question, then, is which aspects of a migrant’s knowledge and skills are transnationally acknowledged, and thus could be considered transnational cultural capital, and which parts are locationspecific. At the same time, we must also ask how migrants improve the value attributed to their knowledge and skills, that is, how they valorize their cultural capital.21 In our empirical analysis, we do not equate education with cultural capital. Instead we emphasize that “cultural competence in all its forms is not constituted as cultural capital until it is inserted into the objective relations set up between the system of economic production and the system producing the producers (which is itself constituted by the relationship between the educational system and the family)” (Bourdieu 2010, 124). These “objective relations” have resulted in a system of mutual trust in which credit is given to local educational titles. With regards to foreign titles, however, the question is how migrants are able to (re) gain this credit, this “advance, a credence, that only the group’s belief can grant those who give it the best symbolic and material guarantees” (120). In our research, we have inquired into the relational character of cultural capital (see Al Ariss and Syed 2011) by taking into account several aspects that emerged as important in our empirical analysis (see figure 2.1). First of all, cultural capital is based on knowledge and skills acquired in educational organizations and in the family; some of this cultural Figure 2.1 The relational character of cultural capital Implicit and explicit expectations in the labour market

Knowledge acquired in educational organizations and family, partly certified in diplomas

CULTURAL CAPITAL Social networks

Knowledge acquired through further education State regulations of labour market and migration

Practices of inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination, based on constructions of ethnic difference

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capital is certified in school and university diplomas. However, further education in its various forms may play a role in the constitution of cultural capital, too. Another aspect of cultural capital that must be considered is the state regulations that allow or limit the use of knowledge and skills as cultural capital. Along with social networks (see Thomsen 2012), practices of exclusion and inclusion based on ethnicized difference may decisively shape cultural capital. In all these regards, we are particularly concerned about society’s implicit and explicit expectations of migrants in the labour market. We argue that the concept of cultural capital (as opposed to “human capital”), with a strong emphasis on cultural capital’s relational character, will serve as a suitable theoretical tool to guide our empirical analysis. The various elements noted above and depicted in figure 2.1 shape the transformation of knowledge and skills into cultural capital in a temporal process, the essence of which we propose to capture in the term status passage. Cultural capital depends not only on space but on the ongoing processes of obtaining and using knowledge and skills, processes that are overlapped by restrictive and enabling factors, which are time-bound as well. As we shall discuss in the following chapter, studying “cultural capital” against the backdrop of the concept of the “status passage” encourages a deeper understanding of highly qualified migrants’ performance in the labour market.

3 Multidimensional Status Passages: Migration, Labour Market Inclusion, and Private Life Domains

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 and success are the result of various, often temporary, phases in career trajectories. Immigration and education-to-work transitions have already been described as time-related processes in which chronological sequences can be distinguished. From a time-related perspective, barriers at interim stages potentially matter in different ways (see Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011): they may prevent any access to labour markets at all, or – more commonly – they strongly affect further stages until the final outcome, seen here as immigrants’ career trajectories in the long run. In this chapter on immigrants’ status passages into the labour market of different immigrant societies, both the previously mentioned issues will be taken into account: temporality in the sense of transition processes over time, with their sequences of phases and stages, as well as potential barriers with short- or long-term effects on a person’s future career. We use the term status passages to define transitions in immigrants’ lives, with potential thresholds, boundaries, and rituals, including the way these transition processes are socially embedded in institutions and networks (Heinz 1991, 2009). Drawing on concepts common in life

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course research, we use transition to refer to changes of status in the life cycle, such as the transitions between school and professional training and from graduation to first employment (see Sackmann and Wingens 2001), while trajectory indicates a sequence of transitions. In qualitative social research, trajectory has become a key term used to describe those social processes in the individual’s life history that are not completely under his or her control.1 Indeed, social processes in an immigrant’s trajectories can be beyond the individual’s control, whether or not the trajectories have dramatic results. As Glaser and Strauss point out, the open-ended nature of a status passage is sufficient to ensure that undesirable results occur (Glaser and Strauss 1971, 106). In theoretical debates on life course research, trajectory is understood mainly as a sequence of transitions or life events and implies an interrelation of impacts over time (see Sackmann and Wingens 2001). Within this perspective, it is the dynamic and structure of social processes and the relationships between single transitions and life events, rather than a process of an individual’s shifting and completely losing control (Schittenhelm 2011), that should form the core of our analysis. Thus, our approach highlights the impact of social structures, along with the dynamics of social processes, including those unintended by the biographical agent.2 The ambiguity of status passages – their open-endedness and the various possibilities that depend on if and how status passages are mastered – has been a primary subject in life course research, focusing on the interconnection of transitions with social and institutional contexts (Heinz 1991, 2009; Kohli 2007; Mayer 2009). Among the key issues in this debate are social inequalities and their evidence in individual life courses. Important for the analysis in this book, life course studies provide a promising approach for the examination of inequalities by highlighting macro-structural configurations and their many consequences in individual life courses over time (DiPrete and Eirich 2006; Mayer 2000). In this regard, status passages between education and employment are of considerable interest to scholars for their function in the (re-)distribution of social status and the (re-)configurations of social boundaries throughout the life course (see Schittenhelm 2005). It is in this sense that Bourdieu (1982) stresses “rites de l’institution” as a method of boundary making during status passages, separating those who walk across a threshold from those who are not allowed or not able to do so.3 As our investigation concerns transitions between education and the labour market in inter- and transnational career trajectories, we draw

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attention to the fact that these passages do not simply reflect successive stages in the migrant’s life cycle but may also result from trajectories across national and local territories, with their changing institutional and social configurations. Thus, this investigation takes into account the immigrants’ transition from one location with distinct institutional and social contexts to another. Indeed, the multidimensional status passages discussed in migrants’ biographies later in this text are a result of successive sequences of the life cycle and the circumstances of transnational mobility inherent in the immigrants’ career trajectories. 3.1

Empirical Approaches to the Study of Immigrants’ Life Courses and Biographies

Today, a broad range of methodological approaches debate immigrants’ access to the labour market and discuss explicitly the analytical potential of life course perspectives for issues in migration studies (Kou, Van Wissen, and Bailey 2010; Schittenhelm 2005; Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011; Wingens et al. 2011). With the development of longitudinal studies, survey-based life course research became a common approach in the social sciences, taking into account a variety of topics, among the most prominent being those factors that affected education and work in the life course (Mayer 2000, 2009). Despite discontinuities in biographical research traditions (see Apitzsch and Inowlocki 2000; Bertaux 1981), case-oriented approaches have been applied repeatedly in studies on migration (see Breckner 2007). The analytical potential of these approaches should become obvious in the following overview of studies that are particularly relevant to our investigation and, at least implicitly, draw on perspectives and concepts of life course research. Using the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey data, Buzdugan and Halli (2009) consider the relevance of duration of stay for Canadian immigrants in the labour market. They examine the value attributed to the foreign education of immigrants, based on the immigrants’ length of stay in Canada, which proved to be an important methodological factor. Thus, they consider immigrants’ labour market integration as a process over time. The authors’ findings highlight the limitations of human capital theory in explaining the labour market experience of Canadian immigrants. In a study of labour market structures, immigration policies, and welfare regimes in the European Union, Kogan (2007) stresses the role that host countries’ institutional characteristics play in immigrants’ labour market integration. The comparative analysis includes

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various migration societies along with their immigration regimes and labour market policies, and sheds light on the impact of institutions and their regulatory arrangements. Drawing on comprehensive data sources, the study seeks to explain immigrants’ labour market outcomes, with reference to both the institutional contexts of the transition process in the receiving country and the characteristics of immigrant populations in the European Union. In a similar manner, by comparing Jewish immigrants in Germany and Israel and the experiences of ethnic German (re)settlers in Germany, Kogan et al. (2011) explore immigrants’ labour market allocation as a two-sided process, taking into account the relationship between allocation and the host country’s institutional impacts on the one hand and the characteristics of distinct immigrant populations on the other. In a theoretical framework that goes beyond human capital theory, Salaf and Greve (2003) consider career trajectories of Chinese immigrants to Canada by contrasting past careers in their country of origin with those in the host country. Their research, based on an analysis of fifty professional couples, demonstrates gender-related differences in the performance of men and women in the two countries. Comparing types of barriers for three occupational subgroups (engineers, medical practitioners, and computer scientists), their findings show how the subgroups differ in the challenges they face, depending on the degree of professional regulation. If we presume that any analysis of biographical accounts inevitably includes the biographical agent’s point of view, then the individual’s experiences, along with his or her strategies to cope with the transition processes, also necessarily become part of the researcher’s observations (Bertaux and Thompson 1997; Breckner 2007; Kontos 2003; Kupferberg 1998; Schittenhelm 2011). The usefulness of the biographical approach for analysing immigrants’ labour market integration has been demonstrated by various authors. Apitzsch and Kontos (2003) and Apitzsch (2003) consider issues of immigrants’ self-employment, using a sample of biographical case studies undertaken throughout Europe. Apitzsch’s (2003) study of the biographies of female members of minorities leads her to reformulate the concept of the “biographical embeddedness” of self-employment. Kontos (2003) explores a biographical perspective on the concept of resources, studying the emergence of entrepreneurial motivation in “ethnic business.” She argues that motivations, as the result of biographical phases and coping strategies, are processual and not static (197). Fefler and Radenbach (2009) look at the discontinuities

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in the careers of a “generation of social climbers,” individuals of German background born in Russia in the 1950s and 1960s. Using a biographical approach, the authors present their subjects’ growing ambivalence in their sense of belonging and status inconsistencies over the course of their migration from the Soviet Union, where they demonstrated a good labour market performance, to Germany, where they faced disillusionment and declining professional status. Of particular importance for the subject of our investigation is Riaño and Baghdadi’s (2007) biographical approach to the trajectories of (academically and vocationally) skilled female immigrants in Switzerland. Examining fifty-seven cases of immigrant women from non-EU states in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe, they show how the women use their educational credentials, and under which conditions they fail to establish themselves with a long-term perspective in qualified segments of the Swiss labour market. Their analysis demonstrates the interplay of class, ethnicity, and gender, and how the related – negative and positive – impacts simultaneously shape immigrants’ positioning in the labour market. In sum, in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, life course perspectives show commonalities that are of considerable interest for the subject of our investigation. First, they enable us – at least potentially – to consider transition processes, such as the transition between education and work, by taking into account their short- and long-term consequences. Second, life course or biographical approaches take into account institutional characteristics of immigrant societies and their impacts upon transition processes, and thus have been presented as helping to fill in the gap between micro- and macro-effects in social research (see Kohli 2007; Mayer 2000). A main issue addressed by life course approaches is the manner in which structural conditions and societal institutions affect individual life courses, and vice versa (Heinz 2009; Mayer 2000). As discussed in the following section, both these characteristics are of considerable importance for our analysis of immigrants’ labour market integration as a socially embedded process over time. We shall now focus our discussion first on the way that life courses are socially and institutionally embedded and how this characteristic can be taken into account by applying a comparative, multilayer approach. Second, we consider aspects of temporality in terms of shortand long-term, or up- and downgrading, effects on the evaluation of immigrants’ cultural capital as a process over time. Third, we continue

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with a discussion of the multidimensionality of status passages, in particular with regard to various life domains and the immigration process. As will become clear, the multidimensionality of status passages is essentially a general characteristic of modern biographies, yet the analytical potential of the concept should be reconsidered with regard to migrants’ inter- and transnational mobility. In the empirical analysis that follows (see chapter 4), we use our analytical framework to discuss findings on overlapping dimensions in immigrants’ transitions into the labour market. The multidimensionality of these transitions is then described in more detail on the evaluation of immigrants’ cultural capital during phases of their labour market inclusion over time. In the following section we discuss a theoretical framework to the main characteristics of immigrants’ trajectories. 3.2

Socially Embedded Transitions into the Labour Market

In our investigation, major analytical issues include changes in status configuration and how these changes appear in different sequences of status passages (Schittenhelm 2005, 2011). We define these transitory processes by taking into account the host country’s immigration regimes and the biographical agent’s perspective on his or her living conditions throughout the transition. Which conditions are determined by immigration and integration policies, or by labour market conditions, in different immigrant societies? How and to what degree, and with what kind of consequences, are the status transitions perceived, mastered, and negotiated by the immigrant agent? While our discussion of statistical data (see chapter 2) reveals outcomes of social processes, the later qualitative analyses (see chapter 4) reveal which processes in the course of status passages precede the social positioning of immigrants as holders of educational titles and certificates. Biographical agents construct their transitions as self-reflexive and socially mediated processes in which individual strategies and negotiation skills are relevant yet still strongly intertwined with social and institutional contexts (Heinz 2009). Of primary interest in our investigation are the effects of different labour market and migration policies, such as the institutional regulation of access to labour markets, residential restrictions, and unemployment benefits. The comparative approach used here, which includes units of analysis on national, transnational, and sub-national levels, considers immigrants’ access to the labour market within a multidimensional framework. Taking into account various types of transitions

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and how they are institutionally and socially embedded, the study aims to illuminate various factors that shape immigrants’ access to the labour market and various stages of transitions over time (Schittenhelm 2011). Within this framework, we consider immigrants’ transition into the labour market with regard to the following: • State regulations of labour market, welfare, and migration. The study highlights how institutional characteristics of the receiving country control immigrants’ entry into the labour market and shape immigrants’ occupational careers, even over the long term. The impact of these regulations can be observed in the biographical experiences of the immigrant during different phases of the immigration process. Policy regimes also influence negotiations in various social networks and institutional settings. • Practices of inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination. According to Bourdieu’s (1986b) concept of cultural capital, the outcome of symbolic struggles between groups contributes to the value of their cultural capital. The impact of symbolic exclusion on the value of immigrants’ cultural capital can be studied with regard to various social contacts and institutional settings. Exclusion is not limited to direct hostility. The value of cultural capital may also be reduced when institutional arrangements favour dominant groups or when labelling and stigmatization, including constructions of ethnic difference, are in evidence. It is important, however, to realize how ethnic attributions interplay with other markers of difference, such as class and gender. Our analysis considers constellations of advantages and disadvantages posed by various dimensions simultaneously shaping immigrants’ positioning in the labour market. • Patterns, sequences, and circumstances of a transition, including the way they are perceived by the immigrant agent. An immigrant’s transition into a labour market position can be examined by considering the stages prior to first employment – including internships, phases of temporary unemployment, and the application process – and all work experiences and training undertaken by the immigrant until qualification is completed and the current employment status has been attained. At this level of the analysis, we highlight patterns based on descriptive typologies that characterize the sequences and concrete circumstances of the transition into the labour market of the receiving country. Apart from presenting characteristic patterns of the transitions, our investigation seeks to highlight how a given

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institution frames entry into the labour market and how a person perceives social and economic conditions. The aim of our multidimensional approach is to examine the processes of the immigrant’s trajectories with regard to their various stages and contexts. For instance, while immigrants with foreign educational titles inhabit a common environment shaped by the national migration policies of the receiving society, they may participate in different local or transnational networks that provide varying levels of access to useful knowledge, or even to job opportunities. As a matter of course, immigrants’ strategies of coping in the institutional context of a given receiving society will differ, as will the initial phases of their transition processes. In the case of Mr Mehra, discussed earlier, gaining Canadian work experience proved to be an interim stage for his entering the labour market, despite the fact that he already had relevant work experience in Pakistan, his home country. Gaining the necessary local labour market experience can be part of the immigrant’s strategy, or the opportunity to gain such experience may develop out of the immigrant’s networks. As discussed in chapter 7 of this book, learning the codes of the local labour market seems to be an initial phase in the successful transition of managers in different immigrant societies. In the countries included in our investigation, however, this initial phase did not develop in the same way. Though the initial phases of transition processes were similar in different receiving countries, our comparative analysis suggests that contextualization on a national or local level shapes the particular character of immigrants’ transition. 3.3

Up- and Downgrading Effects over Time

In our analysis, the status passage between education and working life, with its changes of status, is not viewed merely with regard to the way it is currently embedded in given societal structures and institutions. Drawing on a biographical approach, our aim is also to shed light on short- and long-term effects of particular advantages or disadvantages of immigrants’ living conditions in the receiving country. Our investigation aims to examine how strategies and behaviours of immigrants are developed gradually throughout different phases of the immigration process. In particular, potential discrepancies between the individual’s achieved status and his or her qualifications and aspirations

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are taken into account. Underachievement and the non-recognition of cultural capital may appear in the respondent’s narrative as descriptions of failed attempts to gain access to skilled employment or as complaints about the unsatisfying employment they finally accepted out of necessity. Our approach presents a differentiated view of a transition, providing great detail on a transition’s sequences and phases, including the immigrant agent’s view of his or her living conditions, along with implied opportunities and restrictions. Specific conditions faced by an immigrant in the receiving society affect not only the initial phase of his or her search for an occupational status but also the immigrant’s career trajectory over the long term. How immigrants succeed or fail in gaining access to qualified labour is not primarily a matter of opportunities in a given situation. The immigrant’s career trajectory in the receiving country – whether this trajectory results in up- or downgrading of employment status – is, rather, a process over time (see Liversage 2009; Fuller 2011). In this regard, our approach allows us to distinguish between synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The synchronic perspective focuses on the social and institutional contexts of an immigrant’s transition into the labour market at specific points in time. The diachronic perspective focuses on the agent’s career trajectory and his or her coping strategies over the long term. It is worth noting at this point that inter- and transnational migration is usually accompanied by interruptions, delays, and detours, all of which are characteristic of immigrants’ professional trajectories. Yet how these obstacles and delays are compensated for or, alternatively, how they contribute to cumulative downgrading of the immigrant’s employment status is of considerable importance. For the purposes of our analysis, for example, it is particularly important to determine the extent to which successive barriers to the skilled labour market may result in cumulative disadvantages for immigrants, that is, a growing inequality over time (DiPrete and Eirich 2006, 273). For instance, as will be demonstrated in a later section, in the German and Canadian contexts, similar disadvantages in initial phases are shaped by similar obstacles, such as the host country’s non-recognition of educational titles received abroad and the immigrant’s lack of (host-country) language skills and country-specific labour market experiences. Compensating for each of these barriers takes time and, as a matter of course, results in an additional delay in the immigrant’s career trajectory. If this delay cannot be compensated

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for in the long term, and the downgrading effects on the immigrant’s career trajectory are compounded over time, a loss of cultural capital is unavoidable (Von Hausen 2008). On the other hand, if some of these disadvantages can be reduced and the immigrant’s employment position gradually improved in a timely manner, then the loss of cultural capital is at least partially compensated (see Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011). Hence, in addition to barriers present in initial phases due to the immigrant’s lack of language skills or other factors, or as the result of institutional regulations, time is a factor that affects a career trajectory by fuelling the dynamics in the transition processes in the course of downward mobility. If the knowledge and skills imported from the country of origin are not used because of barriers or institutional restrictions in the receiving country, their utility cannot be maintained over time. The longer these skills are not required and thus not used in the host country, the more these skills tend to be devalued. While for many people in contemporary societies, not using one’s cultural capital can risk the devaluation of that capital, for immigrants this process is particularly shaped by the cumulative effects of a specific set of migration-related conditions that are explored further in this book. These include: • the consequences of residence permits and legal barriers to the labour market; • the non-recognition of educational titles; • steps of adaptation and “learning to labour” while facing the conditions for non-qualified labour in the receiving country; and • the (re-)construction of cultural capital. Once begun, the downgrading transition continues to be determined by the intersection of all these dimensions (see Von Hausen 2008, 12). As mentioned above, we can distinguish cumulative disadvantages throughout the trajectory if various impacts – be they short-term or long-term – affect the trajectory in the same direction, that is, with similar outcomes. In contrast, however, the compensatory effects of factors influencing a career either simultaneously or gradually have consequences that tend to compensate or neutralize each other (Schittenhelm 2011). In our analysis, once immigration took place, we could identify initial phases in the immigrant’s trajectories, such as obtaining a residence and/or work permit, learning the local codes of labour,

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upgrading foreign credentials, and gaining language skills. A lack of opportunities at the very beginning of the transition phases might still be compensated for by the immigrant’s cultural or social capital, as well as by conditions provided in the host country. In this regard, individual capacity proves to be important, migrants’ networks have the potential to provide useful knowledge or even job offers, and specific programs in the receiving society can be helpful. Particularly interesting is the extent to which potential barriers in the host country can be compensated for by the immigrant’s abilities and networks on one hand and by supportive conditions in the country of arrival on the other hand. If there is no compensation, an immigrant may fail to gain access to qualified labour in the long term. Thus, the effects of various migration and integration policies in the immigrant societies being compared should be considered over the long term, ensuring that both short- and long-term effects on immigrant labour market integration are considered in the study. In particular, when time-related factors do not affect an immigrant’s trajectories in the same direction, the long-term scope of our approach helps to identify typical patterns of immigrant transition into the labour market. Those who face considerable difficulties during the initial phases of their immigration may rectify or at least improve their situation in the long run, but they can also fail to overcome this initial barrier. Furthermore, lack of employment in the profession that an immigrant is trained for can result in a kind of stabilization of the immigrant’s position in low-skill-level jobs or even in precarious work conditions. Briefly, though it is possible to identify particular dynamics in the course of up- and downgrading transitions, these trajectories depend strongly on the institutional arrangements in each host country. This study considers the link between a country’s institutional arrangements and the immigrant job allocation process by comparing the institutional frames and settings in the national context in Canada, Turkey, and Germany. In each of these countries, however, the risk of inadequate evaluation of the educational credentials of highly skilled immigrants who imported their educational titles from their country of origin is still high. Given the fact that in many cases immigrants did not fully succeed in applying their knowledge and skills in the labour market of the receiving country without a loss of status and reputation, the identification of detailed phases and dimensions of the status passages helps to pinpoint the geneses, and the intersections, of various up- and downgrading effects.

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Multidimensional Status Passages in Transnational Biographies

For Mr Mehra, who came to Canada as an engineer and had to upgrade his credentials, his position at the threshold of the labour market and the initial phases of his immigration are already characterized by a specific overlapping of various life domains. In his biographical account he describes his attempts to enter the Canadian labour market as follows: mr mehra: So I was telling you about that funding, so they did give me the funding, with the living expenses, and said that you have to upgrade your studies, but (2 sec. pause) I won’t say you’ll agree with me or not, it doesn’t matter to me, but at a certain age, it’s very hard to go back to school, studying with young kids, it’s not easy. interviewer: Yeah. mr mehra: It’s not easy. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience or not, but I have – it’s not easy. So, once I’m going to do these courses, and if I complete them, then I go back to school, BCIT. I will be doing my diploma in chemical sciences, so let’s see what happens from there. But I was saying that instead of the government funding us, paying lots of money on living expenses and things like that, why don’t they give us training, on-job training, which costs them less money like they should introduce, kind of, initiative of like providing (2 sec. pause) training to professionals, on-job training who have some decent backgrounds, like five years of experience so that they can work and do their (1 sec. pause) enter the workforce.

In Pakistan, Mr Mehra already had job experience as an engineer and was the primary breadwinner of his family. Thus, he had already undergone two transitions often perceived as the classical steps towards adulthood (see Liefbroer 2009) – the achievement of a stable occupational status and the establishment of a family. At this point in life, he saw going back to school as more difficult. According to Mr Mehra’s narrative account, the fact that he had to leave the labour force is harder for him to accept than the need to update his credentials. In this regard, Mr Mehra’s experience is typical of many others who migrate with their families: entering the labour market by gaining Canadian work experience and upgrading foreign credentials is undertaken after the immigrant has established himself in the home country, both in working life and private life. While the immigrant’s status in his working life

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undergoes considerable change, his responsibilities as a breadwinner and the expectations that others have of him remain the same. Up to this point, the multidimensionality of status passages has been examined with regard to one’s simultaneous involvement in more than one life domain – for instance, working life and other life domains (Kou, Van Wissen, and Bailey 2010; Liefbroer 2009; Pusch 2010a; Shanahan 2000), as demonstrated in the case of Mr Mehra. His example was significant for immigrants with the primary responsibility as the (often male) breadwinner. Yet involvement in working life and private life domains can vary, depending on whether the immigrant is a breadwinner and simultaneously responsible for household chores and the family. Hence, it is worth considering the family status (i.e., partnership, parenthood) during immigrants’ transition into the host country’s labour market, including gender roles and arrangements in the private life domains.4 In other words, scholarly debates are based on the assumption that people go through more than one status passage at a time (Glaser and Strauss 1971, 142), and throughout their lifespan (Mayer 2000). Yet the primary questions remain: how and to what extent must the issue of multidimensional status passages be reframed, given the transnational character of immigrants’ biographies? The following discussion systematically considers how migration-related dimensions of modern biographies might overlap with other dimensions. Notably, simultaneous transitions may be independent from each other, although rarely. However, the possibilities for relationships and interdependencies are innumerable, especially between transitions related to work and transitions in the private life domain. The transitions may strongly interrelate in the way, for example, that one supports the other. For instance, graduates often “pass into” a paid occupation, simultaneously leaving their parental home and moving into their own place. In contrast, other passages may compete for an individual’s time and energy, causing considerable strain if they are undertaken during the same period in one’s life. For example, the classic conflict faced by the working mother – how she divides her energy between home and career – has been the subject of life course research (Mayer, Allmendinger, and Huinink 1991) and case-oriented biographical approaches (Battagliola et al. 1991). In considering factors that affect immigrants’ eventual access to the labour market – for instance, gender, as well as those aspects determined by other dimensions of immigrants’ status transitions – our analysis

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refers to debates on “intersectionality” in the sense of approaches that consider interrelations of gender, class, and immigrant background (see Crenshaw 1991; Brah and Phoenix 2005; Lutz, Vivar, and Supik 2011; Stasiulis 1999). The previously mentioned intersection between working life and work in private life domains has been extensively discussed in debates on migration, gender, and intersectionality (Buckel 2012; Lutz 2011). For instance, how a working mother manages the challenges she faces is shaped by diverse conditions, including gender relations and the family’s economic means (see Kraler et al. 2012). If these factors interrelate with the process of immigration and its new demands for time and energy in the maintenance of a professional career – as previously described in the case of Mr Mehra – the potential conflicts and constraints are reinforced by the additional impacts of immigration. The intersection of status passages and life domains is particularly critical for highly skilled female immigrants with primary responsibilities in child care and family work. Re-establishing one’s own professional career in the receiving country can lead to conflicting intersections with the requirements of caring for the family; furthermore, there are migration policies regulating labour markets in favour of a constant and full-time involvement in work life as well as gendered recruiting practices (Kofman and Raghuram 2009; Riaño and Baghdadi 2007). The immigration process can be linked to a restructuring of gender relations ( Jungwirth 2011), leading to disadvantages for the labour market integration of highly skilled female immigrants (see the overview of conditions in receiving countries in Kofman and Raghuram 2009; with regard to Germany, see Grigoleit 2012; Jungwirth 2011, 2012; for a study on deskilling Chinese female migrants in Canada, see Man 2004).5 The multidimensionality of immigrants’ status passages is caused not only by factors that occur simultaneously but by the way these factors occur in successive life cycles. Transitions in education and work, such as the transition between university and the labour market, have become de-institutionalized and prolonged and may include stages, such as internships, temporary unemployment, and further education – without the individual knowing whether these stages lead to a stable occupation. Thus, an individual’s gradually changing occupational status is influenced by other transitions – perhaps an exploration of single life, a non-marital union, marriage, and/or parenthood. Generally, the multidimensionality of status passages is characteristic of most modern biographies and may be present in various configurations. By the same token, the biographies of immigrants are founded on multidimensional status

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passages, structured by different life domains, successive life cycles, or social mobility. Yet in transnational biographies the multidimensionality of status passages as a result of different life domains and successive transition sequences in the life course is potentially extended by passages across national societies. In fact, these status transitions are often linked with changes of the relational position in hierarchically organized societies. Current migration research often tends to focus on the immigrant’s status in his or her receiving country, while the immigrant’s status in the home country and the relational change of position are rarely taken into account (Wimmer 2007). For instance, an immigrant who has already achieved the position of an engineer and who, along with his or her family, is part of the well-established middle class in a country with poor living conditions may improve the family’s living conditions in the course of the immigration process. Yet if the immigrant is not able to realize his or her educational credentials in the country of arrival, social status and recognition may be diminished relative to the individual’s class position in the home country (Nieswand 2011; Pajo 2007). The migration process constitutes another status passage in the transnational biography, one that can be considered alongside the pre-migration context, and the conditions in the respective host country (Thomsen 2009). In addition, this status passage can be linked with specific boundaries, determined by social and institutional frameworks in the receiving country (Kogan 2007) on the one hand and by ethnically defined group formations (Wimmer 2008) on the other. Wholly apart from further transitions or specific interrelations between these passages, then, additional boundaries should be taken into account when we consider status passages in immigrants’ career trajectories. In this regard, the status passage in the course of the migration process is characterized not only by temporality and successive stages but by passages that cut through lines of restriction and social distinction, in the sense of Bourdieu (1982). Even though migration research currently focuses on the labour market in the host country, the immigrant group is often defined by its country of origin and classified ethnically. Our analysis of transitions in the immigrant’s life course with regard to institutional and social contexts in the host country can distinguish various influences, including the host country’s program of immigrant reception as well as potential boundaries established by symbolic dimensions or ethnic group formation. At this point, it is worth noting that immigrant trajectories still show crucial distinctions: only some of them depend on their situation in the

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country of origin, others on the conditions provided in the receiving society. For example, the extent to which an immigrant’s career pattern consists of voluntary and desired changes is important, as is how the entry into the labour market is shaped by the immigrant’s residence permits and the host country’s recognition of his or her educational title(s). Even voluntarily chosen mobility on the part of the immigrant does not necessarily mean that all changes in status configuration, or the transition process as a whole, have been foreseen and accepted as part of the individual’s decision to immigrate. Unexpected and unintended results must also be considered. Social mobility – of all kinds – implies a transition seen as a change of status configuration that is not prescribed by successive changes in a person’s life course. Instead, it is a change of status embedded in divergent social, institutional, or informal contexts and the corresponding social relationships born within these contexts. A change in one’s position within an ordered social hierarchy is circumscribed by boundary-making practices in the country of arrival. Going through this passage may lead a person to a terrain with social rules, symbols, and styles as yet unknown to him or her, and with his or her insecurities about expected appropriate behaviour (see Bourdieu 1982). In sum, migration-related dimensions shape specific passages across national territories and potentially across social class formations. Furthermore, there are specific boundaries determined by the contexts of these transitions. The immigrant’s orientation and strategies for coping with conditions in the receiving country may overlap and change throughout the transition. Analysis of the impact of these changes should take into account the relationships between migration background and its potential effects on career trajectory, especially the immigrant’s entry into the labour market. To recapitulate, the multidimensionality of status passages (see Schittenhelm 2005) in immigrants’ transnational biographies is determined by • transitions undergone in the life cycle, such as those between educational phases and working life; • transitions in the private life domain, such as marriage and parenthood; • immigration from one nation state to another, including a long-lasting restructuring of social status; and • potential transitions determined through class mobility and entry into new social fields.

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These transition processes often occur simultaneously and are interrelated. Not only do passages such as immigration and entry into the host country’s labour market intersect but, according to our study group’s empirical findings, transitions in the private life domain have an impact on both the transition processes of migration and the transition processes of labour market entry (Thomsen 2009; Pusch 2010a). While some structuring elements of status passages clearly originate in the particulars of the state and state policy, others are shaped by transnational social fields or by local circumstances. Thus, migration-related dimensions of the status passages into the labour market have to be considered in light of how they are socially and institutionally embedded: by global labour market developments and their implications for the transnational mobility of the labour force; by the institutional arrangements of the receiving country’s labour market and migration policy; and by distinct social networks and interactive settings that vary within the national contexts and may produce ethnically defined group formations.

4 Aspects of the Multidimensional Status Passage: Phases, Migration Motives, and Cultural Capital among Foreign-Trained Migrants in Germany

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 transition from the education system to the labour market, he began the process over again. Of course, it helped that he did not have a family to care for at the time. Although from a middle-class family, Mr Katekar found it difficult to adjust to the business environment in London. He needed to find a summer job, for example, both as an intern and to earn money, but failed to do so: and, that was very difficult for me to find a job because it was a completely different way, with it. Well anyway in which colour well you wear suits; there it started. and (.) then how you network and (.) if also you don’ know people at all but still yes, hi hallo and then (.) about what well do you talk? (.) and of course on the one hand there’s some (.) preparation for it, (.) but there other thing where the well (.) or there-(.) well there were those- (.) the others had, (.) an automatic advantage. A head start because they were in the environment.

Although Mr Katekar studied at the same business school as his competitors and thus had the same institutionalized knowledge and

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skills, he wasn’t familiar with the dress code of the London business environment, or with “how you network.”2 Consequently, he didn’t have the cultural capital necessary for obtaining a qualifying summer internship. Only in the second year of the program did Mr Katekar find himself a part-time job with Orange, a telecommunications corporation. On the basis of this experience (and the reputation that went along with having had this job in a prospering sector), he was invited for interviews with Ernest & Young, the global auditing corporation, after completing his MBA. Although he originally had intended to seek a position in the United States, in the final interview, Erhardt Heinze, a partner from Dortmund, Germany, asked him to become a consultant in Stuttgart, citing Mr Katekar’s proficiency in German, which he had learned long before in a high school in India. Thus, his second transition into the labour market diverted Mr Katekar to Germany, a country with which he was unfamiliar and in which he had never intended to work. This labour transition went hand-in-hand with a migratory transition. The labour market situation in Germany turned out to be less promising than Mr Katekar had hoped, however. After being sacked by his first employer, he found a similar position in Hamburg and moved there. There he met and fell in love with the woman who would eventually become his wife: “Just before in Hamburg I had started yoga, (.) aaaand there (1 sec. pause) met my wife [breathes in], right when we were thinkin’ that it (.) well yes. that (.) we get along OK with each other.” The relationship was strong and withstood long periods of separation, when Mr Katekar had to work in another city. The couple finally married in 2004, and their daughter was born one year later. Thus, Mr Katekar’s entry into the labour market and his immigration to Germany were followed shortly after by an important transition in his private life. The demands of a new family, however, naturally defined and limited further expressions of the status passage. Previously Mr Katekar’s motive in moving to England had been one of qualification: he wished to improve his knowledge and skills. His motive for the move to Germany was one of amelioration: the job offer at Ernest & Young held the promise of a better salary and a better life. Once he married and had children, Mr Katekar’s previous motives for migration were now compromised by a new orientation towards partnership and family – an orientation that made him choose to stay in Germany. Although his career did not progress as well as it may have in another country – the

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United States, for example – Mr Katekar pursued only those jobs that would allow him to stay with his family. In this highly qualified migrant’s life story, we have identified not only different dimensions of the status passage but also their interconnection. As much as Mr Katekar’s transition into the labour market and migration to Germany are thoroughly interwoven, his transition in the private life domain significantly transforms his migration motives and career prospects. Yet this life story reveals not only several dimensions of the status passage but also different phases of it, which are important in their own right. Before migration, in what we call the pre-migration phase, Mr Katekar was oriented towards improving his qualifications, even if this meant moving to Europe or the United States. Once he had graduated from the MBA program, that is, during the transition phase, he decided to migrate to Germany to join a well-paying consultancy corporation. During his initial phase in Germany, he met his future wife and developed a strong motive to stay there. Thus the initial phase turned into a phase of establishment. In the multidimensional status passage narrated by Mr Katekar during his interview, the dimensions are not only intertwined with each other. The opportunities and restrictions for capitalizing on his knowledge and skills in Germany were significantly affected by his previous experiences, too. It is not only important that, as a young man, he had decided to study abroad. His first experience in the telecommunications job in London was also a key factor in his successful application to Ernest & Young. Finally, he was able to take advantage of the new German immigration regulations issued in 2000 and was swiftly granted full access to the German labour market. As outlined in chapter 3, privileges and disadvantages in earlier phases of the status passage, with its different dimensions, can have short- or long-term effects on the immigrant’s ultimate status in the receiving society. Cultural capital, then, is not only dependent on employer recognition of knowledge and skills (see chapter 2) but also framed by time (see chapter 3). In the process of migration, place and time play significant roles in the evaluation of knowledge and skills as cultural capital. Mr Katekar’s experience is not unusual. As we shall show in this chapter, the status passages of highly qualified migrants typically have in common several aspects related to migration motives, phases of the status passage, and different ways of capitalizing on one’s knowledge and skills. We want to explore these common aspects of the status passage by inquiring into the life stories of migrants in Germany who – like

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Mr Katekar – received their academic qualifications abroad and later acquired full legal access to the German labour market, either immediately upon their arrival or after a waiting period. The overlapping of dimensions in these migrants’ status passages results in different types of transitions into the labour market, during which the imported knowledge and skills may be evaluated or lost. The following typologies explore how and under which social conditions the migrants have been able to use their knowledge and skills as cultural capital. In order to answer these questions, which are central themes of the book, we consider the relationship between knowledge and skills on the one hand and the expectations and opportunity structures of the labour market on the other, as narrated by the migrant (see figure 4.1). For the purposes of this study, we have focused on the utilization of knowledge and skills in order to create a basic typology. We then

Figure 4.1 Aspects of the multidimensional status passage

COUNTRY OF RESIDENCE

Establishment Initial phase Transition phase

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN Premigration

Education system (and labour market)

Labour market

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reconstruct how typical phases of the status passage and typical migration motives interact with this basic typology. As discussed in chapter 3, the utilization of knowledge and skills follows specific pathways; the basic typology is overlapped by phases of the status passage and changing motives for migration. The pattern of interaction seems not to be unique to particular cases. Rather, we identified several typical relationships between aspects common to different immigrant trajectories.3 In each of the following sections, we present the reader with one such typical relationship. The typical relationships are demonstrated in specific groups of cases that have been identified among the foreigntrained migrants in Germany.4 In the first case group, comprising those like Mr Katekar, migrants characteristically are able to fully capitalize on their knowledge and skills, and the establishment of partnership and family during the status passage into the labour market becomes an important motive for staying in Germany. In contrast, for the second case group, entry into the labour market in Germany is based on a downgrading of occupational status. Here we consider a typical relation of phases, motives, and utilization of knowledge and skills in which migrants who are entitled to welfare system benefits acquire new non-academic knowledge and skills in the receiving country. We then undertake an empirical analysis of the experiences of migrants who, as the result of specific migration motives, were able to access pathways that are strictly regulated by professional law (as in medicine and dentistry). Another typical relation of migration motives, phases, and utilization of knowledge and skills can be observed among persons who seek to reconcile their managerial careers with their private life (e.g., to live together with a partner in the new country without risking one’s career), the resulting restrictions on both creating a precarious balance. However, restrictions placed on the use of one’s knowledge and skills can be temporary, as demonstrated by the typical relation between biographical orientations and a “time out” phase, in which migrants adjust their qualifications to labour market expectations. Finally, a considerable time out may also be forced upon migrants, for temporary lack of a work permit. If this phase of transitional deprivation is prolonged, it may result in a devaluation of one’s cultural capital and the ascription of cultural capital on the basis of one’s social identity. Previously we referred to cases drawn from a subsample of foreigneducated migrants in Germany. At the time they were interviewed, all the interviewees were immigrants with a legal status that allowed them

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full access to the German labour market. However, as we shall demonstrate in the following comparative analysis of cases and case groups, the legal status required for entering the labour force was not always available to immigrants immediately upon their arrival in Germany. For some, a waiting period resulted in delays that had considerable consequences for the evaluation of their cultural capital. 4.1

Enhancement of Cultural Capital during the Transition Phase, and the Local Attachment of Transnational Careers through Partnership and Family

Some migrants, like Mr Katekar, were able easily to use their foreign knowledge and skills in the German labour market. When we study the life stories of those migrants who, in the private sector, received full recognition for their foreign educational titles and who did not have to increase their cultural capital after migration, two characteristics become evident: first, highly qualified migrants who work in the private economy as managers or consultants had already enhanced their cultural capital either before migration or in the transition phase. In some cases, migrants even developed a relationship with Germany at that time. Mr Katekar had the opportunity to acquire new cultural capital during a prolonged transition in the United Kingdom, where he received an MBA from a renowned business school. This newly acquired cultural capital can be considered transnational because Mr Katekar did not report any adaptation problems upon graduation and was called to Germany without any hesitation by his future employer. In addition, Mr Katekar had already studied some German in his home country. For another individual, Ms Sonne, an economist from Sweden in our sample of foreign-educated migrants in Germany, a swiftly established and qualified post-migration career was facilitated by the fact that she had been able to begin adapting her knowledge and skills, develop personal ties in Germany, and learn German during an earlier one-year study program in the country. Such an extension of cultural capital via a relationship with Germany established prior to migration or in the transition phase cannot be observed in the interviews conducted with natural scientists working in universities – migrants who otherwise share many similarities with Mr Katekar and Ms Sonne. For example, biochemist Ms Yan, when offered a job in a German university, could not speak German; it took her many years to adapt to a new language that she was not required to

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use at work. This peculiarity highlights not only differences in expectations in respective labour markets but also differences in the education systems where academic titles have been obtained. For example, Mr Katekar emphasized the cultural specifics of his knowledge and skills when he narrated his first year in London: he could not find a qualified internship because of his lack of context-related networking abilities. In contrast, Ms Yan emphasized the transnationality of the knowledge and skills she acquired during her years of study in Beijing. In the interview, she stated that “research and work were the same” in Germany and in China because she had worked in a “very good institute in Beijing.” When she also stated that the “language is the same,” the curiosity of the interviewer was piqued: interviewer: It is the same language? What do you mean by this? The working language in Beijing was English? ms yan: Yes, yes. No. (.) Not that. Not really working language I mean … interviewer: The terms? ms yan: Communication, that is, of course in mother tongue, but I mean method what [they] work. interviewer: The method. ms yan: The method. That is, you can, of course, translate into Chinese, translate into German, the methods all are the same. When we, that is, we speak to the colleague, of course, I speak English, but the method all are the same. That (…) very easy with colleague to communication, to (.) interviewer: Communicate. ms yan: Yes, communicate. That is, the paper we read research letters, for the projects, [how] to do this, that is easy for me, but working easy for me.

In this part of the interview, which is itself characterized by considerable problems in communication, Ms Yan gives her perspective that it is not important whether one speaks Chinese or English, as long as the way of “communicating,” of “reading the research papers,” and of implementing “projects” remains the same. She seems to experience the natural science labour market as rather transnational, an experience she shares with other natural scientists among our interviewees, such as Mr Blochin and Mr Brahmi.5 In this regard, the knowledge and skills of Ms Yan as well as those of other natural scientists appear to be transnationally valid, as both institutionalized and embodied cultural capital. In contrast, the embodied knowledge and skills – above all, language – of foreign-educated managers and consultants in the German

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private-sector economy – like Mr Katekar and Ms Sonne – had been adapted to the German environment prior to their entering the labour market. While both the natural scientists and the transnationally recognized consultants and managers in our sample can fully capitalize on their knowledge and skills, they differ in the necessity of countryspecific skills acquired during their pre-migration and/or transition phases. Those highly qualified migrants whose academic degrees were transnationally acknowledged chose to remain in the German labour market despite other, potentially more lucrative, opportunities.6 Why would highly qualified individuals such as Ms Yan and Mr Katekar stay in Germany when their university degrees could lead to lucrative job opportunities around the world? As in the case of Mr Katekar, our analysis suggests that with all members of this case group a partnership orientation was developed in the initial phase of the status passage, after the individual’s migration to Germany. Ms Sonne, Mr Blochin, Mr Brahmi, and Ms Yan all found partners after making the move to Germany. For Ms Yan, who had already started postdoctoral research in the United States, this partnership orientation was strong enough to bring her back to Germany from America. Pregnant when she was just halfway through her postdoctoral research, she found it difficult to raise the child on her own. She returned to Hamburg to marry the German father of her child and began to look for a job in a German university. In the case of Ms Yan, as well as in the other cases mentioned, the partnership orientation developed during the initial phase led to the establishment of a new family and the birth of children. These experiences ensured that the migrants stayed in Germany. Thus, during the status passage, migration motives and opportunities for using one’s knowledge and skills in the labour market changed over time. For these interviewees, all of whom command “transnational cultural capital” (Weiß 2005), an important characteristic of the status passage becomes apparent: having one’s knowledge and skills recognized as cultural capital may not always be the focus for the biographical orientations of the migrants themselves, although cultural capital is a primary interest of this study.7 Moreover, as we shall see in the following typical relations of aspects of the status passage, sometimes the success or failure of a migrant’s application of foreign knowledge and skills in the German labour market is due precisely to the fact that the individual was motivated to migrate by other biographical orientations.

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4.2

Legal Inclusion in the Welfare State and Newly Acquired Non-Academic Knowledge and Skills

In contrast to those migrants whose knowledge and skills were transnationally recognized as cultural capital, another group of migrants found that their foreign cultural capital had been significantly devalued, even though they had full legal labour market access and were afforded full legal access to the labour market. For these migrants, success in the labour market meant having first to acquire new, non-academic knowledge and skills. Why did these people tolerate a post-migration downturn in their career? The life stories of these migrants document a relatively short phase of transition, after which the individuals received a legal status that enabled a long-term stay for them in the receiving country. Mr and Ms Shwetz, as well as Mr Ziegler, all from the former Soviet Union, came to Germany to seek a better life. As ethnic Germans, they were not only granted full access to the labour market but also had the opportunity to swiftly obtain German citizenship. Despite full legal inclusion, however, these migrants had enormous difficulties using their foreign academic titles in the German labour market: either their academic diplomas were not acknowledged by the university to which they applied or their educational titles were not valued by private-sector employers, despite recognition of those titles by the state. Mr Shwetz, who had worked as a car engineer in the Soviet Union, told us how, with the help of the labour office, he tried unsuccessfully to find a job: “And well here at at job centre, well was I as an engineer, and well one year I stood there at job centre and well I also said then they must downgrade like as a mechanic or so and they did.” After a year of searching in vain for a job as an engineer, Mr Shwetz was downgraded by the labour office to a mechanic.8 Similarly, Ms Shwetz, a former teacher of physics and mathematics who later worked as an educated programmer in a Siberian corporation, was enrolled in a course in Germany to learn how to use computer programs for tax accountants. And Mr Ziegler, a construction engineer in the Soviet Union, sought without success an equivalent position in Germany until he began to acquire the knowledge necessary to work as an IT network administrator. Like Mr and Ms Shwetz, Mr Ziegler had come to Germany with the biographical orientation of seeking a better life for himself and his family. This amelioration motive, along with the swift legal inclusion into the country and its welfare system, is an important

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backdrop to his enduring the downturn of a career that had begun so successfully in the Soviet Union, and to his accepting the downgrading of his cultural capital. The case group under discussion, however, does not consist only of ethnic Germans with strong amelioration motives and swift legal inclusion. Other migrants have also faced challenges in the labour market and a devaluation of their cultural capital. One striking example is that of Mr Baako, a Nigerian who had received his PhD in physics from a Czechoslovakian university but who, when he moved to Berlin, was not even recognized as a graduate of physics. Faced with the depreciation of his cultural capital, Mr Baako developed biographical orientations beyond the labour market. He first started to work as a taxi driver and was happy to earn enough money to support his lifestyle. Later he fell in love with a German woman, married, and fathered a child. New biographical orientations, that is, partnership and family orientations, developed wholly disconnected from a professional career.9 Eventually Mr Baako found more suitable job opportunities – not in physics, his former area of expertise, but more closely related to his original interests than driving a cab. As he told us during the narrative interview, he eventually got a “further education course” financed by the labour office: Then after all I started taxi driving [deep breath]. And well, yes besides privately I always devoted myself to, to the computer. And then, well (3 sec. pause) then well I just officially applied at well the job centre. Then I did well, (.) an an [deep breath] what was it? Yes that was one of these training measures I took part. For [click] computer systems analyst it, it was called [deep breath]. Yes. That was (2 sec. pause) God, almost nine months that, that was. And well, because then I didn’t find a well job (.). I went on with taxid-, taxi driving. And then well (.) I happened to meet a friend. Also foreigner [deep breath] Well, from Vietnam he was. He was also a taxi driver. And then well we ta- ta- ta- talked and he he said, you know [deep breath] well, some company is looking for network technicians. Very many. I said really? He knew it from (.). He lived in Schöneberg. And from his his well well from his jo- jobcentre he got the letter that he should apply at the company. I had well not got any letter. You know, but well, can I go (.) with you? All right; Pf, yes, come with me. Then we were there and there was there was there was an a a test. And an interview. And unfortunately they didn’t hire him. I, I was hired.

As documented in this narrative, Mr Baako acquired new knowledge and skills, well below his academic qualification as a physicist, with

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the assistance of the labour office, which financed him to study as a network technician. Later he secured himself a job in which he could use his new skills. Similar to the case of the ethnic Germans – and in other cases not discussed here – the new acquisition of non-academic knowledge and skills is the result of a typical relation between various aspects of these migrants’ trajectory into the labour market. All the migrants discussed in this section were provided with legal inclusion swiftly, allowing them full access to the labour market. As ethnic Germans, or as employees who paid monthly unemployment insurance premiums, they were eligible for unemployment benefits and further education courses financed by the labour office. But their legal inclusion in the welfare state can be fully understood only if their biographical orientations are taken into account as well. In the case of the ethnic Germans, their motives to migrate were acknowledged as fully legitimate, allowing for their full legal inclusion. Others, like Mr Baako, tolerated working in positions for which they were over-qualified, making unemployment insurance payments that eventually enabled them to claim benefits and undertake further education. For Mr Baako, these factors in connection with his biographical orientations (e.g., an evolving family orientation) resulted in his staying in Germany, even though he couldn’t pursue a career as a physicist. Hence, in addition to peculiarities of the welfare state,10 specific biographical orientations that motivate individuals to migrate to Germany and/or establish themselves there even before they can capitalize on their foreign knowledge and skills are additionally important for downgrading effects on cultural capital during the status passage. 4.3

Trajectories Based on Professional Law and Migration Motives Convertible to Extensive Legal Inclusion

Some individuals do not migrate seeking to capitalize on their foreign knowledge and skills but become quite successful in the labour market, regardless. For example, Mr Nazar, a medical doctor from Turkey, came to Germany to join his wife, whom he had married prior to his immigration: “And I come here. After all I didn’t expect much (.) no great expectations (breathes in and out) yes I came here (as) a doctor (1 sec. pause) but I wasn’t really born a doctor. And I can do everything after all being a healthy man, and that’s why at first I didn’t worry, indeed found a family for a start and then (.) I’ll succeed, I thought and also she had a job.”

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From this part of the biographical account, it is evident that Mr Nazar did not make his profession a priority when he moved to Germany. Instead, living with his wife and establishing a family were his priorities, yet without him in the position of primary bread-winner. In the sequel to this account, however, Mr Nazar tells us about his first German-language course and his involvement in an organization of Turkish medical doctors, to which he was recommended by a relative of his wife: ’91 marriage, (.) well then (.) I came here as late as in ’92 July (1 sec. pause). Well (2 sec. pause) then (3 sec. pause) I started (.) at Goethe Institut, twice (.) no nine months about (.) I was at Goethe Institut. The primary level I completed there, in Turkey I hadn’t learned German at all, just English as common. (.) Well (.) then (2 sec. pause) I was at HSI. That is Hamburger Sprachinstitut just round the corner [short breath], but then after I came here, ’92 I was active in association. There is well an association Union of Practitioners from Turkey, well to just have a look at first what’s going on, how’s going on, (.) well that was one year I was there at almost every board meeting. Well but not yet a member. And then ’93 I was a member and well at yes for about 10 years had been active as as secretary, of the association (.) (1 sec. pause) and then well (1 sec. pause) that is ’92–’93 from (.) ’93 to ’94 I well (.) partly headed AIDS counselling centre (2 sec. pause) that was why this HSI I had to stop the language class, that is I didn’t complete secondary level, no examination (.). Well (.) nine months about I well was we – well in charge as deputy [under] (.) head of then (1 sec. pause) AIDS counselling centre (2 sec. pause) well (2 sec. pause) then (.) ’94 (1 sec. pause) November I started at the surgery here as well something like a first-year intern (.) and then as a junior doctor after my predecessor well had got the certificate. (.) And then since ’99 (.) well (.) I took over the surgery, because he had to stop for old age.

Mr Nazar’s initial phase of the status passage into the new country and its labour market was shaped by the need to learn the German language and, in particular, by his contact with an association of Turkish medical doctors. His affiliation to the related network proved to be helpful for his access to the labour market in the long run. First he was employed in the AIDS counselling service of the association, and then a fellow member asked him to work as an assistant doctor in – and later take over – his medical practice. Although he had first given priority to his marriage and family, Mr Nazar eventually established

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a successful medical practice, with many patients of mostly migratory background. For Mr Nazar and in the cases of other medical doctors and dentists, we find a biographical orientation that on the one hand did not involve a professional career but on the other hand still allowed a swift and extensive legal inclusion in either the pre-migration phase or the transition phase. These migrants married Germans, became German citizens, or received the right to work as recognized refugees under asylum law. With this extensive legal inclusion, these individuals enjoy the benefits of a state procedure of recognition for their educational titles as medical practitioners, which allows them to receive a minor medical licence.11 For example, Mr Zadeh, a dentist from Iran, had been acknowledged as an asylum seeker; as a result, and because of his professional experience in Iran, he was granted the right to work as an assistant under the supervision of a fully licensed dentist. After a certain period of time, and after becoming a German citizen, he was allowed to apply for a full licence, which he received after passing an exam. Only then was he allowed to establish his own practice and work as a “self-employed dentist.” Medical doctors faced similar restrictions. In the case group of Mr Zadeh, Mr Nazar, and others, the utilization of knowledge and skills in the initial phase of the status passage is complemented by a specific legal inclusion that is implied by migration-related biographical orientations. All migrants in this case group had migration motives advantageous to their establishing legal status in Germany (such as a recognized refugee status or partnership with a German). This pairing of medical knowledge and skills with a migration motive that has been used to establish a relatively good legal status provides the opportunity for the individual’s application to be processed by professional law. These biographical orientations, which bind individuals to the receiving country at an early date in the initial migration phase, provide such compelling motivation that individuals are willing to go through the temporary devaluation of their cultural capital, accepting positions as assistants where they had successfully worked as professionals in their home country prior to migration. As in other case groups, biographical orientations beyond a professional career help to shape the migrant’s trajectory into the labour market. The “demotion” to the role of assistant doctor or dentist is softened by a trajectory based on professional law, within which these migrants can anticipate the end of their positions as assistants and the beginning of full recognition for their knowledge

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and skills as cultural capital. In this case group, the trajectory based on professional law institutionalizes a period of rest in which medical professionals are able to adapt their knowledge and skills – if so desired – to the expectations of the German labour market. It is important to note, however, that all the medical doctors and dentists in this case group now work in or own medical practices that cater to patients with a migratory background. In a professional field where we have found evidence for ethnic discrimination against medical doctors with foreign academic degrees,12 the access of foreign doctors to the labour market was restricted mainly to (and facilitated by) medical practices that catered to migrants (irrespective of origin). As in the case of Mr Nazar, foreign doctors may not experience ethnic discrimination when looking for a position; in an ethnically segmented health care system, as we have seen in some quarters of German cities, it is opportune for doctors with a migratory background to choose associations and labour market positions that cater strongly to migrants. Here, as at other points in the status passage of highly qualified migrants, restrictions set by others and options chosen by the self go hand-in-hand; it is not always possible to discern agency and structure. As the typical patterns in this case group reveal three different aspects in which foreign knowledge and skills can be recognized, we should revisit the relational character of cultural capital discussed in chapter 2. Mr Nazar, Mr Zadeh, and other individuals in this case group have their foreign academic knowledge and skills recognized by the state (e.g., by health care system authorities); hence we can speak of fully institutionalized cultural capital. This institutionalized cultural capital, which is dependent on the recognition of knowledge and skills by the state, must be distinguished from the recognition of educational titles on the free market. The migrant doctors, for example, find appropriate professional positions only in medical practices that are owned by fellow migrants or that cater to migrants. Thus, within the private sector, their institutionalized cultural capital is limited to specific workplaces. That these medical practices pose not only a restriction but also an opportunity has to do with the embodied cultural capital accorded to the doctors by patients with a migration background. While some native Germans stay away from medical practices owned by migrant doctors, fellow migrants value the knowledge and skills provided by these doctors in addition to their medical expertise, such as language skills and cultural competence. In this

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case group, the relational character of cultural capital manifests itself in three different forms: institutionalized cultural capital as knowledge and skills fully recognized by the state; institutionalized cultural capital recognized in the private sector in medical practices that serve migrants who value certain language skills; and cultural competences as embodied cultural capital.13 4.4

Precarious Balance between Biographical Orientation and Location-Specific Cultural Capital

The migrants in the next case group face similar restrictions in the private sector. Their foreign academic titles can be used only with strong reference to their home country or region. Why do these highly qualified migrants – and it is worth noting that all the individuals are female – risk the consequences of using their knowledge and skills only by referring to their home country, thus restricting themselves to “location-specific cultural capital” (Weiß 2005)? Analysis of the life stories of Ms Donato, Ms Guzman-Berg, and Ms Piwarski shows that, for a considerable time, these migrants strike a precarious balance between a partnership orientation,14 which went along with their migration to Germany, and a desire to use their foreign educational title in the labour market. On their arrival, the three women did not receive full free-market recognition for the educational titles they had received in their home country. Rather, they found employment or established self-employment precisely because their educational title was specific to a certain country or region. Ms Donato worked as a specialist in Italian law; Ms Piwarski initially used her economic expertise to help Slovak companies in the German market; and, finally, Ms Guzman-Berg became a judicial expert for Latin-American tax law. These migrants came to Germany in order to continue their partnership with a German citizen. None of them chose immediately to marry her partner, which would have enabled her to receive a family visa. On the contrary, each tried to access the German labour market without relying on her partner. Ms Donato profited from EU freedomof-movement legislation; Ms Guzman-Berg received a visa as a specialist; Ms Piwarski received a visa as an entrepreneur. This access to legal inclusion in the German market, independent from one’s partner, is one component of the precarious balance between location-specific cultural capital and biographical orientation. In her narrative account,

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Ms Piwarski describes her best intentions to obtain a residence and work permit independently from her partner: “And one impor- a- an important point was also well I didn’t want to marry my husband; that is [short laugh] really I would like very much to get married that is in those days, we are married now, but I didn’t want that well so that I here get permit of residence that I get married for that reason; an so well’s why I thought to myself that was also the method so to speak that here I well well can function quite ordinarily.” The attitude demonstrated by Ms Piwarski, and observable in the other cases as well, is characterized by a combination of work and partnership orientation. A typical feature is the desire to obtain a residence and work permit without using marriage in an instrumental way. The “method” Ms Piwarski speaks of is applying for a visa as an entrepreneur. In these three cases, the migrants then try to move beyond this precarious balance by expanding their opportunities to use their foreign knowledge and skills. Ms Guzman-Berg, whose partnership orientation later included starting a family, attended a study program on European law and used it to expand her opportunities, albeit without accreditation as a lawyer. When she received a licence as a tax accountant, she was able to find a job as an international (i.e., not only Latin-American) tax consultant in a large corporation. Working within Eurozone law, Ms Donato was able to use her professional Italian title as avvocato (lawyer) even in Germany. Ms Piwarski found that only a few Slovakian companies wanted to invest in Germany. She then found new clients by using a different business strategy: And well yes what was I going to say we- well at first the idea was to support just the Slovakian companies on the German market; that was well well (.) the the (.) the thesis and the idea but then it well proved as it is so often in business, that although times were perfect well the Slovakian companies were not that much [laughing] interested in expanding here in Germany; (.) end still of ’90s; because indeed in Slovakia there was an economic boom and so many thought well OK there’s much time there’s much time for us and that is (.) but of course for my company it was a disaster then I had to reorientate very quickly, and then I thought I must do something in (.) both directions; that is now also for German companies in Slovakia; and that’s how the branch in Bratislava in Slovakia came into being. For the German well companies.

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Ms Piwarski considered the possible markets for her specific knowledge and skills, looking for those potential clients with a strong relationship with her home country, Slovakia. She expanded the range of markets in which she could capitalize on her qualifications, by offering her services to German corporations as well. A characteristic feature of this case group is that, although the individuals migrate with the intention to live with a partner in Germany, they refuse to profit from the legal advantages of marriage to a German citizen, such as secure resident status and full labour market access. Rather, they endure considerable mismatch between their biographical orientations (towards partnership and career) and legally restricted labour market opportunities for a significant length of time.15 This feature distinguishes them from the second case group, in which migrants, on the basis of their biographical orientations (motives to migrate and to stay), secured a (legal) position in German society while their cultural capital was downgraded. Ms Piwarski, Ms Donato, and Ms GuzmanBerg also differ from migrants in the third case group, insofar as the latter’s professional careers were shaped by professional law trajectories accessible only because of their advanced legal status. In contrast, the female migrants in the fourth case group slowly moved from a position of restricted employment (based on their previous level of qualification) to a position of enhanced opportunity for their knowledge and skills. These enhanced opportunities in the labour market went along with a change in partnership orientation and – after marriage – consolidation of their legal status. Finally, some features of this case group are remarkable with regard to recent scholarly debates on highly skilled female migration (see Kofman and Raghuram 2009; Riaño and Baghdadi 2007): The three women did not cross international boundaries primarily as labour migrants but, rather, as a result of their relationship with German partners. Yet despite this motivation to enter the country in the context of partnership and marriage, their intention was to get full access to the skilled labour market. Moreover, they aimed to realize an independent professional career, independent from their partners or from a marriage to a German citizen. However, their access to qualified labour was restricted to a limited segment of the labour market, available by redefining their cultural capital as location-specific. In addition, their professional careers were shaped by a national migration policy in Germany affecting their access to the labour market based on their legal status, as discussed further in chapter 5.

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Adaptation of Academic Knowledge and Skills during a Time Out in the Context of Partnership or Qualification Orientations

As we have seen above, foreign-educated migrants in Germany may have to tolerate a partial (but sometimes only temporary) devaluation of their cultural capital and sometimes may have to acquire new knowledge and skills. This is true not only in the health care system with its professional law standards but also in other professional fields. Biographical orientations that lead to migration or that make migrants establish themselves in the receiving country are important contextual conditions that offset the indignity of such devaluation. Hence an analysis of status passages into the labour market would be incomplete if one did not take into account the intertwined character of cultural capital and biographical orientation and their changing relationship over time. Biographical orientation was very important for the next case group, members of which experienced a lengthy time out as they acquired new knowledge and skills. In Germany and elsewhere, where the health care system is heavily regulated by the state, the time period for acquiring new knowledge and skills is determined by professional law (e.g., Mr Zadeh and Mr Nazar first had to work as assistant doctors for a specified length of time). In the private sector, however, we do not find such organized recognition of the cultural capital of managers or other highly skilled personnel. Why do the migrants in this case group not only tolerate the temporary devaluation of their academic titles but also accept the risk of acquiring new knowledge and skills when their value as cultural capital cannot be safely anticipated or guaranteed? In the life stories of Mr Bergström, Ms Morales-Aznar, and Ms Gonzalez-Montejo, various biographical orientations overlap each other during the migration process. Moreover, it is worth noting that their migration took place relatively early in life, prior to the establishment of a career in their home country. The biographical orientations that were important in the pre-migration phase (qualification and/ or partnership motives) were not replaced by other orientations but, rather, were overlapped and enforced by them. Ms Morales-Aznar, for example, had already obtained a degree in jurisprudence in her home country of Portugal when she decided to follow her German boyfriend to his home country. While he was working as a medical doctor, she took German-language courses and improved her language skills by

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working as a gofer in a private company. In the following interview excerpt, she justifies taking on this position, for which she was underpaid and over-qualified. “Because I thought [to myself] (.) everything is all right for me and all I can get is all right for me then I can then I’ll be among people [breathes in] well (.) by way of this contact I will also find it easier to learn the language and well (.) or get to know it then also I will be able to practise a bit slowly, and become well well well more experienced and then [breathes in] then I thought by way of telephone conversation (well then) and so on at this company [breathes in] I can well (.) also further (.) because in the beginning I always had my problems with telephone conversation.” Ms Morales-Aznar used her time as the “wife” of a well-salaried doctor to gain “experience” and to improve her language skills, especially under the difficult conditions of “telephone calls.” It is her expressed aim to “understand everything” and to “make herself understandable.” Later this young migrant, who had not had the opportunity to gain much work experience in her home country (she had completed only a one-year supervised internship as a lawyer), was able to use these informal skills when she applied for a job in a bank, where she has since continued to advance her career. Similarly, Mr Bergström and Ms Gonzalez-Montejo,16 and others like them, had or developed a strong qualification orientation, which, along with other biographical orientations, was important in their decision to migrate. Even when these migrants found jobs they were qualified for, they continued to improve their knowledge and skills and hence improve their career (see also chapter 7). Their desire to improve their qualifications certainly relates to the fact that they had not worked in their home country for a significant period of time and thus had not previously secured themselves a labour market position. In contrast, many migrants discussed earlier had already worked in their home country for a longer period, successfully transitioning from the education system to the labour market. They experienced the subsequent devaluation of their knowledge and skills during their second transition into the labour market as more severe when contrasted with their first – successful – inclusion in the labour market of their home country. For Ms Morales-Aznar and the other migrants in this case group, however, immigration to Germany and transition from the education system to the labour market were simultaneous. For this reason, they were able to accept with less frustration a time-out period to acquire knowledge and skills in a free market company or as a university assistant for an

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additional period of time. Their qualification orientation was shaped by the understanding that their education was not yet completed and that there was still something to be learned. Again we see that within the multidimensional status passage of the highly qualified migrant, simultaneously experienced and intertwined dimensions have specific effects for the evaluation of qualifications as cultural capital. The use and improvement of knowledge and skills is related to given (legal) opportunity structures and to biographical motives that may change over the different phases of the status passage. As much as we have identified upgrading effects during the status passages of highly qualified migrants, there are also case groups for which the overlapping of status passage dimensions may lead to a downgrading of the individual’s labour market position. This is certainly the case for the migrants discussed in the next section. 4.6

Long-term Transitory Deprivation Resulting in Cultural Capital Assessed on the Basis of Ascribed Social Identity

Ms Orsolic, an economist from Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to Germany at the age of thirty-four, seeking refuge for herself and her children from the war in her home country. Before her emigration, she had worked nine years as an economist, the last years as a leader, before her flight. After her arrival in Germany, she was not accepted as an asylum seeker. The state granted her permission to stay in the country only as long as the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina continued, and prohibited her from taking legitimate employment. Since then, her status in work life has never been what it was in her home country. The devaluation of her cultural capital was the main feature of her subsequent career trajectory. With regard to her situation in Germany, she gives the following biographical account: Well here in Germany, well I never well (.) really worked anything a real job but as I was at the asylum I was doing much well (.) for the refugees I interpreted and mm this way helped much and if someone needed advice because (.) I myself needed that and asked looked then I was able to well give advice to others (.) well and then at the home we had a well (.) dear and nice female boss (…) and afterwards I also did this class at [the community interpreting service], interpreting now and then, indeed I like doing this (.) but indeed assignments a- are very rare (.) and I would like also to do something fo- in my profession and several times I went

Aspects of the Multidimensional Status Passage 87 to job centre and tried to get any kind of retraining (.) well thousands of excuses I heard but I never got anything real; and now when I was 45 I was told I’m too old (.) yes (2 sec. pause) and that’s a real shame (7 sec. pause) I think that well I could really do much (.) well OK well (.) I completed studies in socialist country but (.) it’s not such a great difference I have well looked it up myself it’s about a few [bank accounts] well so (.) well when you have to book what if that’s called profit or well (.) something else doesn’t matter everybody works to get some- (.) something done well (3 sec. pause) that’s a real shame.

During the first few years, when she was not allowed officially to work, Ms Orsolic made herself useful in the shelter for refugees, translating for other residents and helping with advice. After this long “transitory deprivation” (Thomsen 2009, 153), she obtained full legal labour market access. But even then she was able only to attend a course for becoming a nonprofessional community translator. Her attempts to convince the labour office to provide her with further education in her own profession as an economist were unsuccessful. After eleven years, the labour office claimed she was now too old to receive training as an economist. Hence, despite her professional experience and her continued struggle for professional recognition, Ms Orsolic’s educational title was not valued in the country of arrival. She was able to obtain only those jobs that were strongly related to her immigration background (as a poorly paid community translator, for example, who was offered only a few “assignments”). Ms Orsolic belongs to a case group whose transition into the receiving country’s labour market bears a typical pattern: after a long transitory deprivation phase in which these migrants were not allowed to work at all – and in which their previous knowledge and skills could be neither used nor improved17 – their foreign education titles were totally disregarded when they sought qualified jobs in the labour market. Cultural capital was acknowledged only on the basis of their social identity as refugees and foreigners. For example, some were given small jobs as “community translators.” Another refugee of this case group, Bosnian engineer Ms Pasic, after obtaining full legal access to the labour market, could only find a job as an education assistant for Bosnian children (along with some assignments as a community translator). The municipality gave her this job only because her experience as a woman and mother seemed to qualify her for the position. Long-term transitory deprivation, along with symbolic exclusion, here leads to (combined) ethnicized and gendered ascriptions.

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Although the motive to flee, which had brought Ms Orsolic and Ms Pasic to Germany, could not be turned swiftly into a permanent residence status, it nevertheless played a big role in the labour market inclusion (or, rather, exclusion) of these women. This motive explains why these migrants tolerated accommodation in a hostel and finally – after obtaining a work permit – a labour market inclusion that did not do justice to their academic education. It is significant that, even during the seven years of transitory deprivation, these migrants’ first work experiences in Germany were with gendered and ethnicized labour market inclusion. Both women observed that other female refugees worked illegally as cleaning women. They dismissed such opportunities for themselves because they were illegal. However, even when they still were not allowed to work in proper jobs, both women found opportunities to work. The director of the refugee hostel asked Ms Orsolic to translate for other residents and to counsel them in social matters. Ms Pasic received a special work permit for a job as a waitress in a Macedonian restaurant. With these jobs, which are both lower-level service jobs in Germany and seen as appropriate work for women and ethnic minorities, the trajectory that results in cultural capital being ascribed on the basis of social identity starts even within the transitional phase. In this case group, the typical relation of different aspects of the multidimensional status passage reveals dramatically how important it is to consider cultural capital as a relational category in place and time. The sort of specific application of knowledge and skills that we see in the cases of Ms Orsolic and Ms Pasic is comprehensible and meaningful only when we take into account their trajectory through the phases of the status passage, considering its multidimensionality. Motivated to immigrate to Germany because of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the women endured a transition phase that, on the basis of restrictive asylum legislation in Germany, was prolonged and turned into a phase of deprivation. After they had been kept out of the labour market for many years, the academic knowledge and skills of the refugees lost value in the eyes of potential employers and even the labour office. Here the non-recognition of foreign knowledge and skills is due to the long transitory deprivation rather than the pre-migration quality of the refugees’ qualifications. Forced to the bottom of the labour market by legal exclusion, these refugees had no choice but to exploit their ascribed social identity. That Ms Orsolic and Ms Pasic tolerated this disregard for their foreign academic titles even after the civil war had

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ended can be understood as due to developments in other dimensions of the status passage: their children had now been socialized mainly in Germany. Thus, because of their children, these refugees established themselves in the receiving country, even though they had experienced only downgrading effects during their own status passage. In the downgrading careers within this case group, aspects of the immigration status (i.e., being a refugee in Germany with legal barriers to the labour market and academic credentials from abroad) are interrelated with aspects of gender. Moreover, gender is already affecting the career trajectory in a multilevel way: it works in the symbolic dimension and the evaluation of the immigrants’ cultural capital and at the same time is a structural feature of their situation – that is, being simultaneously involved in pursuing employment and in their responsibilities for child-raising and family work. All in all, the intersection of these dimensions resulted in a severe loss of cultural capital and a loss of a former status in work life in favour of a re-evaluation of ascribed and/or newly gained social knowledge within a low-paid position in Germany. 4.7

Multidimensional Transitions and Their Effects on Cultural Capital over Time

In chapter 3 we argued that in highly skilled immigrants’ transition into the labour market, life course perspectives enable the researcher to consider phenomena that affect the success or failure of the migrant’s access to the labour market. The long-term scope of this approach allows us to consider phases of the status passage and the evaluation of knowledge and skills as a process over time (see Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011). By studying the intersections of successive or simultaneous transitions in different status passages, we can assess how biographical orientations remain constant or change during different phases and how they interact with certain (legal) conditions under which knowledge and skills are used as cultural capital. The analyses discussed in this chapter reveal, first, that we cannot speak of one single connection between different status passage dimensions but, rather, we must speak of several typical relations of aspects in the migrants’ trajectories. The case groups demonstrate the importance of improvement and/or adaptation of knowledge and skills to labour market expectations, from the pre-migration phase through the transition phase to the initial phase of the status passage into the receiving

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country. However, endeavours to boost cultural capital are not the result of spontaneous decisions. As we have seen, bringing knowledge and skills to a point where they are recognized transnationally as cultural capital and adapting knowledge and skills to the expectations of the labour market of the receiving country are practices connected with the biographical orientations that motivate people to migrate in the first place. These biographical orientations, developed in the pre-migration or transition phase, whether they are strong qualification motives or the overlap and augmentation of different motives, helped people to improve their knowledge and skills. For those who have already worked in their profession in their home country, the (temporary) devaluation of their cultural capital and the need to learn again is surely more demanding, especially if the migrant is faced with this devaluation only once he or she has arrived in Germany or even when he or she has already established him- or herself in the receiving country in arenas other than a professional career. The comparison of the case of medical doctors and dentists with that of migrants whose foreign academic titles were not acknowledged in the labour market and who were then downgraded by the labour office to non-academic positions points to the importance of institutional regulations for the adaptation of knowledge and skills. Whereas medical practitioners could anticipate the institutionalized path of working and learning again as assistant doctors, provided they gained legal access to the labour market, the migrants of the other case group were offered state-funded further education below their academic qualifications, consequently downgrading their cultural capital. For each of the case groups considered in this chapter, there is one phase in the status passage (two phases at most) of decisive significance for the final recognition of qualifications as cultural capital. There are two case groups, however, for whom both the biographical orientations and the opportunities and strategies to capitalize on their knowledge and skills reveal an astonishing continuity over time: Ms Donato, Ms Guzman-Berg, and Ms Piwarski maintain their original migration motives (partnership and qualification) for a long time, while slowly but surely expanding their opportunities to have their qualifications acknowledged as cultural capital. The (precarious) balance they keep between their biographical orientations and the application of their knowledge and skills renders all phases of the status passage equally important. A similar continuity of biographical orientations and cultural capital was identified among refugees Ms Orsolic and Ms Pasic.

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But here the continuity, caused by a specific link between biographical orientation (flight from civil war) and institutional regulations (restricted work permit or no work permit at all) along with genderrelated impacts had a downgrading effect, which continued even after the women obtained full legal access to the labour market. The interconnection between biographical orientation and the institutional context in which it is formed is most pronounced when migrants’ fate in the labour market is examined over time. The next chapter will take a closer look at the institutions and, more specifically, the legal regulations shaping migrants’ trajectories by expanding the scope of our analysis to a country comparison.

5 Migration Control and Migrants’ Agency

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 decisive, often having long-term effects on an individual’s career. Ms Hernandez was excluded from the discussion of migrants with legally equal status in the labour market because, in the course of time she spent in Germany, she was unable to obtain a visa that would give her full labour market access. In her qualifications and biographical orientation, she differs little from the migrants discussed in the previous chapter; in the end, however, her precarious legal status results in a drastic form of downward mobility. Much like many other migrants in our sample, Ms Hernandez was remarkably successful in her educational trajectory and during the pre-migration phase. She is the first member of her extended family to complete a program of higher education, charting a different course from that of her sisters, who have become homemakers. She majored in economic engineering; she graduated best of class and began a career in a national telecommunications company in her home country, Brazil. At twenty-five years of age, she was in charge of a sixty-person department. At that point, her former university offered her a scholarship for an international master’s program in Germany. She told us how difficult

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the decision to migrate was: “I had, (.) unfortunately had- well (.) was this super offer, to go to Germany, I spoke to my (.) not to my: (.) boss directly but to our management, well, that I got this super offer and so, and so on, ‘(…) not, we’re afraid not, well you get no permiss- to simply go to Germany for a year. You’re very young, and you’re at a super level here, (.) aand that not well simply anybody has (.). You know what you’ve got in Brazil here, is really (.) very, very, very much, (.) and, if you not interested you must choose between Germany and (.) and your (.) job.’ Was very difficult this decision, but I [opted] for Germany well.” Ms Hernandez requested a one-year leave from her position, but the company refused to grant her request. Considering the privileged position Ms Hernandez had been able to attain by age twenty-five, the company saw her desire to go abroad as a breach of loyalty and instead expected her to either stay or leave for good. Ms Hernandez notes that the decision was very difficult. Her biographical narration up to that point clearly shows her ability and desire to establish a career. From this we can assume that she experiences an inner conflict: her desire for further education abroad and her ultimate decision to step down from a well-paid and established position in the company in order to take on the role of student once more. Yet when the interviewer asks a follow-up question, Ms Hernandez tells a different story: Well (.) in my country well, well (2 sec. pause) either you have- (.) is very much, much big difference. You know, either you work directly for the government, (.) and have incredibly many breaks, holidays, and so on, but you you don’t earn (.) anything, that is you can- (.) you starve on that money. Or at a big and private company, you earn very much, I made much, much well (.) money, or saved, but you have no private life. Really no. I, I (.) I had (.) always work (.) without break- well, weekend, sometimes all night, sometimes on holiday, that’s no private life. I was simply (.) I was very young, and also I wanted to do something else. I thought, yes of course, I still interested earn much, much, much more, but I could within (.) five year, make much money really, pff, new car, and so on, but I couldn’t do (.) anything, you know, no day off, is (.) so terrible.

Ms Hernandez’s vocational success had come at a high price, as private companies had high expectations of their employees. She made a lot of money, and this was important to her. But she suffered from a lack of spare time, and she felt too young to be working as much as she did.

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Consequently, she viewed going abroad as her last chance to experience something “for her life.”1 In migration studies as well as migration legislation, migrants are classified on the basis of their presumed motivation (Groß 2006): those who are looking for a career abroad are seen as labour migrants, even though many of them are also joining their families (Kofman 2000); those who want to study abroad are student migrants; those forced to flee their country are “refugees.” In each of these examples, one migration motivation is deemed to be the decisive motive and it is used to characterize migration processes at least during the early phases. Social scientific surveys have only recently allowed respondents to give more than one reason for migration. In a representative sample of EU migrants to France, Germany, Britain, Italy, and Spain, respondents have been allowed to give a maximum of two reasons for their migration; 13.9 per cent of respondents had migration motivations overlapping the categories “work,” “study,” “family/love,” and “quality of life” (Santacreu, Baldoni, and Albert 2009, 60). Our interviews show a much more differentiated picture. Even for people like Ms Hernandez, who is clearly career-oriented, migration motivations are not one-dimensional. Instead, they are complex, intertwined with other personal concerns, and they change over time (Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen 2007, 97–132). For Ms Hernandez, going abroad is not an “either/or” decision; rather, it combines her desire to move ahead in her professional career through an international education and the chance to explore the world in a way that she thinks is appropriate for a person of her young age. In retrospect, Ms Hernandez does not regret her decision to take up the scholarship offer. She describes her first year in Germany as a wonderful time. She enjoyed her English-language studies as well as the three-month internship with a large German company. Later in the interview, we also learn that she falls in love right after her arrival in Germany and starts a relationship that continued until shortly before the interview and that she deems to be the best partnership in her life. In her attempt to balance several goals in life, Ms Hernandez is similar to those in the case group discussed in chapter 4.4 that includes Ms Piwarski, Ms Donato, and Ms Guzman-Berg. These women are motivated to stay in the country because they have met German partners, and they are able to develop careers independently from their partnerships. Much like these three women, Ms Hernandez emphasizes that she resents the idea that her visa could depend on a marriage. In contrast to these women, Ms Hernandez’s partnership motivation developed only

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during the course of her stay in Germany; originally Ms Hernandez left her home country in order to study and live abroad. More importantly, Ms Hernandez is unable to translate her degree in economic engineering into a work permit based on location-specific cultural capital and thereby conclude the transition phase. Her graduation from the international master’s program comes at the height of the IT crisis in 2002, and for a period of one year she can find only low-paid internships. So, like Ms Guzman-Berg, she looks for a position as a specialist for her home country, for which she could get a work permit; in contrast to the case group in chapter 4, however, she fails to find such a position. After a year of internships, she has spent her savings and has to return to Brazil. We do not know much about the eighteen months Ms Hernandez then spends in Brazil, as she is unwilling to talk about them. She says only that she has fallen in love with Germany and therefore tries to return. When she returns in early 2005, she arrives much better prepared: her earlier futile job searches have taught her to find a job prior to arriving in Germany. This precaution fails, however, because the German company that hired her from abroad declares bankruptcy right after her arrival. As a backup plan, Ms Hernandez had also researched the possibility of entering a PhD program. For this, she must prove sufficient command of German prior to entering the program – not an issue in the English-language master’s course that had brought her to Germany in the first place. Technically, she could have gotten a visa simply for learning German. But the migrant administration does not believe that Ms Hernandez had returned to Brazil for eighteen months, because she had failed to deregister when leaving the country.2 Consequently, the duration of the residence permit she was granted for learning German is reduced significantly, and her options to work legally in order to support herself are restricted to weekends only. This results in her having to accept low-paying jobs in the informal economy, and she fails her first language test. Despite these troubles, she does find a PhD position. This part of Ms Hernandez’s trajectory deviates clearly from that of most of the migrants discussed in chapter 4. It is characterized by a constant struggle with government administration, deteriorating job options, and a gradual move into the informal economy. Unlike other migrants who are completely excluded from legal employment in Germany, Ms Hernandez is still allowed to work part-time and to settle where she wants on the basis of her status as a language student.

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This precarious but not hopeless situation turns disastrous when Ms Hernandez becomes pregnant. She does not want to be a stay-at-home mother like her sisters. She emphasizes repeatedly that the mutual independence she and her partner enjoy makes it the best romantic relationship in her life. This relationship is severely challenged by the unexpected pregnancy, and her partner refuses to accept responsibility for the child. With the unplanned pregnancy, Ms Hernandez’s trajectory into the labour market becomes gendered in multiple ways. First, Ms Hernandez does not expect to find child care that would allow her to do her PhD as a single mother. Second, by this point Ms Hernandez herself has realized that it is impossible for her to obtain a visa on the basis of her professional accomplishments and that she would have been well settled had she married right away. However, a marriage for visa purposes is at odds with her basic beliefs and convictions. In addition to all this, her partner’s (female) friends accuse her of a strategic pregnancy. So Ms Hernandez feels that she did not take advantage of legal privileges that might have been open to her had she adhered to more traditional gender roles.3 This is also the point at which Ms Hernandez’s biographical orientations and the institutionalization of legitimate and illegitimate migration motivations in migration law deviate most strongly. Ms Hernandez is a strong believer in meritocracy (see Biehl 2008), and it is vital for her to succeed through personal accomplishments, not family connections. She is enraged by instances of marriage migration among her acquaintances. Migration regulation, on the other hand, rarely follows meritocratic considerations (Cornelius et al. 2004). More often, residence permits in Germany depend on non-meritocratic reasons, such as when specific sectors of the economy are opened in order to further the interests of the receiving country, or when specific nationalities are favoured on the basis of international relations, or when visas are granted to family members of citizens. Ms Hernandez fulfils none of these criteria, but she expects to give birth to a child who will then have the right to live with both parents. If one of the child’s parents is a German citizen, the other parent can also reside legally in Germany for some years. So Ms Hernandez trajectory, third, becomes gendered with respect to her future motherhood and its legal implications. At the time of the interview, Ms Hernandez is working illegally as a live-in au pair, and her precarious residence status depends on the expectation that she will give birth to the child of a German. Her health insurance has refused to pay for the pregnancy. She can see no chance

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to combine PhD research and single parenthood without the support of her extended family. She therefore plans to return to Brazil as soon as she has secured a German passport for her child. The case of Ms Hernandez is typical in several aspects. First, it shows the full impact of legal exclusion, which – in combination with other factors – can result in the complete demise of an individual’s career aspirations, even for high achievers who hold internationally attractive degrees. In the introduction to this book, we discussed the apparent paradox between migration policies, which are generally geared towards attracting highly skilled migrants, and a reality of labour market inclusion, which wastes the cultural capital of a significant number of those who actually follow the call to migrate. Judging from our research, this paradox applies not only to countries such as Germany, whose decision to allow highly skilled migration has been made only recently and with much reservation, but to some extent also to countries such as Canada, which has attracted and integrated wholeheartedly a large number of highly skilled migrants during the past few decades. We therefore take a closer look at the institutions governing migration. Do these institutions contradict the declared goal of attracting highly skilled migration? Do they differ in the countries in our study – Canada, Germany, and Turkey – where we interviewed persons who obtained their educational degrees abroad, or can we see some parallels? Second, our interviews provide evidence of the extent to which migration policy is mediated through biographical orientations and individual agency, even when it has a severely restricting impact on migrants’ trajectories. Ms Hernandez has to justify her migration to administrators, to her friends, and to the interviewer. As few reasons for migration are seen to be legitimate in Germany, she must reframe her complex and changing biographical orientations as “legitimate” purposes. To some extent, this works: for example, she is willing to do her PhD as a detour en route to her main goal of furthering her professional career. A semiinstrumental marriage, on the other hand, is a step that she does not want to take. In the case of Ms Hernandez, we can see both the extent to which migration control restricts her options and the relevance of biographical orientations even for migrants who are confronted with a high degree of legal exclusion. The literature on migration control has focused on institutional reasons for the gap between the intentions of migration policy and their outcome. The present chapter considers the literature and then goes on to explore ways in which migrants themselves deal with differing

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experiences of legal exclusion. German and Turkish migration policy includes many provisions for the legal exclusion of migrants from full labour market access; we focus on how migrants experience legal labour market exclusion. On the basis of our findings, we consider how normative orientations to legal exclusion and action strategies of migrants affect the outcomes of legal exclusion. In this chapter, we shall compare cases from three macro-social country settings: Turkey, Canada, and Germany.4 This comparison poses specific methodological challenges that we have discussed at more length elsewhere (Nohl 2009, 2013; Schittenhelm 2009a, 2012; Weiß and Nohl 2012). In our attempt to understand connections between the individual level of biographical orientations and the macro-social level of the legal regulation of migration, we want to avoid ecological fallacies by distinguishing two methodologically different approaches. First, by starting our analysis of trajectories into the labour market “bottom up,” based on the narratives of highly skilled migrants, we can show how they are structured by biographical orientations and practices. In this methodological perspective, our findings relate, for example, to personal orientations such as the desire to balance careers and personal-life goals, which was discussed for the case group in chapter 4.4 and can probably be found among some individuals everywhere in the world. Our sample offers a wide selection of cases and contrasts on the individual level so that our findings concerning biographical orientations are well grounded in empirical research and rather comprehensive.5 That our attribution of causal connections can be proven by our empirical material is slightly more difficult to argue for those findings that refer to the macro-level of analysis and to the interconnections between macro-social frames and individual trajectories into the labour market, which is at the heart of our investigation. The fact that women such as Ms Guzman-Berg and Ms Hernandez are looking for an expert visa instead of marrying and immigrating as a spouse is clearly related to the institutional framework in Germany. We could find similar concerns in our sample in Turkey but not in Canada; we might be tempted to attribute this difference to specifics in the respective migration regimes. This could be an ecological fallacy, however; our sampling strategy in Canada was quite different, and that could also explain the distinction. For our analyses of macro-social settings, we therefore utilize a second research strategy: in order to understand the impact of specific institutional contexts, we view cases in Germany as the centre

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of our interest and use cases from other countries as maximum contrasts (Nohl et al. 2006; chapter 1). These contrast cases must be similar enough to warrant a meaningful comparison (Schittenhelm 2009a, 2012). For example, it would not be fruitful to compare legally excluded migrants in Germany with migrants who enjoy full rights in Canada; it can be enlightening, however, to compare legally excluded migrants in Germany with legally excluded migrants in Turkey, as both countries’ migration regimes are characterized by many facets of legal exclusion, even though the administration of legal exclusion in the two countries differs significantly. By comparing cases that are similar in many aspects but situated in very different macro-social settings, we can distinguish between more universal biographical concerns and those that are closely connected with the specifics of a macro-social setting. Furthermore, we analyse the institutions governing legal exclusion in order to inform our comparison of migrants’ narrations. Our findings regarding the impact of macro-social contexts on migrants’ trajectories are therefore based on a combination of maximal contrast between interviews situated in diverse contexts and institutional analysis. 5.1

Migration Control: Institutionalizing Migrants’ Motivations

From a theoretical perspective, controlling borders and establishing rules of membership historically have been among the pivotal prerogatives of the sovereign nation state (Brubaker 2000). Functionally, modern liberal democracies, social security, and welfare state provisions historically have been tied to national citizenship regimes and modes of defining exclusive membership (Habermas 2000). Yet the magnitude and the increasingly transnational nature of cross-border migration call into question citizenship regimes that traditionally have been based on the categorical distinction between members and non-members, nationals and non-nationals. Exclusive and permanent membership in one (national) community no longer reflects the social reality of a growing group of migrants (Castles 2002; Faist 2004, 2008). Current patterns of migration are increasingly difficult to institutionalize in duties, rights, and entitlements of individuals vis-à-vis the community they live in. Transnational lives and professional careers challenge national modes of regulating migration, normatively and functionally. Social hierarchies among citizens and other residents are common in the short term, but it is hard to justify and practically enforce exclusion of a particular group of residents over the long term (Bommes 2012).

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The model of exclusive national citizenship status and the logic of excluding foreigners are not only questionable normatively but also produce side effects that cannot be controlled easily and that threaten the institution of national sovereignty (Beck 1999; Castles and Davidson 2000). First among these side effects is the difficulty of controlling movement of people over borders – movement that challenges the clear-cut distinction between citizens and outsiders and creates a multitude of questions about who should be part of the electorate, under what conditions, and for how long (Brubaker 1992). Citizens can move abroad and have children there. Should the children be citizens of their parents’ home country? Should citizens who live abroad, marry a foreigner, and choose to speak their partner’s language retain their citizenship? How should a nation state deal with foreigners who have lived in its territory for extended periods of time but have never obtained nor even applied for citizenship status (Soysal 1994)? Migration policy can be seen as an attempt to regulate the specific problems that arise once the clear-cut distinction between citizens and outsiders is undermined. The underlying issues are common to (liberal) nation states (Hollifield 1992). Yet the response of specific states to the general problem of border control can be very particular (Zimmermann et al. 2007). Germany, Canada, and Turkey have highly specific and very different migration regimes. Assuming that differences in legislation affect migrants’ labour market trajectories, the three-country scope will give us a broad perspective on the beneficial and disabling impacts of legal in- and exclusion. Despite the differences in migration policy, which we shall describe in detail shortly, it is important to keep in mind that nation states are not completely free to choose wanted migration and reject unwanted migration. National migration policies are increasingly affected by supra- and international border regimes, such as that of the European Union (Geiger and Pécoud 2011; Baumann, Lorenz, and Rosenow 2011; Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). Several of the biographical orientations discussed in the previous chapter6 are strongly protected by international regimes. This is the case for refuge-seeking migrants, who are protected by the Geneva Convention and the UNHCR (Hollifield 2000), should their right to life be severely threatened. Migrants with a partnership orientation and parents of children holding citizenship in the receiving country are also protected by human rights legislation, should they be married and/or able to prove parentage.7 For other biographical orientations, international standards have not evolved into

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binding regimes (Hollifield 2000; Pries 2010). Migrants who desire to ameliorate their situation, to improve their education, or to explore the world must depend on the contingent options offered by specific nation states. We shall now take a closer look at how specific nation states process the migration motivations that we identified in chapter 4. On this basis we can understand better how the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate migration institutionalized in migrants’ legal status affects labour market trajectories.

Germany’s Modernizing Citizenship and Immigration Policies: Legal and Bureaucratic Hurdles to Migrants’ Successful Labour Market Inclusion Germany’s migration regime is still shaped by the legacy of the guest worker scheme. During the post-war economic boom, the Federal Republic of Germany recruited foreign workers primarily from Southern Europe. The vast majority of these migrants were hired for manual labour, and their formal education was either low or unrecognized in the labour market (Constant and Massey 2005). After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, migration processes changed significantly. Since 2000, the government has developed policies to attract highly skilled migration. By the turn of the century, 47 per cent of new immigrants had completed a university-track secondary education; only 33 per cent of the native German population had done so (Diehl and Grobecker 2006, 1144). Nevertheless, public discourse and migration policy are still shaped decisively by the guest worker program. As a result of the guest worker program, West Germany’s foreign population grew quickly from 686,000 in 1961 to 3.9 million in 1973 (BAMF 2006, 79). In 1973, the West German government issued a recruitment stop in response to the first serious economic crisis after the Second World War. Still, despite the fact that the government no longer aimed to attract migrants for the labour market, the foreign-born population grew steadily. This growth can be attributed primarily to some of the guest workers’ decisions to make Germany their home and to unite with their family members (under the family unification scheme). The year 1973 marks a turning point in Germany’s perspective on migration: the idea of guests who stay for a short time in order to work gradually evolved into what was, in reality, officially unwanted immigration as well as the unwanted challenge of integrating not only foreign workers – who,

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as a result of the economic crisis, began losing their jobs in increasing numbers – but also the families of foreign workers. In addition to this much debated inflow of “foreigners,” Germany had always accepted ethnic Germans and political refugees from Eastern Europe on a fairly liberal basis. Much like other asylum seekers, ethnic Germans were transferred to large camps upon their arrival and then distributed to locations all over Germany. In contrast to asylum seekers, however, ethnic Germans could be certain of receiving citizenship and substantial social and educational support; the period spent in a camp was short-term, and an individual’s wish to move close to family members was usually respected. After the democratic transformation in Eastern Europe, numbers of asylum seekers and in particular of ethnic Germans rose dramatically (with more than 400,000 migrants in this category in 1990 alone). Germany also accepted large numbers of Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union from 1991 to 2004, who were admitted based on the “Quota Refugees Law” (which denotes a commitment to humanitarian goals). German politics responded to the rising numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe and to the political change in the region by enacting more restrictive conditions for the entry of ethnic Germans and Jewish migrants in the latter half of the 1990s, resulting in a reduction of these immigration streams. In the 1980s and 1990s, the other large group of newcomers consisted of asylum applicants, partly as a result of Germany’s liberal legislation at the time and the closure of other legal means of immigration but also as a result of the collapse of communism and the ensuing civil wars and unrest, mainly in the former Yugoslavia. The number of asylum seekers peaked in 1992 at 430,000 (BAMF 2006, 21). The period was characterized by a series of right-wing terrorist murders targeting asylum seekers and members of the Turkish minority, an anti-immigration public discourse, and a constitutional change in the asylum law. The right to claim political asylum remained in the constitution, but a new law stated that migrants coming from “safe third countries” could no longer claim asylum in Germany. As all countries bordering Germany were considered safe, the number of asylum applicants dropped dramatically. The number of migrants granted asylum status reached a historic low in the mid2000s. In 2005, of 48,102 applicants, only 0.9 per cent were granted full asylum, 4.3 per cent were given the status of “little asylum” or subsidiary protection (deportation protection, according to the Geneva Refugee Convention), and 1.4 per cent were granted a temporary suspension

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of deportation (Duldung).8 As the administration had been unable to process asylum applications quickly in the 1990s, and as many rejected asylum applicants could not be deported for practical reasons (e.g., citizenship was unclear, the individual had no papers, or the country of origin was unwilling to accept him or her), the number of persons residing in Germany with a temporary suspension of deportation or with papers saying that they must leave grew over the years. At the end of 2006, 178,326 persons lived in Germany with a temporary suspension of deportation, and most of these individuals had been in Germany for more than six years.9 All of these immigration movements are represented in the composition of Germany’s foreign-born population today. In 2009, 10.6 million persons residing in Germany had been born abroad (13 per cent of the total population), with Turkey and Poland the most important sending countries (German Federal Statistical Office 2010). Approximately 5.6 million, including many who were born in Germany, held a foreign citizenship. The growing number of migrants permanently settling in Germany and the challenges of the demographic transformation of German

Table 5.1. Foreign-born population in Germany, 2009 Region of origin EU-27 Poland

Total (000s) 3422 1103

Italy

434

Romania

386

Greece Other European

227 4060

Turkey

1489

Russia

992

Croatia

249

Serbia-Montenegro

209

Bosnia-Herzegovina Africa Americas Total

176 341 272 10,601

Source: German Federal Statistical Office (2010)

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society (including the predicted lack of qualified labour) led to important changes in Germany’s immigration and integration policies in the new millennium. One key initiative of the Red-Green government under Chancellor Schröder was to amend Germany’s citizenship law. With the modernization of the outdated German nationality laws (the new law came into effect in 2000), the traditional ancestry principle has been supplemented by elements of a territorial tradition (jus soli) that facilitates the acquisition of German citizenship by birth. This step removed the strong reliance on an ethnocultural understanding of nationality and aligns German citizenship law with the model commonly used in other European nation states. In addition to facilitating naturalization (the waiting time for German citizenship status was cut from fifteen years to eight), in 2000 the Schröder government started the Green Card Initiative, which was designed to attract highly trained IT specialists to Germany. As a consequence of this initiative, 17,931 work permits were issued to computer and software specialists, and 13,041 migrants actually came to Germany between 2000 and 2004 with this kind of visa, which was limited to a five-year term.10 During the next few years, the German government also introduced Germany’s first modern immigration law, which, as its basic rationale, seeks to control and regulate the flow of foreigners with respect to the needs of the labour market and society as a whole. Its central goal is twofold: to position Germany in the global competition for qualified labour, and to more fully integrate the millions of foreign residents in German society. What initially started as a bold move to introduce a modern immigration law in Germany turned out to be far less ambitious in establishing a direct link between labour market needs and the recruitment of highly skilled migrants. After difficult negotiations and compromise among Germany’s major parties, the 2005 immigration law did not include a Canadian-style point system (as originally suggested in the parliamentary commission) and put considerable emphasis on controlling immigration to Germany (Green 2004; Schmidtke 2004).

The Legal Regulation of Immigration in Germany Our interviews were conducted from 2005 to 2009, shortly after implementation of the new immigration law. This law was supposed to reduce the traditionally high number of legal categories in Germany to two basic types of visa and work permits: the residence permit

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(Aufenthaltserlaubnis), which is granted for a particular time and often comes with restricted access to the labour market; and the settlement permit (Niederlassungserlaubnis), which provides migrants with permanent residence status and unlimited access to the labour market. In practical terms, the residence permit is split into many different subcategories. Some residence permits expect migrants to leave the country after a specified time, whereas others include the option to receive a settlement permit after some years of employment. In addition, “non-permits,” such as the temporary suspension of deportation, continue to exist. Since all the interviewees selected had spent more than five years in Germany, all had entered the country during a different migration regime.11 As every interviewee has a different migration story, it is not possible to go into the myriad details of each individual’s legal status. Instead, our institutional analyses will summarize the main characteristics of the legal status of quantitatively important groups that also were represented in our sample of highly skilled migrants. One large group of migrants is that composed of citizens of other EU countries (see Favell and Recchi 2009; Ackers and Gill 2008). At the time of our interviews, EU citizens did not face legal restrictions in labour market access. Many moved to Germany even without a stable job (Verwiebe 2008). EU foreigners constitute a growing group: in 2009, 1,987,000 foreigners from twenty-seven EU member states resided in Germany.12 Some of our interviewees had entered Germany at a time when additional conditions applied, but even then the right of EU citizens to free movement was generally recognized, and the legal hurdles were low. Immigration from outside of the EU was not encouraged after the immigration stop in 1973, but there were many exceptions for specific categories of migrants, also in the highly skilled sector (Heß 2009, 17). After 1990, scientists employed in academia were admitted, and the employment of other highly skilled specialists for which a public interest could be ascertained was permitted. After 1998, internationally active corporations received general permission to transfer skilled employees internationally. And, as mentioned above, the so-called Green Card Initiative invited IT professionals to Germany after 2000. Recently, the EU Blue Card Initiative has aimed at integrating programs for highly skilled immigration on a supra-national level (Gümüs 2010). The 2005 immigration law introduced a general category for highly qualified migrants who have a job offer in Germany and a minimum

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income of €66,000. They can apply to settle permanently in Germany (§19 AufenthG). Yet this scheme of recruitment has proven to be rather unsuccessful: in 2005, an estimated 700 to 900 highly skilled migrants received a settlement permit on the basis of this law, and in 2006, this number was even lower (closer to 500) (Steinhardt 2007). The other categories mentioned above continue to constitute reasons for a timerestricted residence permit under §18 and §20 of the new law, and now include journalists and persons holding leadership positions.13 The numbers of migrants in all these specialist visa categories can be estimated at 20,000.14 It is one of the peculiarities of the German case that most of the highly skilled migrants come to Germany through schemes and under legal categories different from those designed to attract highly skilled migration. In a representative study of newly arrived migrants, 36.7 per cent in 2004–5 mentioned a priority motive of family reunification. In absolute numbers, more than 53,000 visas with the purpose of marriage were awarded in 2004 (Diehl and Preisendörfer 2007, 10). As 23 per cent of the newly arrived immigrants held a university degree (Diehl and Grobecker 2006, 1145), we must assume that the number of highly skilled migrants with a visa based on family reunification compares to that of migrants in the highly skilled category. Migrants who can document their partnership orientation through marriage or parentage experienced few legal restrictions at the time of our study,15 but it should be noted that the many highly skilled in this visa category are not viewed as a labour market asset but, rather, as “spouses” by migration policy and integration programs, which continue to be geared towards lowskilled immigration. Another important path of entry for highly skilled migrants is the student category. Alumni from universities in developing and transformation countries often feel that a degree in an internationally prestigious university system will contribute much to their career. Germany is a main country of choice, as its universities are seen to offer a very good higher education at a comparatively low price (i.e., non-existent or low tuition fees). In contrast to many other migrant groups, international students have always been actively recruited by Germany. The relative proportion of foreign students in Germany (10 per cent) far exceeds that in the United States (3.7 per cent) and is surpassed only by foreign student populations in Australia and Great Britain (Mau 2010, 72), even though in absolute numbers most of the world’s internationally mobile students study in the United States.

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Since 1995, the number of foreign students in Germany has more than doubled (92,609 in 1995, and 181,249 in 2010). About 124,968 of these students come from states outside of the EU, and some – though not all – have already completed a university degree in their country of origin.16 Members of this group of migrants have to prove that their living expenses are funded by scholarships or other sources, that is, not their own work in Germany. They can, however, take on “student jobs” for up to ninety full days annually and, since 2002, can stay in Germany for up to one year after completion of their studies in order to look for an adequate professional position and thereby stabilize their status. As mentioned above, asylum applicants are in a legally much more precarious position. If accepted into Germany, they receive full labour market access, but the number of acknowledged asylum seekers has remained very low. At the end of 2009, about 120,000 people with a granted asylum or refugee status were registered in Germany, but this is a number that has accumulated over many years (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2009).17 Asylum applicants may either receive deportation protection according to the Geneva Refugee Convention, which allows them to work in positions that cannot be filled by a German or EU citizen, or, more frequently, live in Germany with a temporary suspension of deportation or with papers saying that they must leave as soon as possible. At the time of the study, only a few of the interviewees in this legal situation had been allowed – after long waiting periods – to take positions for which no other applicants could be found. Such permission could be withheld if the administration felt that a migrant was not fully cooperating in her or his deportation. The proportion of highly skilled among refugees in Germany is unknown, but estimates of 10 per cent are conservative18 and would result in an estimated 17,000 highly skilled migrants living with that extremely restrictive status in 2006. Recently some legal reforms have been implemented, both for migrants who had lived with this restrictive status for a long time and for those with an academic education and/or professional experience in their home country.19 Despite these reforms, barriers have remained significant, as suggested by the fact that in 2010 only 10.9 per cent of individuals whose status could be classified as “asylum seeker” held any kind of legal employment (Lukas 2011, 49).20 Estimates of undocumented migration range from between 650,000 individuals and 1.5 million at the time of our study (Cyrus 2004;

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Schönwälder, Vogel, and Sciortino 2004),21 and we do not know how many of these hold academic degrees. Yet even low rates – of 4 to 10 per cent, for example – would result in a conservative estimate of 26,000 to 65,000 highly skilled migrants without documents.22 Unlike other European countries, Germany does not have a scheme for regularizing irregular migrants; they are at constant risk of being deported, and they continue to be so for a long time. This is just a summary of the formal legal regulations, the complexity of which posed challenges even for the German language research team.23 The regulations are detailed by administrative instructions, many of which differ even among states in the federal system of Germany. They are enacted by administrators who follow these instructions but who – as we shall see in the following chapters – are also guided by more implicit objectives. For example, relations between Germany and the home country,24 the importance of the German organizations involved, and the savings of the prospective migrant all play an important role in administrative decision making. As migration legislation belongs to the body of administrative law, it gives substantial leeway to individual decision makers, and options to appeal decisions are reduced (Schiffauer 2006, 137). Analysis also shows that migrants themselves often perceive the bureaucratic process to be arcane and, at times, unfair.25 recognition of educational certificates In public discourse, intense debates for and against dual citizenship and about the need to open or close borders to migration have long overshadowed another form of legal exclusion, the non-recognition of foreign educational certificates. Procedures for the recognition of foreign credentials for the approximately sixty regulated professions are complex; some selected professional fields will be looked at in more depth later. For migrants in all other vocations, and also for Germans who studied abroad, it was difficult even to gain access to a formal procedure of credential recognition prior to a change in legislation taking effect in 2012. There had been some special provisions for ethnic German resettlers, and the EU was continuously working for a better recognition of foreign educational credentials within the EU (Englmann and Müller 2007). Nevertheless, the migrants in Germany experienced substantial credential devaluation, if they could gain access to procedures formally evaluating their educational experience at all.

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As we shall see in more detail in chapter 7, a lack of legal recognition is not a problem in professions that hire highly skilled personnel on the basis of market value. As soon as large bureaucratic organizations and/or the state become involved, however, the lack of formal recognition becomes an issue. The Federal Office for Labour is completely unable to assess the value of foreign education credentials and cannot even enter non-recognized foreign degrees into its data files. A recent study of migrants receiving welfare shows that almost one-third of the migrants in this very disadvantaged group have completed a foreign vocational training that is disregarded by the Federal Office for Labour. This disregard is also discernible in labour market trajectories as the success rate of migrants with a disregarded educational title is as low as that of those without any vocational training (Brussig 2010, 118, 120). Welfare recipients have very few resources; therefore, these results may be quite different for a sample of highly skilled migrants that includes successful careers. Nevertheless, these figures confirm our findings in chapters 4 and 7 on the general disregard and/or downgrading of foreign credentials by the German labour agency and the negative impact of these practices on labour market success. The ensuing “brain waste” (Englmann and Müller 2007) and the EU Lisbon process allowing for a better transferability of educational titles have resulted in a law for better recognition of educational titles, passed in 2011. Since Germany regulates education on the level of federal states and in concert with employer associations and other professional bodies, the task to enact a new, fair, and easy system of credential recognition poses an enormous challenge, and the chance of success yet remains to be seen. Beyond the formal legal regulations, two characteristic features of the German migration regime surface recurrently in the interviews discussed in this chapter. First, while Germany has made considerable strides in introducing elements of a modern immigration law (easier access to naturalization, for example, and qualification-based recruitment of skilled migrants), its practice of attracting and retaining these migrants is not very aggressive. Bureaucratic hurdles figured prominently in our interviews as a powerful deterrent not only for the very excluded but also for those migrants who enjoy partial legal inclusion and therefore could aspire to finding full and equitable access to the labour market. Second, and closely related to the first point, the multitude of legal categories and their continuous reform over the past ten years has created uncertainty and anxiety among migrants (Weiß 2010a).26

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The Canadian Migration Regime: Full Legal Inclusion and Profession-Specific Forms of Exclusion from the Labour Market Historically, Canada’s immigration policy, in its focus on white immigrants from Northern Europe, was committed to nation-building not fundamentally different from the European experience. Immigration policy was based upon “race, ethnicity, nationality and colour,” and thus discriminated against visible minority immigrants (Basran and Zong 1998). In effect, the Canadian government maintained a policy that sought to limit the entry of migrants coming from Asia and Africa, or from the “non-traditional source” regions (Li 2003b, 22). But with the changing domestic economic situation and Canada’s international role after the Second World War, Canada gradually amended its immigration policy. Race and ethnicity were no longer used to determine eligibility; rather, the new immigration policy took into account criteria such as occupational and educational credentials, linguistic abilities, and age of potential immigrants (Basran and Zong 1998, 6). The nation-building objective – protecting the colonial identity of the receiving society – was replaced by the socioeconomic rationale of modernizing the country by attracting skilled labour from around the world (Triadafilopoulos 2012). A key component of this transition was the immigration policy reform from 1967 that brought the recruitment of newcomers more firmly in line with the country’s overall socioeconomic imperative. A new point system was introduced to evaluate applicants on the basis of their education, linguistic skills (ability to communicate in English or French), work experience, age, existing job offer, and “adaptability” to life in Canada. From this point onwards, race and origin were no longer the determining factors for admittance into Canada. Rather, the education, age, and qualifications of potential migrants became important. Although the point system was modified during the late 1970s, migrants’ education and occupation were still seen as being important, in particular for independent migrants, one of the categories under which migrants could apply to enter Canada (Li 2003b, 23–4). In 2001, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was introduced. The new act essentially continues to rely on a reformed point system but seeks to maximize the positive effects of immigration, placing more emphasis on “flexible,” transferable skills and making an attempt to assess the education and credentials of economic migrants more accurately. The act continues to emphasize that Canada needs to be able to attract highly skilled and/or professional migrants so as to be able to continue

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to compete in the global and knowledge-based economy. As a result of Canada’s using the qualification-based point system as the primary system of recruiting newcomers, the migrant population in the country is now far more diversified than it was. Immigration from Asia in particular has grown substantially since the introduction of the point system.27 legal immigrant categories There are three basic categories under which migrants can gain permanent residency in Canada, and then citizenship: Economic Immigrants, Family Immigrants, and Refugees / Protected Persons (Dolin and Young 2004). This is similar to the German system, but the absolute and relative numbers of economic immigrants and accepted refugees / protected persons are much higher in Canada than in Germany. Once a migrant has been granted permanent resident status under any one of these three categories, he or she is also granted full and unconditional legal access to the labour market. In addition, permanent residents are strongly encouraged to become Canadian citizens after a minimum of three years in the country. The Family Immigrant category applies to family members sponsored by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. The Protected Persons category applies to individuals who have been sponsored as Geneva Convention refugees or who successfully claim refugee status once in Canada. The Economic Immigrants category has grown over the past twenty-five years and now represents more than half of the permanent residents permitted in Canada each year. In 2011, of the 248,748 new permanent residents, the Economic Immigrant category (including spouses and dependents) accounted for 63 per cent of the total, while the Family Immigrant category accounted for 23 per cent and the Protected Persons category for 11 per cent.28 In the Economic Immigrant category, there are four streams. Skilled Workers are evaluated by the point system with a view to their education, work experience, language skills, adaptability, and employment prospects, and must be experienced in one of twenty-nine eligible occupations. Business Immigrants must meet significant minimum net worth standards and have investor, entrepreneurial, or selfemployment experience. In almost all cases these two streams must apply from outside the country. Provincial Nominees, on the other hand, are nominated by a province, on the basis of the migrant having the skills, language abilities, education, and Canadian work experience

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to immediately make an economic contribution to the province. In most cases these individuals are temporary migrants or former international students applying from within the country. In 2008, after the completion of our fieldwork, the federal government introduced a fourth stream, Canadian Experience Class Nominees, in order to address particular shortages in the highly qualified labour market. Migrants in this stream are either highly skilled, temporary foreign workers with at least two years of Canadian work experience or former international students who have at least one year of Canadian work experience. In all cases, migrants in this category are applying from within the country. In addition, Canada has a constant influx of non-permanent residents.29 The biggest group entering Canada under the temporary resident scheme is made up of workers destined to fill positions in the labour market. The number of foreign workers in Canada has grown steadily in recent years (in 2009, this number reached 250,000 – more than double what it was at the beginning of the millennium).30 Traditionally this reflected primarily employment in the agrarian sector. Yet increasingly these temporary workers fill positions in all sectors of the service industry and some parts of manufacturing. While foreign workers constitute a considerable proportion of immigration to Canada, our study did not focus on them because they very rarely seek long-term employment in the skilled segment of the labour market. Entering Canada as a temporary worker is contingent upon a job offer from a Canadian employer. The work permit is tied to this particular position and can be extended for a maximum of four years. It is attractive to employers to hire these temporary workers because they are far less expensive and they can easily be fired. For instance, during the recent economic downturn, many of these temporary workers lost their jobs and had to leave the country. Canadian employers are officially entitled to pay temporary workers lower wages than their regular workforce (up to 15 per cent less than a regular employee). Accordingly, temporary workers are regularly subject to exploitation and marginalization (Sweetman and Warman 2010; Stasiulis 2008; Worswick 2010). The second-largest group of temporary residents is international students. In Canada, international student numbers increased by 51 per cent in ten years, from 97,336 in 1999 to 196,227 in 2009. Access to the labour market has become less restrictive for international students, both during their studies and after graduation. They can work in

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Canada for up to two years after graduation if they receive a job offer in their field of professional training. The last group of temporary residents comprises migrants who are allowed to stay in the country on the basis of humanitarian and compassionate grounds, such as when the migrant would have to face an undeserved or disproportionate hardship if he or she had to leave Canada in order to apply for permanent resident status. access to the labour market: recognition of qualifications and the critical role of professional regulatory agencies While much simpler than that of Germany or Turkey, the Canadian migration regime includes a feature that has become the subject of much misunderstanding and frustration among migrants: they often perceive the points they receive under the skilled workers scheme as recognition for their educational and employment credentials, with which they can then enter the labour market and obtain employment in their field. But gaining employment in the same field is not based on the number of points granted by the government for a profession, skills, or education (Brouwer 1999, 7). Essentially, there is no direct relationship between the points awarded by the Canadian government and employment within the Canadian labour market. Recruitment and recognition of qualifications and professional experience in the labour market follow different logics. In some contrast to migration regulation, Canadian professional law stipulates that migrants who wish to enter certain professions, in particular the regulated professions, must get proper accreditation for the field. For example, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers (CCPE) has set out requirements for an individual to receive accreditation as a professional engineer. Applicants must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents; they need to have worked in the engineering field for at least three to four years, of which a year minimum must be “Canadian experience”; they need to be well versed in one of Canada’s official languages, depending on where they reside in Canada; and they must “be of good character and reputation,” have the required educational credentials, and pass the examinations as required by the CCPE.31 For Canadian university graduates, there are established regular tracks for accumulating the necessary work experience in trainee positions. Academics from abroad, however, may find it difficult to be accepted into these positions, as employers often consider the additional language or

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professional skills training required for foreign-trained experts to be too expensive in both time and resources.32 When it comes to accreditation33 and/or the recognition of credentials, and the reasons migrants sometimes have difficulty getting their credentials recognized or accepted, a critical role can be attributed to the number and complexity of the organizations and agencies involved in the process. Provincial governments assign the responsibility of credential evaluation and recognition to regulatory institutions governing specific professions; these might be characterized by local particularities, too. In Ontario, for example, the professional regulatory bodies have the powers to “set the standards of practice,” “assess qualifications and credentials,” and “register qualified applicants” (Government of Ontario 2004). The assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications is done by nearly five hundred professional regulatory authorities and numerous credential assessment bodies, as well as hundreds of post-secondary and vocational institutions. Although professional associations can also evaluate migrants’ credentials, their decisions are non-binding. Provincial licensing agencies do not have to abide by these credential assessments (see, e.g., Brouwer 1999, 8), which means that even if a migrant’s credentials are assessed, the individual still might not receive a licence to practise in his or her profession. Many migrants thus find themselves dealing with a number of different institutions and regulatory bodies to get their credentials recognized. This institutional maze complicates the migrant’s situation. In Canada, almost all health professions are regulated (from medicine and dentistry to chiropractic and veterinary health). Other prominent professional fields that require licensing are engineering, teaching, accounting, social work, law, real estate, and architecture. For occupations in which no certification or licence is required to practise, it is generally the employer’s responsibility to determine whether a potential worker possesses the appropriate qualifications, training, or experience.34 The following figures illustrate how difficult it is for professionals to find employment in their professional field (Boyd and Schellenberg 2008; Zietsma 2010; Boyd and Thomas 2002; Boyd and Pikkov 2008). While the Canadian-born population with a degree in medicine or dentistry is very highly likely to work as a medical doctor (92 per cent) or a dentist (90 per cent), respectively, those with a foreign degree are much less successful at embarking on this professional trajectory (Zietsma 2010, 16): among foreign educated medical doctors, 56 per cent

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work in the medical field as doctors, and only 44 per cent of foreigneducated dentists work in dentistry. Doctors who trained abroad are first required to pass the Medical Council of Canada Evaluating Exam and, after completing a lengthy clinical training, must pass the certification exam of the relevant college. As a form of re-qualification and certification, graduates of foreign medical schools then must take two to six years of postgraduate medical training at a Canadian university. In 2002, only 16.7 per cent of foreign medical graduates were accepted into this form of postgraduate medical training, according to statistics from the Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials. Only eighty-three of these individuals landed one of the 1,260 internships available to medical postgraduates. With a view to labour market inclusion, the Canadian institutional context is shaped by a paradox that was also repeatedly referred to in our interviews. On the one hand, the Canadian migration regime is geared towards carefully selecting migrants on the basis of their skills and their potential contribution to society. On the other hand, however, there are considerable barriers to the full utilization of these skills, mainly as the result of complex, labour-intensive, and costly reaccreditation (a process that often duplicates previous training experience). And, as will be shown in our analysis of the narrative interviews in chapters 6 and 7, the issue of migrants’ access to qualified positions seems to involve more than the legislative framework and has more to do with the complex interrelationship of factors structuring access to the labour market.35 These often involve subtle power struggles, the monopoly of professionalism, and privileges granted through access to rare opportunities in the labour market (Foster 2008). As Bauder (2003) argues, institutionalized cultural familiarity in the licensing criteria enforced by regulatory bodies includes processes of distinction that undermine immigrants’ access to the professions in favour of access for Canadian-born and Canadian-trained applicants (see Neiterman and Bourgeault 2008).

The Turkish Migration Regime: Restrictive Regulation and Lax Enforcement36 Turkey is widely known for its emigration, having sent migrants to Western Europe in particular throughout the second half of the twentieth century (labour migration and refugees, the latter primarily of Kurdish descent). Yet the fact that between 1923 and 1997 more than

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1.6 million people migrated to Turkey is a lesser known aspect of the Turkish migration regime (Kirişçi 2003). This might have to do with the fact that the Turkish migration regime has been shaped until recently by the legacy of a nation-building effort. Since the early twentieth century, Turkey has targeted migrants with a Turkish-Muslim background to populate the young Turkish state and provide it with a culturally and religiously homogeneous identity.37 Until 2006 – and with some obvious similarities to the German citizenship law favouring ethnic German “returnees” – people of Turkish descent and culture were allowed to settle in Turkey according to the Law on Settlement (Law No. 2510). Throughout the twentieth century, a flexible interpretation of the Law on Settlement enabled people from various ethnic backgrounds to be considered immigrants of Turkish origin. Much like the ethnic German resettlers, many of these immigrants were fleeing ethnic or religious persecution in their countries of origin. Their ethnic, historical, and/or religious ties to Turkey put them in a position to benefit from generous protection and integration programs (Kirişçi 1995, quoted in Pusch 2005). Towards the end of the twentieth century, migration to Turkey was shaped more profoundly by developments outside the country. Turkey had accepted the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, but with the geographical reservation that it would accept only those applicants of European origin.38 The end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the instability of the region in the Middle East (the Gulf Crisis in 1991) and the Balkans brought new and larger migrant groups to Turkey (Pusch 2010b, 121). The first large-scale transit migration through Turkey took place after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Iranians were not recognized as asylum seekers under the terms of the Geneva Convention but instead have been allowed to remain as tourists for extended periods of time. It is estimated that 1.5 million Iranians have transited the country, and 100,000 to 200,000 have remained (İçduygu 1996, 2003). A second, large, non-European refugee population was composed of Iraqis, who arrived in Turkey between 1988 and 1991 in three mass inflows (Pusch 2005, 17). Under the geographical limitation of the Geneva Convention, they were not recognized as asylum seekers either, but rather as “temporary guests” who were expected to leave Turkey as soon as possible. Many intended to resettle in the West, but as that was not possible for all of them, large numbers returned to the safe zone in northern Iraq. With the civil war in Yugoslavia, the trend continued; however, Bosnian refugees from

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Table 5.2. Applications under the 1994 Asylum Regulation, 1997–2005

Accepted cases

Rejected cases

Pending cases

Withdrawals and secondary protection

Country

Applications

Iran

16,972

5,919

5,209

4,707

1,137

Iraq

28,963

18,316

3,225

6,048

1,374

1,480

312

280

860

28

80

15

43

15

7

231

70

76

73

12

Afghanistan Russia Uzbekistan Azerbaijan Other Europe

36

3

24

1

8

125

53

59

3

10

Other

2,467

339

369

1,676

83

Total

50,364

15,027

9,285

13,393

2,659

Source: Foreigners Department of the Turkish Ministry of the Interior (data made available by the Focus Migration Project: http://focus-migration.hwwi.de/Turkey-Update04-20.6026.0.html?&L=1)

the former Yugoslavia were legally included as immigrants of Turkish descent. During these years, Turkey became a prime destination for refugees from the region. With more restricted asylum legislation in 1994, the Turkish state engaged in a host of strategies to deter refugees, ranging from imposing arbitrary preconditions on filing asylum claims to placing asylum claimants in remote cities with extremely limited professional opportunities. Despite these measures, the UNHCR in Turkey still received about 50,000 asylum applications from 1997 to 2005. Some of the migrants whom the UNHCR approves as refugees are sent on to other countries. Yet the processes of decision making and eventual resettlement are lengthy (Özgür-Baklacioglu 2011), and a considerable number of refugees stay in Turkey and seek employment in the irregular sector of the labour market. Table 5.2 indicates their countries of origin and the success rate in their application for asylum status. Along with the increased influx of refugees, a growing number of irregular migrants have also chosen Turkey as both a major destination and a transit country. Until recently, Turkey allowed citizens from more than forty countries to enter with only minimal visa requirements, if any.39 Irregular migrants usually enter Turkey legally and drift into an illegal residence status during their stay because they overstay their

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visas, are reluctant to return home after they are rejected as asylum seekers, try to migrate illegally to a third country, and/or work without the required permits (Pusch 2005, 20). This of course facilitates irregular migration and trafficking.40 The estimated numbers of irregular labour migrants differ drastically – figures given by academics and state authorities vary between several hundred thousand and one million (Toksöz 2006; İçduygu 2006, quoted in Pusch 2011, 161). Judging from the number of arrests, even the higher estimates are well founded: between 1995 and 2007, Turkish authorities arrested more than 330,000 migrants without a permit. The examples above show very clearly that the boundaries between different types of migrant groups are fluid. As asylum claimants neither have the right to work nor receive sufficient subsidies to survive, many migrants are an all-in-one package: asylum seeker, transit migrant, and illegal worker. Interestingly, academic studies on foreign workers have been rather rare. With few exceptions, such as the studies by İçduygu (2006) and Toksöz (2007), the influence of illegal foreign work on the Turkish economy has not been researched either. In any case, the reasons for staying in Turkey have amplified. In the past twenty-five years, immigrants generally have not come to Turkey in order to settle for good but instead come with various goals: some want to migrate to Europe, using Turkey as a transit station; some want to stay and work for a limited period of time in Turkey in order to save money and live a better life in their home countries; others enter Turkey as tourists but actually live in the country on their Western pensions; finally, still others come as tourists but are in fact working as traders (“suitcase traders”) (Pusch 2005, 23). The recent influx of migrants to Turkey is also shaped by increasing diversification and internationalization in terms of countries of origin. Until the 1980s, immigrants used to come from the Balkans or different parts of the Turkic world; now they come from nearly all over the world (Pusch 2011, 153, 163). There is also increased diversification in the origins of the spouses of Turkish citizens. According to a former minister of the interior, Abdülkadir Aksu, more than 40,000 foreign women have married Turkish men during the past ten years: 6,092 came from Azerbaijan, 5,216 from Bulgaria, 4,264 from Romania, and 3,189 from Moldavia (Babacan 2005, quoted in Pusch 2005, 12). In the specialized literature on migration to Turkey, the heterogeneous background of newer spouses is interpreted as pointing towards another migration channel to Turkey. As there are few venues of legal and permanent immigration, Bloch (2010,

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521) speaks of “intimate circuits,” types of intimacy among post-Soviet women in Turkey that form under specific conditions of legal exclusion. Prior to the 2003 amendment to the Turkish Citizenship Law, female foreign spouses were able to apply for Turkish citizenship upon their wedding. Under the new law, female and male foreign spouses are allowed to apply for Turkish citizenship after a three-year waiting period (Pusch 2008b). Even among the officially recognized foreigners in Turkey, considerable change has taken place in recent decades. All groups of foreigners in Turkey have grown, but the number of “traditional immigrants” who want to live in Turkey with a formalized status as a foreign resident has increased the most. Migrants from Western Europe and the United States also continue to arrive in substantial numbers. Altogether in 2006, there were more than 187,000 foreigners living in Turkey with a residence permit. This number may seem large, but given the fact that, according to the World Bank, in 2010 Turkey had a total population of 72,752,325, officially recognized foreigners still make up only 0.25 per cent of Turkey’s total population (Pusch 2010b, 124). Only 13 per cent of the officially recognized foreigners with a residence permit also hold a work permit, a status that is regularly restricted to a privileged group of migrants from Western countries working in high-ranking jobs (Pusch 2010b). This again points to a large degree of informality in the labour market: many of the officially recognized foreigners have no work permit and are not allowed to work in Turkey although they have a residence permit (Erder and Kaşka 2003). Informality is an important characteristic of the Turkish migration regime but also of the Turkish labour market in general (Pusch 2010b, 126–8). legal categories and access to the labour market in the system prior to and after 2003 According to Pusch (2005, 25), foreigners in Turkey are subject to the Turkish Law on Foreigners (Law No. 5683 of 15 July 1950) and related provisions and regulations. If foreigners wish to reside in Turkey, they must have entered the country legally and must have an entry visa. One important characteristic of the Turkish Law on Foreigners is that it does not provide a right to residence. A foreigner may apply for a residence permit, which can be issued after the relevant authorities at the local police security department have found no reason to justify the denial of a residence permit. Traditionally there have not been permanent

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residence permits in the Turkish system; permits are issued for a limited period and must be renewed. For example, after 1998, a residence permit was issued first for one year, upon renewal for a period of three years, and upon a second renewal for a period of five years. Foreign spouses of Turkish citizens receive some privileges, but they have no legal right to have their residence permit renewed if the marriage terminates, by divorce, for example, or the death of the Turkish spouse. Until 2003, work permits for foreigners were issued independently of their residence permit (Pusch 2005, 28). Furthermore, the work permits were not issued to the foreigner him- or herself but to the institution or firm she or he worked for. In addition, several laws regulate access to the professions. Most important in this context is the Law on Activities and Professions in Turkey Reserved for Turkish Citizens, of 16 June 1932 (Law No. 2007), which provides a long list of professions that are reserved exclusively for Turkish citizens. Among them are the professions of photographer, tourist guide, driver, actor, singer, waitress, interpreter, and all other professions in the service and production sector. Other laws exclude foreigners in principle from the medical professions (see Sezer and Yıldız 2009), employment in television and broadcasting, the veterinarian profession, the court bench, the professions of public prosecutor and public notary, and engineering. Nevertheless, some staff in highly qualified positions, such as executives in international companies, teachers, and university staff and their families, are officially recognized foreigners and do hold work permits (Kaiser 2001; Pusch 2010b). In 2003, the parliament enacted the Law on Work Permits for Foreigners (No. 4817), which installed a new system (Pusch 2005, 28).41 The Definitive Work Permit is given to foreigners for a maximum period of one year. It is valid for a particular workplace and a particular job. Under certain conditions, this type of work permit can be extended for up to three, or even six years. Indefinite Work Permits are given to foreigners who have resided in Turkey legally and without interruption for at least eight years or to those who have legally worked in Turkey for a minimum of six years. These permits are not restricted to particular enterprises, professions, or areas. Contrary to the Definitive Work Permit, this permit is not dependent on other factors, such as the situation in the labour market and the economic development of Turkey. A third permit, the Independent Work Permit, is issued to foreigners who have resided in Turkey legally and without interruption for the previous five years and who are self-employed in Turkey. Finally, the Exceptional

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Work Permit gives migrants the highest flexibility in the labour market. It has no restrictions and has a long list of potential recipients: spouses of Turkish citizens, foreigners who were born in Turkey, and foreigners who are accepted as immigrants or refugees. Although the number of foreigners who live and work in Turkey legally has increased considerably, this group still constitutes a tiny percentage of both the general population and the migrant population (Pusch 2010b, 124). To properly understand the migration regime in Turkey, it is important to realize that migration to Turkey and access to its labour market is characterized primarily by undocumented and irregular modes of employment. Although foreigners who hold work permits sometimes have advantages – for instance, foreign academics are often better paid at Turkish state universities than their Turkish counterparts – most of them are subject to the many legal regulations that disadvantage foreigners (Pusch 2005, 14). The newly passed laws have resulted in some improvements for highly skilled migrants, but this group is still far from enjoying rights equal to those of Turkish citizens. In Turkey, legal exclusion affects labour market trajectories in a very peculiar way. On the one hand, the practice of providing migrants with residence and work visas is highly restrictive. In particular, the commonly temporary character of these visas and, until recently, the highly selective process based on origin and “cultural fit” have created a context in which full legal status and access to the labour market are the exception rather than the norm. On the other hand, legal regulations are not strictly enforced. Given the often arcane and burdensome process of acquiring a visa, many migrants live and work in Turkey without authorization. Although the EU is pressuring Turkey to enforce its laws and protect its borders more effectively, most migrants still work, or even reside and work, under conditions of illegality while employed – for years, even – in the regular labour market. Our interviews shed light on how this environment creates legal ambiguity and flexible entry points into the labour market for migrants. At the same time, it results in precarious living conditions for many migrants in Turkey. 5.2

The (Im-)possibility of Migration Control

Looking at formal institutions gives us an idea of the extent to which countries develop differing and specific systems of migration control. In countries such as Canada, control focuses on the legitimacy of entry; those who have entered the country legally as permanent residents

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enjoy full access to the labour market, which is, however, compromised by a complex system of credential (mis-)recognition. Germany, on the other hand, has developed an intricate system of regulations that govern rights and labour market access during the first phases of immigrant incorporation. Even though the estimated number of undocumented migrants is high, and many legal migrants to Germany suffer from some kind of restrictions in the transition phase, most migrants have some legal access to the labour market and can hope to improve their status over time. This is not the case in Turkey. Here a small minority of migrants is accorded a residence permit but rarely a work permit, and even among the lucky few who hold a work permit, most have to renew it frequently. Migrants to Turkey take advantage of a culture of informality in the labour market that enables them to accept highly skilled positions even when they have no formal right to work. At first sight, these legal systems appear to be very different from each other. Nevertheless, the political science debate (Joppke 1998, 2005) and our findings show some similarities in the experience of legal exclusion of migrants, even in such apparently different migration regimes as those of Germany and Turkey. This similarity in experience if not in formal regulations is due to several factors. First, as discussed above, (liberal) nation states have to comply with international conventions and universalizing human rights when designing migration policies (Hollifield 2000). Many EU countries, including Germany, ratified the Schengen Agreement with reduced controls at internal national borders but tight controls at the borders of the Schengen Area. Candidates for EU membership, such as Turkey, are expected to enhance their migration control in order to prevent unwanted migrants from reaching the Schengen Area borders. This aims at a convergence in migration control. Second, in day-to-day politics, liberal nation states are entangled in a “liberal paradox” (Hollifield 2000). Migration is highly contested, and there is considerable public and political pressure to curb it. Yet, being liberal states, they are usually unable or tacitly unwilling to effectively control their borders because this would offend interest groups such as employers, former migrants, and human rights activists (Castles 2007).42 One policy option frequently found in liberal nation states, therefore, is a nationalist discourse and legislation that affirm full control over borders, combined with a tacit tolerance for partially opened borders. As a result, the system of migration regulation often appears to be contradictory and even hypocritical from the perspective of migrants. Even in a country with a liberal migration regime, such as Canada, the de

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facto misrecognition of foreign academic degrees seems to contradict the basic rationale of attracting highly skilled foreigners, namely, to capitalize on their contribution to the economy. Of course, unspoken paradoxes in public discourse, legal policy, and practice also feed symbolic exclusion. As we shall see in chapter 6, symbolic exclusion can exert some degree of closure, even when migrants formally enjoy equal access to the labour market. Third, and apart from these more general difficulties in finding noncontradictory legal frameworks, nation states commonly face practical and political challenges to regulating migration: migration is a long-term social process that cannot be simply switched on and off by migration policy. Neither can trade, scientific exchange, or tourism be restricted by nation states in an era of globalization. Even if it were possible to build a wall that no outsider could scale, such a wall would be huge, in both human and financial terms (Pécoud and De Guchteneire 2007). These costs undermine the legitimacy of national border control, especially in liberal states (Hollifield 1992) and in supra-national entities such as the EU, which are most dependent on legitimate procedure. In this situation, migrants’ agency and biographical orientation become important factors for the overall results of migration policies. As Castles (2007) eloquently argues, many migrants come from situations in which “people have to learn to cope despite the state, not because of it” (37). Migration selects for persons who are not easily deterred by apparently hopeless circumstances, as studies on migrants dealing with appalling conditions have repeatedly shown (Pajo 2007; Seukwa 2006). Therefore, the labour market trajectories of migrants are structured not only by the legal options that they formally have but also by their experience of legal exclusion (Weiß 2010a; Weiß, Ofner, and Pusch 2010) and by their action strategies (Brosius 2008) and justice orientations (Biehl 2008). On the basis of their biographical orientations, many migrants challenge migration regimes. In this chapter we focus on twenty-five migrants confronted with legal exclusion at the time of the interview in Germany and twenty in Turkey.43 The entire sample in our study included more adult migrants to Germany and Canada, albeit with legally better residence permits (see the appendix). These migrants enjoying equal legal status are referred to in this chapter as contrasting cases, with two issues in mind. First, migrants “breezing through” legal barriers are discussed as the impact of legal exclusion on labour market trajectories can be understood better through a comparison with migrants who experience

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(legally) easy access. Second, several of the adult migrants who enjoyed a legal status equal to that of citizens at the time of the interview had spent years in a state of legal exclusion prior to their gaining equal status. The experiences of some of these migrants were discussed earlier, but we shall revisit them here for comparative purposes, as time spent waiting for full legal inclusion can have a long-term impact on labour market trajectories. As Germany and Turkey have very specific and differentiated systems of legal stratification and migration control, we do not compare individuals in the two countries directly with each other but instead analyse experiences of legal exclusion according to two separate typologies, which we had previously developed for Turkey44 and Germany (Weiß, Ofner, and Pusch 2010). On the basis of these analyses, we have selected case groups45 that are similar enough for a meaningful comparison (see Schittenhelm 2009a, 2012) and that are of relevance to our study, either because they are particular to highly skilled migration or because they show the unintended side effects of migration control in general and in specific countries.46 The discussion that follows focuses on the experience of legal exclusion because institutional practice viewed from the perspective of the clients of an institution may differ significantly from the legal and administrative rules governing that practice, even when administrators use their personal leverage while still adhering to the rules (Crozier 1964; March and Simon 1958; Goffman 1961). Legal exclusion restricts the options of highly skilled migrants in a significant manner; in dealing with legal restrictions, however, migrants also develop action strategies that can have unexpected outcomes. 5.3

“Breezing Through”

Some of our interviewees in Germany and Canada47 realize their desire to emigrate in a legally unimpeded fashion. In these cases, the legal aspects of this status passage go almost unnoticed. Sometimes it takes effort to deal with bureaucratic procedures, but most of the time migrants of this type do not mention legal concerns at all, or they refer to them in passing. A closer look at the cases of these migrants suggests that this is likely the result, at least in part, of the migration regimes in which they find themselves. Some of the migrants “breezing through” used country-specific migration schemes – meaning they could immigrate easily to Germany but not Canada, for example. This is the case

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for Mr Ziegler, who previously lived in Russia but is of German descent, enabling him to migrate to Germany with ease: “And well in ’96 we were in Germany well to see relatives and so and well my family liked it very much and we decided also well to hand documents for resettlement well or do everything for it and in year at end (.) of ’97 have we already received invitation from German gov- well from German government for my family and we all well moved.” As indicated above, German ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe enjoy privileged access to German citizenship, a fact that resulted in a mass migration after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As many of Mr Ziegler’s relatives had already migrated to Germany, his family could visit first and see whether they liked it. They decided to migrate and to formalize this decision by sending in “papers” in order to resettle. The wording is interesting because Mr Ziegler does not talk of “migration” but of Umsiedlung – a German administrative term that can be translated as “(voluntary) resettlement.” It is used solely for ethnically German “resettlers” from Eastern Europe, who are not considered to be migrants when they move to Germany. Also, Mr Ziegler speaks of an “invitation from [the] … German government for my family” and of having “moved” (not “travelled” or “migrated”). This is the last time that Mr Ziegler mentions legal procedure. His biographical narrative then focuses on other concerns, such as learning German, adjusting his professional qualifications, finding work, getting divorced, and so on. These issues were discussed in relation to Mr and Ms Shwetz in chapter 4.2 and will be expanded upon in a countrycomparative perspective in chapter 7. Most of the migrants in Canada interviewed for this study are in a situation similar to that of Mr Ziegler, even though their migration followed a very different path in legal procedure. In Canada, those who belong to the “breezing through” case group had either applied to migrate through the point system or received an invitation by relatives. Former South African engineer Mr Forester experiences slightly more difficulty and therefore talks a bit longer about legal concerns: I think a good place to start would be my motivations for leaving South Africa first of all, and it was a bit of a mixture of concerns around crime levels because of political unrest, and to get as far away from my family as possible [laughs] to go and have an autonomous life, a bit of a combination of both. Um, I had my brother who was already in Canada because his wife was Canadian, and my mom is from Belgium so I was looking at,

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I applied to Canada and to Belgium and, um, when I initially applied in South Africa through the Canadian High Commission, they said there’s a four- or five-year wait list to even be processed so we’ll get back to you [laughs]. So then I left South Africa and went to England and I applied from England to immigrate to Canada and to Belgium so within five months, my Canadian application came through, and, um, since it was the first one I took that and we got here in ’95 after living in England for about a year and a half. My wife was on a youth work permit, so she was working legally, I was working illegally, just getting by then arrived in Canada and came here to [name of a city], first of all, in July ’95 (2 sec. pause) and with all sorts of expectations, but didn’t [have] furniture or anything like that, just a backpack each and (2 sec. pause) we newly got married like six months before that so it was this new adventure.

Mr Forester’s motivation is a cross between an exploration and an amelioration, and it compares to that of refugees in his fear of rising crime levels and civil unrest. He gave up a very good professional situation in order to first work illegally in Great Britain48 and then move on to Canada, where it took him several years to find a high-status professional position. Nevertheless, in his account the period of legal exclusion is just a phase in his life, a transitory period that he has left behind for good. Mr Forester leaves South Africa within a year after the end of apartheid, but merely hints at the push factors for his migration. Ms Blochin, on the other hand, also entered Canada through the point system, but clearly wanted to flee the deteriorating situation in her native Chechnya: OK, I am from the south of Russia and when everything started in Chechnya I started to wonder what am I gonna do … ahm … By education I am a chemical engineer – I have master’s … and I used to work on military plant for seven years. Then in 1991 … ’90 … yes, ’91 … government started to cut all financing and we had less and less contracts and it became dangerous in country. I decided to go to work to school. I could work in high school in chemistry laboratory as a cheap teacher’s assistant … ahm … I then started my own business. I had lots of time and I started a retail business … ahm … And in 1998 just many things happened at once: I got divorced; everything just crashed in the country and … ah … six or seven people from my very close … ahm … friends and family died in very different situations. Two were killed, one had a heart attack you know, just and I seriously started to think about immigration. I applied

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and it was only two countries available: New Zealand and Canada for professional immigration. I don’t have relatives abroad and I chose Canada. Because it is closer in climate and it’s better it is far away.

In many respects, Ms Blochin’s account is similar to that of other refugees and undocumented migrants whom we interviewed in Germany and Turkey: Ms Blochin says that she never considered emigration before her personal life and the political situation in Chechnya deteriorated dramatically. Then, she simply wants to leave, that is, she does not have a specific destination in mind but only researches what her legal destination options are. Unlike many other migrants, she knows about professional immigration programs and she must have had the time and financial resources to apply – which includes travelling to Paris, where she must pass an interview. Another contrast concerns the success of her application: she receives a visa with no personal ties to Canada and hardly any knowledge of English. Migration programs like the Canadian point system or sponsorship by family members, as well as the German ethnic resettlement schemes, offer migrants of various motivations a way to legally enter a country. Currently, free movement inside the EU serves the same purpose. For these migrants, legal exclusion is not an issue. Their narrations therefore offer a sharp contrast to those of migrants confronted with legal exclusion. 5.4

Complete Exclusion from Legal Labour Market Access and Its Unintended Effects

As was shown in our institutional analysis, programs that enable migrants to “breeze through” legal exclusion are highly selective: they address either specific ethnic groups or persons with a very high skill level. In this chapter focusing on the experience of legal exclusion, we could point out that migrants with the “breezing through” experience were able to inform themselves and accept a waiting period. This is a sharp contrast to the experience of most refugees we found in Germany and Turkey, who had no time to become informed about potential countries of immigration. Nor did they have European or North American relatives or an ethnic background privileged by resettlement schemes. A comparative analysis shows that these migrants made no mention of visiting relatives in Germany (like Mr Ziegler), going to England from South Africa (like Mr Forester), or doing an interview in Paris while

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residing in Chechnya (like Ms Blochin). This is in line with other migration experiences around the globe (Paul 2011): in our sample, migrants who experience complete exclusion generally lack either money or access to short-term visitor’s visas, or both. In their pre-migration phase, the refugees interviewed in Germany and Turkey had been high achievers, just like the other highly skilled migrants, and their biographical orientations did not differ significantly from those of the first case group. But the fact that they experienced complete exclusion in the receiving country means that they now live in a far less privileged social environment. Mr Young was interviewed in Turkey.49 In 1985, he received a scholarship from his home country, Rwanda, in order to study law and international relations in the Soviet Union. When he was about to complete his studies, his scholarship was discontinued: Nineteen ninety-one was a time when civil war in Rwanda was very, very dangerous. There was no way on getting back when I was finishing my university. And then my intention was to go to Europe because of the war problems the Rwanda government cancelled our scholarship. So I couldn’t finish my university even though I was in the last year. I was writing my “memory.”50 But then because of financial problem the government cancelled the scholarship and then I stopped. Nobody could help me financially to finish university. And then I felt I could be lucky to go to Europe and then finish (there/their) university finish my degree. I tried to find a visa. I went to the French consulate in the Soviet Union in Moscow. I was refused the visa and then I tried Switzerland [laughs] and was also refused the visa [laughs] and then somebody told me about if you reach Turkey probably you can be lucky to cross the border or go somehow to Europe. And then I came I came to Turkey. When I came here I again and again contacted the French consulate, Switzerland consulate, Germany consulate near all the European consulates I was refused visa. And then I stay here. That time was the beginning of my problems here in Istanbul.

When the situation in his home country becomes “very, very dangerous,” Mr Young is already in a safe country completing higher education. In contrast to other refugees, such as Ms Blochin, however, he had run out of money, as his livelihood depended on a government scholarship that had been discontinued. He was unable to find a visa to continue his studies, even though he tried several consulates. Like Mr Forester, he moved to another country, in this case Turkey, and tried

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unsuccessfully to gain legal entry again. We can add, on the basis of our institutional analysis in chapter 5.1, that Turkey is outside the Schengen Area, and though easier for many refugees to enter, does not offer the same opportunities that countries within the Schengen Area may offer. What follows is typical of the experience of undocumented migrants: I said that I came here in 1991, and then I stayed trying to get a job because I couldn’t travel even illegally to reach Europe. I tried had to but whenever I had I would have get caught they would bring me back and I was stranded here in Turkey. Then can you imagine being stranded you have to survive to live you have to manage to get small money to pay the hotel you have to get money to I mean you have to survive somehow. So I started working in one touristic hotel that time even those time it was … ehm … the time when Turkey started to receive many tourists from Soviet Union, from Bulgaria, Romania, from all those country which belong to the Socialist Bloc. So many people started to come here, make their shopping or just visiting and then I start to work in the hotel [Asia] I worked at the reception and at the same time I used to do a guide job. So … ehm … tourist-guide. Then I got somehow to survive I don’t know I got money and I survived. Then always I’ve been into trouble. Because whenever security arrest me and they find out that I don’t have visa and then we end up in prison several time like over twenty times I saw myself in police stations different police station. I would say there would be about one month and then I would be released and would start again working.

Mr Young has neither a residence visa nor a work permit and, being Rwandan, he belongs to a highly visible minority. He gets picked up by the police repeatedly during his first two years in Turkey but is released, and he then continues to work until he is picked up again. This offers evidence for the general climate in Turkey at the time: the police enforced migration law but only to some extent. By releasing undocumented migrants instead of deporting them, the police tolerated de facto continued forms of illegal residence. According to Mr Young’s experience, this climate of relative tolerance would change during a cleansing campaign in 1993. Mr Young was deported to a former refugee camp on the Turkish border with Iraq. He survives two years in two different camps, where he is confronted with dire living conditions, moral abuse, and the dangers of the civil war surrounding them, and finally escapes back to Istanbul but is imprisoned twice more before 2000, when he is able to contact a migrant

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organization for which he starts working as a community interpreter. In 1995, he was accepted formally as a refugee by the UNHCR, but that status was later revoked as a result of his having been convicted of criminal activities twice. Later, however, he was able to convince the UNHCR that he had been wrongfully accused and convicted. At the time of the interview, he had been waiting for resettlement for five years. As we can show for three cases in our typology of legal exclusion in Germany (Weiß 2010a),51 migrants who are unable to gain legal status at all experience legal exclusion through the full force of criminal law enforcement. For many of them, this is the first time that they have had contact with the police, and these interviewees told us of their personal experiences of what they understood to be barely legitimate and existentially threatening police repression: Mr Ashot,52 who had arrived in Germany as a student but had become “undocumented,” feels so wronged by his incarceration that he starts a hunger strike during which he is placed, thinly clothed, in an unheated punishment cell. He discontinues the strike when he feels he is close to dying. Polish biologist Ms Kotek, who now works as a domestic, calls the German police “Gestapo” after being held by the authorities for interrogation. In the years to come, she continues to be terrified about the possibility of being picked up by the police. It is important to note that we cannot determine in a legally sound manner from their narratives whether Mr Young’s deportment, Mr Ashot’s treatment in jail, and Ms Kotek’s interrogation were legal or illegal, or whether their human rights were respected by the law and the practice of law enforcement. We can be certain, however, that the migrants themselves experience their treatment as persecution – existentially threatening and fundamentally unjust. Another common point in these migrants’ experience of legal exclusion is the fact that they clearly distinguish between criminal activities and the legal offences entailed by their undocumented lives. An analysis of legal institutions shows that several offences against migration regulations, and in particular, the intentional violation of visa laws committed by migrants living in Germany without proper documents, are a criminal offence and therefore persecuted not only by the administration but also by the police. As being branded as a criminal can have very negative results – for example, in visa applications for other countries or in the public standing of the migrant – it is understandable that the migrants themselves respond to this institutional setting by distinguishing between “real” crime and a violation of migration law. In this

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respect, the account of Mr Young is telling: he mentions that he was picked up many times as an illegal alien but that he was also convicted twice for selling drugs. In his view, the drug convictions were unjustified, and he was able to convince the UNHCR of this viewpoint. This took some time, and had he not been able to convince the UNHCR, he would not have been eligible for resettlement. While the authorities treat illegal residence as a criminal offence, the migrants counter by strongly emphasizing the distinction between those who “bend” migration regulations because they feel they have no other option, and the “real” criminals, who sell drugs, lie, steal, or blackmail others. Ms Kotek, who was so shocked about being interrogated by the German police, also suffers from the blemish on her honour that this indictment supposedly entails. In one part of her narrative, she quotes the women for whom she cleans house and who assure her that she is not a criminal: “I was really shocked, (.) (…) and they said you may go on, (.) you’re no criminal, and only that you don’t take away rubbish or so, (.) (…) I have (.) got paranoi-, (.) when bell ring, ‘Police come, Jesus, Police come,’ ‘No Zosia, that is ehh, postman, we know’ [laughs]. I’m afraid to open door, I’m always afraid (.) that somebody recognized me, I am (.) world-famous criminal, (.) everybody knows my face.” Ms Kotek is visibly shaken by her single contact with law enforcement, and her employers try to comfort and reassure her. Apart from her shock, we also learn that her employers, too, distinguish between criminal behaviour and illegal work in the informal market. They assure Ms Kotek that she is not a criminal, implying that they themselves do not feel like criminal offenders. On the other hand, they do take precautions against being caught again: they advise Ms Kotek not to take down the trash for awhile because that would be an opportunity for the police to apprehend her (and her employers as well). In their labour market integration, undocumented migrants have no choice but to take on jobs in the informal economy, which typically are gendered, physically demanding, potentially exploitative, and – in the case of domestic labour – emotionally challenging (Hochschild 2000; Gather, Geissler, and Rerrich 2002; Parreñas 2001). Very low pay results in a struggle for physical survival, which all of our undocumented interviewees mention, at least for the beginning of their stay. The cultural capital of the highly educated migrants is used, but in a very unspecific manner. For example, our findings show that domestic labourers have to be able to communicate well with their employers, who are often from the middle class. Nevertheless, this limited application of cultural

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capital does not enable the migrants to improve their qualification and move on to more attractive labour markets. comparing case groups experiencing complete legal exclusion from the labour market in germany and turkey We responded to the strongly differing legal systems in Germany and Turkey53 by assuming that the experience of legal exclusion may also differ significantly between the two countries. We therefore created two separate typologies about the experience of legal exclusion for each of these countries. As experiences may be similar, despite differing legal frameworks, we then looked at similar typologically situated case groups (see Nohl 2009, 2013; Weiß and Nohl 2012) in each of these typologies. For the undocumented migrants, we found that the experiences of legal exclusion are quite similar for case groups in Germany and Turkey, with small exceptions that can well be explained with reference to macro-social contextual differences. For example, in Turkey those who overstayed their short-term visa were, in the past (and, at the time of our study, still were), punished with a fine. This enabled a specific form of circular migration: migrants could enter Turkey with a tourist visa, overstay, leave the country, pay the fine, and return later. In Germany, and the EU in general, overstaying one’s visa results in much tougher sanctions: exclusion from any kind of visa in the near future. In Germany, undocumented migrants either circulate in compliance with the terms of a tourist visa or overstay without the option of legal exit and (albeit, fined) return. Thus, differences in legal regulations and practice restrict the options that undocumented migrants have in Germany and in Turkey, respectively. This is a small difference, however, as undocumented migrants practising circular migration and experiencing a similar type of legal exclusion were found in both countries. Some differences between the case groups found in Turkey and Germany are, however, significant in a more general assessment of options and barriers to labour market integration. First, the situation of migrants like Mr Young in Turkey cannot be explained by legal exclusion alone. Many of the immigrants we interviewed in Turkey were able to find a skilled position even though they were legally not allowed to work. This fact, as well as Ofner’s (2010) findings on symbolic exclusion,54 point towards the importance of symbolic exclusion in explaining the situation of refugees like Mr Young: I came here in 1991. Those time the African people I’ve met here they were saying: Oh you’re welcome here in Turkey but you go to encounter a lot of

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problems because you are black. Turkish citizens don’t accept black people. Turkish government or security they don’t accept the black people. Because probably of prejudices. Those time we’re here about … ehm … mostly African black people were involved in criminal activity like selling or consummating55 drugs. Or laundering money. Such kind of criminal activity. And then the Turkish citizens we say that every black man in Istanbul cannot survive if he doesn’t involve himself in such kind of activity.

Mr Young actually accepts the generally shared knowledge that specific criminal activities are “mostly” conducted by African black people. This points not only to the well-documented tendency of victims of racism to internalize at least some of the public discourse (see chapter 6) but also to the strong connections between legal exclusion, material destitution, and symbolic exclusion in the case of those migrants who end up in very precarious positions. It is a widespread public sentiment that migrants who are not allowed to work and who do not have any savings become criminal. The migrants, on the other hand, distinguish between degrees of criminality. Mr Young works as a tourist guide and thereby violates migration legislation, but he does not turn “criminal” in the strict sense of the word. He resents the generalization that “every black man” in Istanbul has to become a criminal in order to survive. The visibility of Mr Young clearly has a negative impact on his life chances in Turkey. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether it is the combination of a very precarious legal status and his physical visibility that has this effect. In contrast, another interviewee in our sample, an African American college teacher in Istanbul who was married to a Turkish woman, enjoyed a middle-class life and did not talk extensively about “Turkish” racism. The legal exclusion as experienced by Mr Young, as well as that experienced by another refugee in Turkey who also belongs to a visible minority,56 is best characterized by a combination of lack of residence status, the necessity to survive on one’s own means, and symbolic exclusion.57 This does not mean that undocumented migrants who are less visible are in a much better position. Pusch (2008a) finds, on the basis of other interviews conducted in Turkey, that even in a legally flexible labour market like that of Turkey, it is difficult to find a skilled-labour position with a tourist visa, yet as long as an irregular migrant does not find a skilled-labour position, he or she cannot apply for a better visa status.

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Thus, the combination of short-term visas and unskilled-labour jobs creates its own vicious cycle. In Germany, on the other hand, in our fieldwork we were able to find visible minorities only among the asylum seekers and not among the undocumented migrants.58 Also, migrants seeking refuge were found mostly among the asylum seekers and not the undocumented migrants. So, in legal terms, the groups overlap in ways that differ substantially between countries. As the experience of legal exclusion for undocumented migrants in Turkey (both refugees and others) differs from that of undocumented migrants in Germany, we shall use them as a contrasting case group here. The situation of registered asylum seekers in Germany is characterized by a very specific experience of legal exclusion that does not have a parallel in Turkey and is unique in its unintended side effects on migration regulation. As noted earlier, Germany offers few options for legal immigration but used to be quite open to refugees. After legal changes in 1992, few asylum seekers could quickly receive asylum. Many were either deported immediately or received a temporary suspension of deportation (Duldung) or some other non-status, based on the fact that they could not be deported for practical reasons. In this very precarious legal status, options to work legally are restricted in a manner that makes legal work empirically very unlikely (Lukas 2011). So in contrast to undocumented migrants in Germany and Turkey who have to work in order to survive, our interviewees – the case group of asylum seekers – also tended to refrain from informal employment. And in contrast to non-EU refugees in Turkey, refugees in Germany do have some small hope of a continued and legalized stay in the country. They receive substandard welfare and therefore are not forced to work informally. At any rate, being caught in informal employment would endanger their hope of legalization. Given this macro-social context, we found that interviewees with a legal status that provided them with substandard welfare but excluded them from legal work were reluctant to work in informal labour markets.59 Quite a few in this case group do unpaid “volunteer” work for NGOs, which utilizes their cultural capital at no cost to the employer. Underemployment and forced idleness result in very bad long-term perspectives: as we have already seen in chapter 4, even those asylum seekers who remain motivated and who receive a stable status after a longer waiting period have a very hard time finding any employment at all (Cyrus and Vogel 2003; Nohl 2008; Von Hausen 2010a; Lukas 2011). This is a sharp contrast to the type of legal exclusion found

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among undocumented migrants in our German sample. Much like the undocumented migrants in Turkey, undocumented migrants in Germany also emphasized that they had to work at any cost in order to survive. Neither in Germany nor in Turkey can the state fully control undocumented migration. In both countries this results in migrants without documents, who experience legal exclusion as existentially threatening and who have to work “3-D” jobs – jobs that are dirty, dangerous, and/or demeaning – in order to survive. Despite these parallels, we can also see differences that point to country-specific migration regimes. In Germany, the experience of asylum seekers differs sharply from that of undocumented migrants, as they collect minimal welfare and are effectively excluded even from informal employment (Weiß 2010a). In Turkey we could observe that access to the labour market is widely practised without a legal work permit. However, the experience of visible minorities in a legally excluded status is specific because they – in contrast to other undocumented aliens who are less visible in Turkey – become the target of drastic forms of symbolic exclusion. This is not to say that symbolic exclusion does not exist in other countries. Chapter 6 looks more closely at forms of symbolic exclusion that can be distinguished from the impact of legal exclusion. In all of these case groups, chances of legalization are slim or nonexistent. Germany has recently given asylum seekers who had stayed in the country for more than eight years the chance to improve their status on the precondition that they find a job, but Germany has never offered amnesty to undocumented immigrants. This puts migrants in a biographical dead end unless they marry a German citizen or long-term resident – a very controversial “solution.” (semi-)strategic marriage as an action strategy? When the biographical orientations of migrants are processed by the migration legislation of a particular country, several things may happen: in some of the cases discussed in chapter 4 and in this chapter, migrants receive good legal status on the basis of their biographical orientation60 early on and therefore face less severe obstacles. Chapter 4.4 also considered the case of Ms Guzman-Berg and other female migrants with expert visas who are able to balance a partnership orientation and a professional career. It is interesting to note that Ms Guzman-Berg is motivated to stay in Germany primarily by her partnership orientation, but she receives a visa on the basis of her being employed as an expert

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in Latin American tax law. In this case, her primary motivation and the legitimacy of her visa diverge, but in a manner that is unproblematic, both from the viewpoint of Ms Guzman-Berg and from that of the migration administration. In contrast, migrants who can neither “breeze through” nor find a legitimate motivation must either accept an undocumented existence – which almost always means coping with criminal prosecution, accepting low pay, working in the unskilled sector, and working informally (Brosius 2008) – or find ways to evade this situation. Many, like Mr Young, attempt to move on. Some, like Ms Hernandez, whose situation was discussed at the beginning of this chapter, move back to their home country. However, they may also be tempted to try to obtain a more attractive legal status, even if this does not correspond to their true motivation. Being highly skilled, some of our interviewees have been able to register as students or get temporary work permits. Mr Ashot, the student who later became undocumented and was imprisoned, had entered Germany originally with two intentions: he wanted to study a subject that he was not able to study in a (post-)socialist country, and he needed to support his aging parents at home. As the latter motivation would not be seen as legitimate by migration control, he emphasizes his qualification motivation and ensures that his legal status as a student is as stable as possible. All the other migrants who are unable to produce a legitimate migration orientation are confronted with the problem of (strategic) marriage. As noted earlier, the ease with which female spouses of Turkish men received citizenship upon marriage fed the suspicion that some of these marriages served solely strategic purposes. The law has now been changed to award citizenship to both male and female spouses, but only after a waiting period of three years. We also noted that spouses of Germans receive equal access to the labour market; many (though not all) of our interviewees in chapter 4 had received a visa as partners of Germans or permanent residents. According to our findings, these marriages were not strategic, and the interviewees actually resented the fact that their residence status might be based on or was actually based on marriage (see the case of Ms Piwarski, discussed chapter 4.4). Ms Hernandez, for example, does not want to mix personal decisions, such as whom she will marry and when, with her visa status. She realizes in the end, however, that her motivation to make a career based on her personal achievements cannot be transformed into a visa to work in Germany. This puts her in a painful

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position, because she has to decide how far she will go in order to adapt her motivations. Several other interviewees are in similar situations. Within our study, Biehl (2008) has developed a typology of justice orientations among adult migrants with a disadvantaged legal status in Germany.61 This typology differs from the typology capturing the experience of legal exclusion but highlights migrants’ justice orientations, which in turn are important for the action strategies that legally excluded migrants may develop in response to legal exclusion. As these action strategies affect the outcomes of migration regulation in the moment at which they encourage or preclude marriage, we shall now take a closer look at Biehl’s typology of justice orientation, which clearly influences the migrant’s response to the question of (semi-)strategic marriage. Ms Hernandez belongs to the first case group identified by Biehl, whom she calls “believers in meritocracy,”62 who resent the fact that some migrants receive easy access because they come from high-status countries such as the United States or because they get married, while those who could contribute to the economy remain excluded. Another case group identified by Biehl (2008) exhibits a strong human rights orientation. Mr Nuhu offers an exemplary account for the case group of migrants with a human rights orientation, a group that also includes Mr Ashot. Seeking political asylum in vain, Mr Nuhu has been excluded from the labour market and any meaningful social interaction for the ten years of his stay in Germany, and he expects to be deported any day. Nevertheless, in answer to a query about marriage by the interviewer, he argues that marriage is out of the question: The most time, my impression is that people go to marry, to have any kind of chance this way; (.) a:nd as I said really (.) I myself am not thrilled by the (.) mmm instead (.) me hoped at one time or another also I would well as human or (.) well maybe as (.) judged or considered as another human, well be entitled that also (.) that also I would marry someone, (.) I like or who suits me or we (.) fit together; and not just for documents, (.) show no good character and what I am really not like (.) and later (.) somehow fa- (.) or how do you say? (2 sec. pause) fails our relationship, (.) and maybe the respective person may be disa- disappointed by me, or I also disappointed would be myself (2 sec. pause) (.) and that’s why I didn’t do and (.) not only you but many friends or people I know or many say, (.) “Why do you marry- you’ve been here for 10 years, (.) and people do marry.”

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Mr. Nuhu talks at length about failed marriages and the children of failed marriages, and the violence and disappointment that he has seen as a result of (semi-)strategic marriages. He contrasts this with his orientation towards mutual choice and respect in a partnership, which – sadly – is phrased in the past tense because at the time of the interview his hope of eventually being treated “as a human” has all but vanished. This and other quotes63 show that migrants in a precarious position are not only asking themselves whether they could or should marry but being confronted by others on the subject of why they have not done so and what their refusal to do so might mean. Forms of migration control in which marriage is the only option for regularization feed discourses that portray (female) migrants as available for strategic marriage. This also explains why several of our male and female informants avoided relationships, or at least refused to marry, independent of whether they were in a legally precarious or legally stable position. They did not want to burden their relationship with the suspicion that they might have married for strategic reasons. While the pros and cons of marriage are an issue for both men and women, they are also gendered. Ms Hernandez wants to avoid traditional female dependencies by not marrying her partner. Mr Nuhu aspires to be a non-abusive husband and father. As the choice to marry or refrain from doing so is strongly connected to very basic and general orientations towards justice, there are broad differences in perspective among the case groups identified by Biehl (2008). A third case group, the “pragmatics,” perceives legal exclusion not as a fundamental issue but as a practical challenge and tries to find solutions that work.64 For one of the interviewees in this case group,65 Colombian Mr Mendez,66 marriage can make many ends meet. Mr Mendez was studying medicine in Eastern Europe when his scholarship was terminated. In contrast to Mr Young, Mr Mendez was able to complete his degree and enter Germany on a tourist visa. He then managed to stay for some months without documents. “And then I thought, well, maybe I try here, something. I asked around, and (.) maybe a well (.) specialist training as a doctor (.) Yes (2 sec. pause). And well, and then I decided well we decided also to get married, of course then the situation was somewhat different. (.) Because well (.) the precondition for working here, was that (.) that I (.) was married (with/was) German. That was the first step.” He does not recount any moral difficulties, simply stating that he realized the precondition for working as a doctor in Germany was marriage and that “I” changed after a moment’s hesitation to “we”

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decided to marry as a result. Later in the interview, we learn that his wife was looking for a father for her children from an earlier marriage and that they did indeed have a personal bond. Unlike Ms Hernandez, Mr Mendez does not find it problematic to talk of a synergy between pragmatic and romantic reasons for marriage. It is important to note that, at the time of the interviews, Mr Mendez had been naturalized as a German and owned his private practice as a doctor, whereas Ms Hernandez planned to leave the country and Mr Nuhu was likely to be deported soon after the interview. The drastic differences between the migration outcomes experienced by these individuals show that the effects of the interactions between migration regulation and the personal orientations and action strategies of the migrants themselves deserve more attention in migration research. What at first sight appears to be a very private decision (to marry or not to marry, for example) can interact with a migration policy (one that offers no options for the regularization of undocumented migrants except marriage, for instance) in a way that produces unintended side effects. Though our findings are not representative for a large group of migrants here, they do point towards what is probably an unintended side effect of that migration regime: migrants with strong meritocratic and human rights orientations may be negatively affected by such a migration regime, whereas morally more “pragmatic” persons may find it easier to adjust their expectations, resulting in a basically unintended selectivity of migration control. In the cases of migrants who are confronted with a high degree of legal exclusion, although action strategies are highly relevant for outcomes, their choice more often consists in “opting out” of criminal activity, of (semi-)strategic marriage, of illegal border crossings, and the like than in choosing between equally attractive alternatives. This experience of legal exclusion is quite different from the experience discussed in the next section: exclusion of migrants who have obtained a good residence permit but struggle with the intricacies of professional law. 5.5

Interwoven Institutions: The Experience of Legal Exclusion among Migrant Professionals in Germany

Professions have been discussed as a third form of regulation, aside from state and market regulation (Freidson 2001), because professions need professionals to have superior skills, the quality of which cannot be properly evaluated from the outside. Professions therefore have the

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right and obligation to organize themselves in order to ensure quality of service, both in the technical competence of professionals and their broader social and ethical obligations (Parsons 1968). In theory, the state backs up the self-regulation of professions with suitable laws and institutions. In practice, the state is also used strategically to monopolize opportunities through social closure (Weeden 2002). Social closure is especially relevant in the case of migrant professionals, who often find that professional bodies are nationally organized and reluctant to acknowledge the value of international degrees. In a similar vein, intersectional approaches also emphasize that profession is a category that must be distinguished from class. The intersection of profession, gender, and migration can be particularly challenging for female highly skilled migrants. As an indirect result of gendered labour markets, women are more often found in the “traditional” professions than in the more permeable new professional fields and therefore experience more prohibiting forms of professional exclusion after migration (Kofman 2000; Raghuram 2004). The regulation of the professions (Littek, Heisig, and Lane 2005) and the interactions between profession and migration (Iredale 2001) vary from country to country. For Turkey, our institutional analysis shows that foreigners are prohibited from practising most professions. At the same time, however, the Turkish labour market is characterized by a prevailing informality that makes it conceivable that a migrant doctor might practise illegally. We have also seen that it is very difficult for foreign doctors to get re-accredited in Canada. In legal terms, their situation is much better than that of their counterparts in Turkey; as permanent residents, foreign doctors in Canada can become naturalized after a short waiting period, and the recognition of their credentials seems to be more standardized. Nevertheless, only about half of foreign-trained doctors are able to successfully surmount all barriers (Zietsma 2010, 16). Germany differs from both Turkey and Canada because it offers a specific legal construct – the minor professional licence, termed Berufserlaubnis nach § 10BÄO – which results in a specific experience of legal in- and exclusion that will be discussed here for the cases of Dr Mendez, Ms Damerc, and Ms Fernando.67 Access to a profession via minor professional licence is common in a relatively large proportion of the population of migrant medical doctors in Germany.68 Though the following analysis focuses on medical doctors, the ways that interwoven institutions affect labour market integration are of more general interest as well (see figure 5.1).69

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Figure 5.1 Interwoven institutions in the case of persons restricted by professional law e.g., EU citizens receive recognition more easily

Right to live and work in Germany

Recognition of educational title and further education

Right to work in one’s profession according to professional law

Before taking a closer look at the experience of medical doctors in Germany, we must first consider in some detail the legal system to which they are subjected. Although the system is similar for all regulated professions in Germany, we consider it here as it relates to medicine, because in our sampling strategy we interviewed more medical doctors than, for example, lawyers. In Germany, doctors are subject to three institutional systems. First, as discussed in chapter 4.3 for Dr Nazar and Dr Zadeh, migrant doctors must have their foreign educational certificates recognized. Second, like all other migrants in Germany, doctors either hold a residence permit, which gives them full access to the general German labour market, or experience some degree of legal exclusion (as when they have received temporary protection from deportation on the basis of the Geneva Convention, for example). This affects their chances in professional labour markets, too. Third, professional law stipulates that only Germans and EU nationals may start their own practice as a doctor, based on the professional status of “approbation.”70 All other doctors, in particular non-Germans71 and those who have graduated from foreign universities, must obtain the minor professional licence discussed above (Berufserlaubnis nach § 10 BÄO) in order to work as doctors. This means that the minor professional licence is necessary, both for migrants such as Dr Nazar, who

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could take up any other job in the German labour market, except a job in his profession, and for migrants like Ms Damerc, whose access to the general German labour market was restricted to positions for which no German could be found. In restricting full access to the profession, particularly independent practice, to Germans and EU citizens, Germany was similar to Turkey and Canada. The specificity of the German system is in the minor professional licence, as it can be awarded to doctors with an unstable legal status, too. The minor professional licence offers reduced rights: it has to be renewed after a period of time, and doctors holding it must find employment either with another doctor holding a full “approbation” or with a hospital. We have so far considered three different institutions: the recognition of foreign educational titles, the decision about the labour market access of a migrant, and professional law (see figure 5.1).72 The situation becomes more complex, however, because the three legislative bodies and the relevant institutions interact in many ways. For instance, recognition of educational titles may depend on a migrant’s legal status. This means, for example, that the medical training programs for EU citizens are considered equivalent to the German medical education programs. Medically trained citizens of non-EU countries (with few exceptions) must prove that their training is equivalent. Before Poland became an EU member state, Polish citizens had to prove the equivalence of their medical training. If received after a specific date, their education is now deemed adequate (Englmann and Müller 2007, 50).73 Another interactive effect can be shown for the time restrictions of the minor professional licence, which has a limited duration and can be renewed for up to four years. Foreigners who are married to Germans are exempt from the four-year restriction. For this case group, the fruitfulness of our focus on the experience of legal exclusion can be seen immediately. The way that legal exclusion is experienced and handled by migrant doctors and the way it affects their access to the labour market do not directly respond to particular institutional regulations, and in some way they may even diverge from the explicit intentions of the law. One important impact derives from a lack of understanding: neither the migrants themselves nor their potential employers, not even the authorities responsible, can understand and explain the legal situation clearly and comprehensively. This is illustrated by the narrative of Mr Mendez, who is in a relatively privileged legal situation: as the spouse of a German citizen, he had full access to

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the general German labour market and his qualifications were recognized. His only disadvantage in the labour market therefore consisted in the need to renew his minor professional licence every year: In the beginning, I was [laughs] I think I thousands, thousands of applications. (.) The people, well, in the beginning want not (.) well (2 sec. pause) it wasn’t clear the thing about the paragraph- that is entitlement according to §10 (.) Anyway they thought (.), “Well, that is too complicated for us, why only one year (.) is he allowed to work as a doctor?” Then like, and (.) and they always asked, “Do you have a work permit?” And I had the work permit from the beginning, that’s no problem at all. But it’s about this licence to practise, because I haven’t got a German approbation, because I have a foreign degree (.) And then they ha- they complicated themselves, “No, that is like” (.) well, I have a couple of (.) letters (2 sec. pause) moment, (2 sec. pause) I tried everything to explain then, please, I phoned everywhere, and- (.) but the colleagues they didn’t, didn’t really try and so, to understand the situation.

The quote shows well that potential employers are aware that some migrants are not allowed to work in the general German labour market, but that they do not understand the minor professional licence, which specifically regulates access of foreigners to the medical profession. As the spouse of a German citizen, Mr Mendez can be certain that his minor professional licence will be renewed every year. So technically the minor professional licence would be a minor difficulty for the employer, but the doctors to whom he submits his application do not understand this. In fact, the interviewer herself did not understand the difference at the time of the interview, even though Mr Mendez did his best to explain it. As potential employers receive the impression that Mr Mendez is not allowed to work in the German labour market at all, they tend to be confused, and this diminishes his chances for employment. The situation is more difficult for Ms Damerc, who is not married to a German and who has gained restricted labour market access on the basis of partial recognition as a political refugee (the “small” asylum based on § 51 AuslG, or Law on Foreigners). For her, all three systems mentioned above constitute a challenge. The first problem arises when she tries to gain recognition for her educational certificates: “Then we applied for this well (.) the asylum application, and we got § 51, that’s well permit to stay, and then I indeed asked them where shall I go, what shall I do, they said I can go to (.) (…) board or so, (…) and I went there,

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I handed in my documents, handed in everything, that showed that I did something, and after three months, I went there again, and I got a letter, that I was allowed to study once again.” Ms Damerc asks several institutions about recognition of her educational title. First she is referred by “people” – we do not know who – to an administration that testifies after three months that she can study in Germany. We know from our institutional analysis that most likely she was sent to a university or related administration, and universities check only whether the qualification of a migrant is sufficient for further studies. They are not able to make binding decisions about whether a migrant’s qualification is sufficient to work in a particular profession. We have learned from other interviewees that it is not easy for migrants to understand this difference. Some take this kind of negative advice to be conclusive and then either leave the profession or study once more. Ms Damerc is more persistent than her peers. Her self-esteem is high, because she headed the gynecology department in a hospital in her home country of Iraq and she studied in a system similar to the British university system. She therefore does not accept the advice that she has to study medicine once more. Then I explained, “Well you know, I don’t want to study, because (.) this I did in Iraq.” Then (.) they said, “Yes, then maybe we understood that wrong.” Then (.) they said I must go to the Ministry of Labour. And I went there, and once again I handed in everything, and of course I’ve got, well, problems, but I wrote it, I want so and so, and like (.) [laughs] parrot I told everything. They said, “OK,” and they the documents to- (.) I always phoned, they said, “Not yet, not yet.” In the end they said, “Well, yes you’re at the wrong place, well, you must go to (…) University.” I went there, they said, “No idea,” yes? Then I went to the Ministry of Education, and then I handed in papers, they said I must this and this and this I have my, what I have done in Iraq, the CV, and this certification, that I have in Ir- well, in in Iraq, well studied medicine, well, and I handed everything there, and they said, “Yes, we haven’t got any well consulate, or well, yes, contact with Iraqi,” well, then we in the meantime make, I dunno, with Jordanian consulate, then they send documents to Iraq or so. But that will take too much time. Yes, can about (.) thirteen or so mo- months, and then I had my degree accepted.

Ms Damerc clears up the misunderstanding and is sent to the Ministry of Labour, to a university, and then to the Ministry of Education, which

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suggests that many administrative officials don’t have the knowledge to point migrants to the administration responsible for addressing their concerns. When she finally reaches the appropriate administration, there seems to be a standard but lengthy procedure involving the help of another country’s embassy. Despite Ms Damerc’s intense efforts, it is another thirteen months before her educational title is recognized. She then attempts to obtain the minor professional licence (Berufserlaubnis): “And I went there, and with Mr (3 sec. pause) what’s his name, (……), I don’t remember, (……) Mr well, (………), yes, I went there, then I said, in Iraq I did so and so, and now I have my doctor’s degree accepted, (…) then said he, ‘No, impossible, in Germany you can’t work as a, well, (.) doctor, well, rather you can work as a cleaning woman or so, but as a doctor is impossible.’” At this point Ms Damerc has legal access to the general labour market that is restricted to positions for whom no one with full labour market access74 can be found, and her educational title has been recognized, at least to the extent that she could work as a general practitioner. The state government that decides about the Berufserlaubnis does, however, inform her that she cannot work as a doctor – possibly as a cleaning woman, but not as a doctor. Judging from our institutional knowledge, this advice was probably based on the fact that Ms Damerc’s labour market access is restricted. The administrator did not believe that she could find a doctor’s position for which no German or EU citizen could be found. Also, his advice about potential unskilled employment clearly places Ms Damerc in a labour market segmented by gender as well as ethnicity. Ms Damerc refuses to give up and finds a position as a doctor in a private women’s hospital. However, she does not receive permission from the administration to take that job. Finally Ms Damerc asks a German acquaintance from her language course (most likely the teacher) to call the state government on her behalf. The same official then tells the German acquaintance that Ms Damerc should look for a position in which her language skills are needed to do the job. In such a case it would be plausible that no German or EU citizen would be able to take the job; on this basis she is able to get the minor professional licence for one year. The public official also asks Ms Damerc’s acquaintance why she wanted to help a foreigner. At this point it becomes clear that the official is not simply informing Ms Damerc about her legal options but that he resents her being allowed to practise as a doctor. When Ms Damerc finally finds a job fulfilling the conditions, the public official calls

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Ms Damerc’s potential employer and questions his resolve to employ an Iraqi. His discouraging of Ms Damerc and his withholding relevant information shows that the official is using discrimination; Ms Damerc successfully confronts him on the matter and finally begins her first employment as a doctor in Germany. The experience of legal exclusion of this type is a result of many institutions interacting in a complex manner. The mechanisms through which this type of legal exclusion affects labour market inclusion are only partially congruent with the intended outcomes of these institutions’ regulations. Instead, the complexity of the legal situation exerts a more generalized and negative impact on labour market integration. First, as we have seen in the case of Mr Mendez, the complexity of the system makes it very difficult for a potential employee to communicate successfully with employers. This in itself constitutes a barrier in looking for employment. Migrants may well become discouraged when trying to understand the system, or they may lack the resources to pursue their medical training in spite of the barriers they encounter. Second, a system of interwoven institutions produces “special cases,” not as a side effect but on a regular basis. The website of the Berlin Administration of Health includes the note: “Whether or not you can receive a minor professional licence depends on further conditions. Due to the number and variability of possible cases, individualized advice will be necessary to determine if you are eligible to receive a minor professional licence.”75 Because every migrant is a “special case,” it becomes difficult for migrants and others to give advice or to organize collectively. Third, the prevalence of special cases leaves more space for symbolic exclusion by individual bureaucrats than would a more clearcut system, as illustrated by the case of Ms Damerc.76 It is difficult for administrators to serve the migrants well, and migrants cannot easily understand whether a negative decision constitutes legally inappropriate advice – as in the case of Ms Damerc, who was told to work as a cleaning lady – or conclusive restriction. In the experience of legal exclusion that we have termed “interwoven institutions,” the complexity of the institutional framework serves as a precondition that provides opportunities for symbolically excluding behaviour of individuals.77 Particular to the German system is the fact that the minor professional licence offers a way to practise medicine even to doctors whose legal status is as precarious as that of Ms Damerc. A significant number of doctors manage to work as doctors in Germany even during the

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initial phase of migration. In the long run, many lose their specialty and end up in ethnic niches of the medical labour market (see chapter 7), but given a strong motivation, some financial resources, and legal labour market access, they can succeed. This success is based on particular action strategies that migrants use to deal with this kind of exclusion, which we will now discuss in more detail. action strategies in coping with complex institutions When Mr Mendez talked about “thousands” of failed applications, he unknowingly volunteered an important detail: he chose to write letters intended to enlighten potential employers about the intricacies of professional law, and he was frustrated that they made little effort to understand him. Consider the narrative of Ms Damerc in contrast: “Then I was- I made a list, about one month I went to … mmm … fifty doctors, I used to ask, ‘I do further education, and with me it’s so and so, and I’m from Iraq,’ and I must do well everything. Then always they [said], ‘No, I’m sorry, no, I’m sorry.’ Finally I found a doctor, she said, ‘Yes, of course, you can help us, that’s good, we go on.’ Ms Damerc visits a large number of potential employers, not focusing on legal intricacies but rather on the steps she has to take in order to work as a doctor again. By introducing herself as a migrant from Iraq, she also asks for solidarity and support. And she visits practices in person, just as she has visited a large number of administrators in person. If we consider that Ms Damerc’s legal position is very precarious indeed and that she overcomes many barriers, her strategy seems to be slightly more successful than that of Mr Mendez. In the end, both are able to secure employment. Mr Mendez and Ms Damerc employ an action strategy that Anja Brosius (2008) has termed “intensification strategy,” when she analysed a subsample of our interviews with adult migrants in Germany whose labour market access is legally restricted. Brosius found that some migrants exert substantial effort on applications; they refuse to give up when they are given discouraging advice and instead try again and again. According to Brosius, among those who eventually “made it,” despite significant barriers, several other strategies were used as well. Migrants often had to give up or modify their primary interests and specialties. Ms Damerc had been a gynaecologist, and Mr Mendez had always wanted to become a gynaecologist, but in the end both learn to find general practice “also interesting.” They accept lower pay and informal work – in the guise of internships – temporarily.

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So they stay in their profession, but at the lower end of it. They also show flexibility in geographic location: Mr Mendez has worked as a fill-in in a large region – a job that resulted in a lot of travel; he also worked for awhile in a rural area. Another refugee doctor interviewed in Germany plans to move to an area that experiences a shortage of hospital doctors. A comparison to the case of a trained medical doctor unable to stay in her profession, that of Ms Fernando, suggests that the action strategies used by Mr Mendez and Ms Damerc depend on several preconditions that cannot always be met. Mr Mendez and Ms Damerc employ action strategies that assume a strong motivation to work as a doctor and the resources to pursue that goal. They also both have access to financial support: as a partially recognized refugee, Ms Damerc can receive social security as long as her income is not sufficient, and Mr Mendez is partially supported by his wife. Ms Fernando’s case is similar to that of Mr Mendez in that she arrives in Germany on a tourist visa after completing her medical degree in Eastern Europe. As an undocumented migrant, she cannot practise medicine as a doctor and instead works as a nurse for the elderly in the informal market for three years. After these three years, a good friend offers to marry her in order to finally give her legal status. Mr Mendez, on the other hand, marries shortly after his arrival and shares the household and the income with his wife. Ms Fernando accepts the offer of marriage but chooses not to burden her husband with the task of providing financial support. At that time, the German labour agency trained promising but unemployed persons to become nurses. Ms Fernando gains access to this training program and receives state subsidies for two years as she trains to become a nurse. At the time of the interview, she was working in the oncology department of a university hospital and she expressed a high degree of satisfaction with her work. Considering that Mr Mendez and Ms Damerc work in fields to which they were not originally attracted, the case of Ms Fernando offers an interesting contrast: Ms Fernando lacks the social and financial support and personal motivation to pursue a career as a doctor. Nevertheless, by accepting downward mobility, Ms Fernando gains more leeway in choosing her place of employment.78 In Germany, migrants who are legally excluded through professional law can manage to work in their profession, but they must be very motivated and resourceful and they have to find ways to overcome a complex and often opaque system of interwoven institutions that leaves space for symbolic exclusion. As we have seen in chapter 4.3, and as will

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be discussed in more detail in chapter 7, the successful doctors manage to resume an education to be a specialist during the initiation phase and have then spent enough time in Germany to apply for citizenship. After gaining full recognition in their professional competences and German citizenship, they can then obtain an “approbation” and open their own practice. In this respect, the cases of Ms Damerc and Ms Fernando, who were legally excluded from the general labour market in addition to being subject to professional law, are not substantially different from those of other medical doctors in our sample. They have to overcome an additional barrier in a complex system of institutions. 5.6

Wanted Experts Experiencing Some Trouble with the Administration

We have so far discussed the extremes of legal exclusion: migrants whom states want to deter and who enter a nation state either without documents or as unrecognized refugees, and migrants who immigrate with citizenship or as permanent residents. We also looked at an experience of legal exclusion that is more specific to the highly skilled sector: the migrant’s experience of interwoven institutions based on the intricacies of professional law. In this section we shall focus on an experience of legal in- and exclusion that is also more often found among highly skilled migrants. Our institutional analysis in chapter 5.1 shows that there are various provisions based on which highly skilled migrants can enter Germany legally and receive a permit on the basis of their job contract. Some of these visas are related to a desirable qualification and/or employment in a particular sector. Migrants in these categories first apply for shorter-term visas repeatedly but can move on to more long-term residence permits, which are awarded independently from their holding a job in a specified sector of the economy. The experience of migrants in many of these advantageous visa categories can be summarized as having a biographical perspective, enabling them to plan a future in the country of immigration, even though they may remain legally excluded for a period of time.79 The experience of these migrants offers an interesting contrast to the experience of Ms Hernandez, who was discussed at the beginning of this chapter and who aspired to find a job that would have given her access to a short-term expert visa but failed to do so. Ms Mazali was interviewed in Germany after having completed a BA in psychology and further training as an IT specialist in Israel. Much

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like other migrants who later became undocumented, she arrived with a tourist visa. In contrast to these other migrants, however, she then quickly became informed about her options and was able to secure adequate employment within a short period of time. Still, the administrative procedures take some effort: I have the job (1 sec. pause), at some time, I think it was May when I found that [when I] went Office of Labour in those days they also did this this work permit and the woman there said I asked her if I should have any documents be translated and she said, “No, we’ll tell you if we need anything.” Anyway, you have to wait for four to six weeks.” Then I waited for a really long time. And then I phoned again and then she said, “Yes, well, we haven’t got any documents from you.” (They) were already about to reject my stay and then I said, “But why, we- we- we-.” Anyway, then I had to have all my documents translated within two days and that took another four to six weeks, I don’t know, but three months later I started to work here, I had my work permit (1 sec. pause) and my permit to stay was always connected to my contract that is if I (…) in the beginning I had half a year probation period and then my permit to stay was for half a year, that is always exactly for this period when I, well, had a contract.

Like Ms Hernandez, Ms Mazali experiences a small misunderstanding about the necessity of having her credentials translated. She understood that the administration would contact her if a translation was needed, and the administration understood that Ms Mazali had not provided them with a translation of the necessary certificates and almost turned her application down. Despite these common troubles, and in contrast to Ms Hernandez, Ms Mazali is successful.80 Migrants experiencing legal inclusion as more-or-less wanted experts perceive legal exclusion mostly as a bureaucratic hassle that needs some attention. They must make an effort in order to gain a legally stable position and are sometimes afraid of dealing with the migrant administration, but for them things tend to turn out well in the end. Ms Mazali, for example, has to renew her residence permit, which is as short-term as the work permit in a situation in which she had just lost her job. She is afraid that the administration will terminate her stay. The official acts unexpectedly, however, saying: “‘Yes, you have to come in two, three weeks’ time and at the moment I cannot prolong anything and if I prolong it, it would be only for three months and from today de- de- dede-.’ And then suddenly he said, ‘OK, I’m going to give you two years.’

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(1 sec. pause) Uih (2 sec. pause) [laughs] really so (1 sec. pause) I just wanted to pay and go home [laughs] that he wouldn’t change his mind and, you know, it was really quite strange but I was, I was really happy.” According to our institutional analysis, the public official technically cannot extend Ms Mazali’s visa for a longer period of time, as it depends on her holding a suitable job. He informs her of this and thereby confirms her informed expectations. Then, however, she relates that he changed his mind. This also is in line with our institutional analysis, as administrative officials were encouraged to make independent decisions and weigh the pros and cons of burdening basically wanted immigrants with further administrative procedures. In the experience of Ms Mazali, however, the event is noteworthy. She was surprised and afraid that the official would change his mind again, which, according to our analysis, signifies that the migrants with this type of experience also feel that they are subject to arbitrary decisions – albeit in their favour. As the migrant experts have no reason to be angry with the administrative authorities, we can view their testimony as indirect proof of problems mentioned by migrants whose experience of legal exclusion differs substantially from that of refugees, undocumented aliens, and students. The foreign experts also find it difficult to understand administrative procedure and to do things correctly on the basis of the information they receive from administrative authorities. They also are confronted with the expectation that they will wait for a long time. And they also perceive decisions to be arbitrary, albeit usually in their favour. Nevertheless, overall – and in sharp contrast to the other types analysed in this chapter – they feel that they are treated well by the migrant administration. With the support of employers and other institutions, misunderstandings can usually be clarified, and migrants in this category do not tend to complain about disrespectful treatment. Neither is the labour market integration of these migrants affected negatively, as the legal status of migrants experiencing legal exclusion as “wanted experts” usually depends on the migrants’ professional success. As the legal status remains somewhat precarious, it can result in a postponement of long-term plans such as having children or buying real estate. Some wanted experts are concerned about the fact that their spouse’s legal status may be less desirable than their own. And a few voice the concern that their employer might not invest in promoting them because their visa term is restricted.

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Interviewees in Canada did not describe any difficulties with administrative authorities, but one case group in the Turkish sample analysed by Pusch (2008a) is quite similar to the wanted experts in Germany. In legal terms, both countries permit the immigration of wanted experts while at the same time exerting some legal restrictions. With respect to the experience of legal exclusion, the case group of “desirable and formally integrated foreigners” in Turkey also describes experiencing hassles with the administration. However, the impact of these difficulties on their career is negligible. 5.7

Interactive Effects between Legal Exclusion and Migrants’ Agency

When people cross national borders, two very different social processes intertwine. On the one hand, migration is, characterized by persons living their lives on the basis of biographical orientations. Like most other people, these individuals want to receive an education and/or good qualifications, establish a career, fall in love, and possibly start a family. Unlike many others, they may have had to flee conflict or persecution in their home country, they may feel that migration will generally improve their situation, or they may be motivated by wanderlust and a desire to see the world (Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen 2007, 122–4). These orientations often overlap and tend to change over time. For example, Ms Hernandez and others who are motivated to establish a career may not accept the downward mobility that often is entailed by precarious legal status. In contrast, some ethnic Germans, like Mr and Ms Shwetz (see chapter 4) may choose to move to a “better” country, even if that means giving up their career. On the other hand, migration is structured by a system of nation states that distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate migration. Our institutional analyses of Canada, Germany, and Turkey have identified three very different migration regimes. While Canada moved to a point system that favours qualification over ethnic origin in the 1960s, Germany and Turkey continue to favour immigration by ethnically German or ethnically Turkish minorities, respectively. Germany is also bound by EU legislation to allow free movement of EU citizens. Other migration channels to Germany are organized through an intricate system of rights and restrictions, which grants most foreigners labour market access and some expectation of becoming naturalized. At the time of our study, legal residence in Turkey was accessible to a small proportion

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of foreigners, and the right to work was even more restricted. At the same time, regulations were not enforced; the Turkish situation was characterized by a high degree of informality. In the course of migration, formal regulation of migration by nationally specific legal regimes and the set of knowledge, skills, backgrounds, and orientations of migrations as biographical agents intertwine. In chapter 3, we discussed these interactions as the multidimensionality of the status passage into the labour market. In this chapter we analysed interesting and often unintended effects of these interactions, on the basis of our empirical findings on the ways in which migrants experience legal in- and exclusion. A comparison of migrants found in the “breezing through” case group and in the case group of those completely excluded shows that these migrants do not differ substantially, either in their achievements prior to migration or in their motivation. This means that someone like Ms Hernandez could have ended up as a permanent resident in Canada. Given an economically more favourable climate at the time of her job search in Germany, she could also have become a wanted expert in Germany. Instead we found her among the very disadvantaged legally excluded group and ready to leave the country. Migrants who were found in the case group of the completely excluded typically had neither time nor resources to choose a country with a hospitable migration regime. Some had fled their home country on short notice. Others, like Ms Hernandez, exhibited a strong – albeit unjustified – belief in their ability to overcome barriers through individual achievement. While some of the factors distinguishing successful from downwardly mobile trajectories appear to be coincidental, legal exclusion and its interaction with migrants’ motivations certainly play important roles. This is particularly clear for the regulation of highly skilled migration. Most immigration countries encourage migration of the highly educated, and many EU states have recently adapted their migration policy and public discourse to encourage migration of such individuals. Nevertheless, these states often find it hard to attract foreign-trained professionals. At the same time, many migrants carrying academic degrees are not registered upon their arrival as “highly skilled migrants” but as spouses, asylum seekers, students, and so on, and they are treated as such. Migration policy – and a lot of migration research81 – places simple labels such as “labour migration” or “qualification” or “family migration” on complex and changing orientations, and these simple labels will not always fit.

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If the label is disadvantageous for the migrant, he or she will try to respond by adjusting her official motivation. Ms Hernandez wants mainly to work in Germany but, failing that, she is also willing to continue her academic education and do her PhD. She is unwilling to marry, however, even though she had a long-term partner until shortly before the interview took place. By streamlining migrants into specific channels, legal exclusion also creates specific and often unintended pathways for (less privileged) inclusion. For example, legal exclusion forces labour migrants to become students, and it tempts highly skilled persons to become spouses. In particular, the fact that marriage has become a last resort for legally excluded migrants in Germany and Turkey has resulted in very peculiar situations. Some migrants with a pragmatic justice orientation find it easy to see marriage as a way to make many ends meet. Others with a more meritocratic or human rights perspective choose to remain excluded rather than risk a marriage tainted by pragmatic considerations. Also, being married can have detrimental effects for skilled female migrants after they have become legalized, as analyses by Riano and Baghdadi (2007, 175) show for Switzerland, whose gender regime is slightly more conservative than that of Germany. On the other hand, undocumented migrants who are already married have no chance at all to legalize in Germany or Turkey. Migrants’ strategies in dealing with legal exclusion are structured not only by the legal categories offered but also by their personal situation, their resources, and their justice orientations. This, too, may account for the discrepancies between the intentions behind migration policy and its actual effects. Another reason that highly skilled migrants are “wanted” but then end up working in lower-skill-level jobs can be observed in the case group experiencing the impact of “interwoven institutions.” Especially for the regulated professions, labour market access has become very complex. We discussed the cases of medical doctors in Germany as that country offers a specific time-restricted permit to professionals, the Berufserlaubnis. Yet previous institutional analyses (in this chapter and in Kovacev 2010) have shown that, in institutional terms, the complexity of barriers in the regulated professions in Canada compare with the institutional maze in Germany. On the basis of our analyses of medical doctors’ narrations in Germany, we can highlight how the experience of legal in- and exclusion may differ from the explicit intention of the law. Apparently, neither the migrants nor all administrators fully understand the entire system. This affects labour market inclusion and leaves space for symbolic exclusion.

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Symbolic exclusion was a concern for the case group of those experiencing complete legal exclusion. We have shown that, for visibly African refugees in Turkey, legal exclusion, material disadvantage, and symbolic exclusion go hand-in-hand in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish their individual impacts. Ulrike Ofner (2010) has published similar findings for disadvantaged migrants in Germany: in the case group of those experiencing exclusion through interwoven institutions, symbolic exclusion is felt less palpably, even though it does play a role. The “wanted experts” who experience “trouble” with the administration, on the other hand, do not talk about everyday racism in connection with legal exclusion at all. Instead, they talk of decisions they perceive to be arbitrary but made in their favour and interpret them as depending on “soft” factors, such as the status of their employer or the status of the country that they came from, but also the amount of their savings. Compare the case of Ms Hernandez to that of Ms Mazali, who, as an Israeli citizen, was able to obtain stable legal status based on the IT job she found. For Ms Hernandez, a minor mistake in de-registering resulted in major restrictions to her legal chances; in the case of Ms Mazali, a similar misunderstanding was solved without further negative results. In legal terms, the labour market access of wanted experts is shaped by many factors that migrants perceive as contributing to their higher or lower symbolic standing. The interaction between migration regulation and migrants’ agency can partially explain the paradox presented at the beginning of this book. A country such as Germany may claim to actively attract highly educated migrants and to strictly control for undocumented migration. Empirically, however, we find comparatively low numbers of the “officially highly skilled” (Heß 2009, 2011) and much higher numbers of migrants82 who are highly educated but who are found either in legally excluded categories or – in the cases of spouses – hold a stable residence permit but are not viewed publicly as an asset. Though officially “wanted” as highly skilled migrants, foreign professionals struggle with the interactive effects of misinformation, restrictions of professional law, and other legal exclusions. Legal exclusion is of particular importance if we consider its effect on the passage of (biographical) time. As long as the legal issues related to labour market access are not resolved, migrants’ careers are “on hold”; they lose time, which later negatively affects their professional CV and employment options (Von Hausen 2010a). We saw earlier that it took Ms Damerc thirteen months just to have her educational title

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recognized – in addition to the time she spent getting a residence permit and actually finding a job. While Ms Damerc was able to gain access to the labour market eventually, our discussion of former refugees in chapter 4 shows that long-term deprivation resulting in an extended transition phase (see chapter 4.6 and Thomsen 2009) can also result in an almost complete loss of cultural capital.83 Legal exclusion intertwines not only with migrants’ motivations and agency but also with other factors structuring labour market access. Among the interviewees discussed in this chapter’s disadvantaged categories, many would find it difficult to integrate into highly skilled labour markets, even if they had obtained legal equality. We have seen in chapter 4 and shall see in the following chapters that the recognition of cultural capital in labour markets depends on much more than equal legal status. But legal status certainly is a first step – or, rather, a first barrier – that will severely restrict options if it is not overcome.

6 Symbolic Struggles over Cultural Capital: Racial Discrimination and Symbolic Exclusion

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 is profoundly relational (Bourdieu 1984, 1986b). Thus, we assume that the outcome of symbolic struggles between groups contributes to the value of their cultural capital. We expect that symbolic inclusion and exclusion have effects on labour market integration by engendering distrust or even hostility towards migrants. The value of cultural capital is reduced indirectly as a result of suspicion of “the other” and institutional arrangements that favours culturally dominant groups. The impact of symbolic exclusion on the value of cultural capital can endure. And as we shall see in the empirical analyses in this chapter, symbolic exclusion is experienced not only by migrants who have completed their degrees abroad but also by migrants with domestic degrees. Even the second generation born to migrant parents in the receiving country often discovers that it is equal to the citizen population in qualification and skills but not in symbolic standing.

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6.1

Analytical Challenges of Analysing Racial Discrimination

Racial discrimination1 is a critical determinant of the integration of immigrants into the labour market. At the same time, however, it is one of the most difficult forms of exclusion to address and provide evidence for in scientific research. A legacy of distinct conceptual and methodological biases (Banton 1998, 2005; Solomos and Back 1994) has traditionally prevented this scholarly field from developing a comprehensive and coherent account of the complexity of racially motivated practices of discrimination and exclusion. This challenge also has to do with the transformation of racism itself: in many contemporary societies, expressions of blatant, biology-based racism have been replaced by more indirect and subtle culture-based racialization (see the debates in Baker 1981; Bravo López 2011; Das Gupta et al. 2007; Miles and Brown 2003; Modood 2005; Winant 2006), whose research-related methodological challenge lies precisely in downplaying or neglecting the overt reference to ideas of racial superiority.2 In Europe, in particular, antiMuslim sentiment has taken on a prominent role in public discourse (Attia 2009; Balibar 1991; Schneiders 2010); nevertheless, racism against blacks in addition to racism against Muslims continues to be a concern. This chapter is not the place to address these conceptual debates in great detail. Rather, our central goal is to reconstruct those dimensions of the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities in the labour market that are linked to ascribed group identities. In this respect, we conceive of ethnicity as embedded within a wider ecology of classificatory struggles of competing actors and identities (YuvalDavis 2011). From this perspective, studying ethnicity needs to focus its analytical attention on what Bourdieu has framed as “classificatory practice” (see also Wimmer 2008): groups engage in an ongoing struggle over the recognition of collective identities, the legitimacy and meaning of culturally or ethnically coded distinctions. Such practice establishes a shared sense of the “we” and the “other” and, linked to this binary logic, forms of inclusion and exclusion. On this basis, groups can define entitlements, defend privileges, be excluded from opportunities, or be exposed to discriminatory practices.

Cultural Capital as a Mode of Recognition and Exclusion A relational concept of cultural capital promises to shed light on the multifaceted experience of racial discrimination. However, Bourdieu himself has not shown much interest in how this concept might be used

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to study the effects of migration. His empirical work focused on the France of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s – at the time a highly centralized country with an elitist educational system. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Bourdieu believed in a national standard of cultural capital3 that is shared by everyone in a country (Bourdieu 1984). From an early point, American authors tended to disagree with this perspective. They found it difficult to distinguish one cultural standard recognized by everyone in a multicultural society (Hall 1992). Empirical research on high-brow tastes in the United States (Lamont 1992; Peterson and Kern 1996) has shown that distinctive tastes may be quite amorphous in content; even in the France of today, French sociologist Lahire (2008) doubts there is a defined relationship between high status and cultural tastes. Cultural tastes, clearly, are more complex than their recognition as cultural capital. For an understanding of racial discrimination, we therefore must take a closer look at the interconnections between the borders of national institutions and cultures and the value of cultural capital. As we have argued following Bourdieu (1986b), cultural capital exists in three forms: as institutionalized cultural capital (such as educational titles), as embodied cultural capital (such as tastes and habitual practices), and as objectified cultural capital (such as objects of art), the last being unimportant for our interest in labour market integration. We may assume that the value of institutionalized cultural capital is relatively undisputed in the country in which an educational title is institutionally recognized. Even in a culturally heterogeneous world, we may expect some degree of national standardization, as the standardization of education is a core reason for nation state formation (Gellner 1993). The argument of human capital theory therefore is applicable to some extent: human capital theory states that the accumulation of knowledge increases work productivity and, in turn, is reflected in an individual’s level of earnings.4 Income differentials between the native and foreignborn populations are generally said to be caused by migrants’ holding educational titles from abroad. Potential employers cannot know the exact value of a title that is institutionalized cultural capital in a different nation state (Spence 1974).5 As long as migrants have not yet adjusted to labour markets in their country of settlement (Aydemir and Skuterud 2005), we may rationally expect some loss in value when educational titles are transported across national borders. Yet whatever exceeds this rationally expected loss is, in human capital theory, “taste for discrimination” (Becker 1973): it is economically irrational in an interest-driven market and should disappear with better information.

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Nevertheless, the human capital approach is incomplete, even if restricted to institutionalized cultural capital. As we have seen in chapter 5, not only are “tastes for discrimination” based on the preferences of individual actors, but legal exclusion is extensively institutionalized by the system of the nation state. For example, in some (regulated) professions, recognition of educational titles is delegated to professional associations by the state. As professional associations have little incentive to engage in a rational assessment of the value of foreign titles, they tend to protect their members’ labour market from foreign competition. For similar reasons, nation states often bar some categories of (unwanted) migrants from labour market access for longer periods of time. This results in a depreciation of what are now outdated educational certificates. We have termed processes of this kind “legal” exclusion, but it should be clear that generalized legal exclusion feeds symbolic exclusion, too. It is hard to imagine an employer who would not start to treat foreign degrees with added scepticism in an environment in which the state and state-sponsored agencies do so on a regular, institutionally sanctioned basis. Not only is the depreciation of foreign educational certificates then a matter of “lack of information,” but it is also fed by institutionalized discrimination. If the formal recognition of educational titles is very complicated – as in all the countries in our study – and if a significant proportion of migrants struggles with legal barriers – as in Germany and Turkey – employers internalize disrespect for foreigners’ educational titles (see Girard and Bauder 2007). The cultural capital approach also offers additional insight into the second form of cultural capital, embodied cultural capital.6 Embodied cultural capital is tied to a particular person, who acquires it through long socialization and educational processes. The embodied aspects of cultural capital include generalized practical orientations (such as “soft skills”), particular tastes (such as a specific sense of humour), and even a way of carrying one’s body in social situations (“hexis”), and a “sense of one’s place” (Goffman 1951, 300). Particularly, the habitual orientations that a child internalizes during socialization respond not only to a nationally specific system of cultural values but also to the economic, social, and symbolic position of the child and its family. The embodied cultural capital of migrants and their children may therefore lose value as a result of two different processes. First, as a result of recent migration, it may be culturally different and therefore may not be recognized and understood. Second, as a result of the lower-class position afforded many newcomers (Portes and Rumbaut 2001), it may respond

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to the necessities of a lower social position and therefore be seen as “low value.” Both aspects, clearly, are intertwined. Let us take a closer look at the first concern. Anyone crossing national boundaries will usually begin using a different language and enter new social networks. But this is not necessarily so, as elites have for a long time cultivated transnational practices and the globalization of media and higher education increasingly transports even subtleties of language and habitus across the globe. Nonetheless, migrants often cross cultural and network boundaries, and this action results in their habitus appearing differently. We know from research about social distance (Bogardus 1925; Bottero and Prandy 2003) and insider-outsider relations (Elias and Scotson 1994) that differences of this kind are immediately evaluated socially. This means that even small differences may evolve into strong group antagonism if they are politicized (Wimmer 2008). In the end, even the children and grandchildren of migrants may be treated as different, as long as they are still visible. On the second concern, assimilation into lower-class positions, the impact of racial and ethnic discrimination on a person’s ability to acquire embodied cultural capital is negative. The connection is obvious when migrants are economically poor (after arrival) and their children are socialized in impoverished neighbourhoods and substandard educational institutions (Portes and Zhou 1993; Waldinger and Feliciano 2004). However, there may also be a more subtle connection. If the right of certain groups to participate as equals is disputed on a long-term basis, the result is negative racist symbolic capital (Weiß 2006b, 2010b, 2012), which also lowers the groups’ social position and affects their habitus. For example, racialized outsiders have to develop practical orientations that are able to handle the impact of subtle threats and ambiguities. As a result, practices that work for them may differ significantly from the practices of racial insiders. This expectation has been formulated theoretically by Bourdieu when discussing situations in which social risers try to adapt to the standards of their acquired class but never gain the sovereignty that is an integral part of upperclass habitus. In a similar vein, Sartre (1965) argues about anti-Semitism that anti-Semites’ demand for assimilation is ambiguous, as assimilated Jews can never be sure that they will not be “recognized” as Jews after all. These theoretical considerations are substantiated by recent psychological studies about discriminated groups struggling with the threat of being stereotyped (Steele 1997; Steele and Aronson 1995). Stereotype threat has been shown to lower test achievements, which have a

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negative effect on a person’s ability to acquire institutionalized cultural capital. Other research on minorities’ response to symbolic exclusion (Butero and Levine 2009; Essed 1991) also gives us an idea of how much energy visible minorities7 need in order to cope with racism.8 It is analytically meaningless and methodologically impossible to distinguish between “incomprehension” of the value of foreign cultural capital and “discrimination” in this context (Weiß 2006b). We therefore resort to a constructivist perspective on cultural capital, which emphasizes that cultural capital is discursively and institutionally reproduced under conditions of symbolic exclusion: established systems of racial classifications affect the cultural capital of the affected groups in multiple ways. Nevertheless, the relational nature of cultural capital also means that migrants are not only victims of symbolic struggles; they themselves are involved in the public recognition and evaluation of their capital. They can engage in self-marginalization from mainstream society, or they can challenge dominant forms of symbolic exclusion and the status assigned to them. Even though ethnicity often is associated with a negative impact of symbolic exclusion in the labour market, keep in mind that group identity must not necessarily be attached to forms of ethnic discrimination (Calhoun 1994). Symbolic struggle can also result in the appreciation rather than the depreciation of group identity and its perceived impact on social capital. In Germany, for example, skills in the languages of the guest worker communities are increasingly seen as valuable after migrant communities have criticized the low numbers of migrant employees in public administration. In this respect, we conceptualize ethnicity as an identity marker in classificatory struggles that can be both disabling and empowering for migrants; ethnicity can be experienced both as a form of exclusion exerted by mainstream society and as a strategic resource to improve one’s position in the labour market. When researching migrants’ success in the labour market, we cannot neatly distinguish between the value of institutionalized cultural capital and racial discrimination. Instead – and from a Bourdieuian perspective – we have to acknowledge that the value of cultural capital is contested and decided upon in symbolic struggles, which in turn respond to legal exclusion. In the discussion that follows, we take a closer look at the impact of symbolic struggles on labour market integration. We focus on ethnicity and to some extent visibility, as these identity markers are particularly relevant for the evaluation of migrants’ cultural capital in the labour market and as these markers remain relevant for the second

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generation, too. In this regard, we conceptualize ethnicity as a classifying category by which the cultural capital of groups is evaluated in particular contexts.

Methodological Challenges Studies of racial discrimination in the labour market often follow the human capital approach, and they have continuously struggled with “measuring” the exact impact of racial discrimination on immigrants and minorities (Hier and Walby 2006). From the perspective of the human capital approach, it is expected that the labour market reacts rationally and uses migrants’ human capital, their educational and professional experiences, by providing them with opportunities to use their skills (Ferrer and Riddell 2008). Accordingly, research in this tradition focuses on statistically measurable productivity-related factors (e.g., levels of education and experience, language proficiency, length of stay in the country, etc.) and relates them to labour market achievements of particular groups. Economic disadvantages for immigrants – such as substantially lower wages and higher unemployment rates – are often attributed to a transition period or gradual adaptation and assimilation.9 Discrimination and racism are then accounted for in terms of a residual category that cannot be explained by other – more rational – explanations. However, when group-specific economic disparities in the labour market persist and are perpetuated, even into the next generation, statistical analysis built on the human capital approach faces considerable conceptual limitations. In this case, negative attitudes towards “foreigners” or immigrants are considered, albeit as a residual category of what in a strict sense cannot be explained within the logic of the model. The methodological challenges become apparent in a statement from a large study by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, elaborating on how to measure the “evidence of discrimination”: As stated, in principle only the “residual amount,” that is, the measured disadvantage, after taking all other determining factors into account, displays the actual degree of discrimination. To put it differently, to measure discrimination sensu strictu one has to establish, first, the average gross differences in employment, unemployment, earnings, occupational attainment, etc. between migrants, minorities and the majority population. Then, these have to be adjusted for the influence of relevant (mainly human

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capital) variables in order to identify the net differences in labour market achievements (sometimes also called ethnic penalty). (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2003, 51)

In this approach the fact that discrimination early in the life course may result in lower human capital is disregarded, and “net discrimination” appears to be based on wholly irrational behaviour. A more comprehensive concept of “discrimination” is, however, extremely difficult to measure on the basis of panel data. In addition, the prevailing approach to investigating discrimination or racism is prone to reproducing, and thus reifying, the negative ethnic markers. These problems of scientific data collection have considerable repercussions for publicly framing the issue and developing policies in the field (Quillian 2006; Simon 2005; Wrench and Modood 2001). One way to address these challenges to empirical research is experimental studies, in which two identical job applications differing only in ethnic and/or gender markers are sent out to employers. A recent experiment in Australia used an online job-finding website and focused on positions that did not require university education. The researchers found “clear evidence of discrimination, with Chinese and Middle Easterners both having to submit at least 50% more applications in order to receive the same number of call backs as Anglo candidates” (Booth, Leigh, and Varganova 2010, 15; for a similar study on the job market in Canada, see Oreopoulos and Dechief 2011). Large-scale audit discrimination experiments have rarely been conducted in Germany, but one such study funded by the International Labour Organization shows that applicants with a Turkish name experience a significant discrimination rate when applying for unskilled or semi-skilled positions (Zegers de Bijl 2000). In 19 per cent of the telephone contacts fulfilling strict control conditions, the job or a personal interview was offered to applicants with a German name and not to applicants with a Turkish name. Field experiments of this kind are cost-intensive, and they can look only at the early and legally non-binding stages of application procedures. As highly skilled labour markets are much more specialized and dependent on professional social networks, it is virtually impossible to conduct audit discrimination experiments in highly skilled labour markets. Also, these experiments are ethically problematic because experiments involving face-to-face encounters result in ethnic minority researchers experiencing repeated incidents of confirmed discrimination (Goldberg, Mourinho, and Kulke 1995; Riach and Rich 2004). Nevertheless,

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experimental studies add critical insight to secondary analyses of survey data, as they can attribute the discrimination of minorities clearly to factors that are unrelated to individual productivity. Both panel data analyses and experimental field studies share the assumption that discrimination is clearly different from and acting in addition to the functional logic of an interest- and profit-driven labour market. As we have argued above, it is hardly plausible that the accumulation and evaluation of embodied cultural capital can be kept free from symbolic struggle. Instead we should conceptualize the value of cultural capital as determined by symbolic in- and exclusion, among other factors.10 A methodological response to this kind of conceptualization will redirect the analytical lens towards how the meaning of ascribed ethnic identities is negotiated in social arenas and what kind of structuring effects symbolic struggle has in legitimizing social inequality and exclusion. Detecting forms of institutional or systemic discrimination in the workforce remains a methodological challenge; studies that shed light on employers’ recruitment practices (assessing qualifications, etc.) have repeatedly pointed to the subtlety of discriminatory – discursively reproduced – practices (for instance, Rydgren 2004; Moss and Tilly 2001; Tilbury and Colic-Peisker 2006).11 Our approach builds on these studies. However, it shifts the analytical focus to the biographical narratives of (potential) employees (Essed 1988, 1991; Forstenlechner and Al-Waqfi 2010; Shih 2002) as a particularly fruitful way of reconstructing these experiences of having been exposed to discrimination based on an ascribed group identity. Ethnicity or culture may be seen as constructed and arbitrary boundary markers. Nevertheless – as stipulated by the Thomas theorem (Thomas and Thomas 1928) – these markers are real in their consequences for those exposed to them. A conceptualmethodological approach to symbolic exclusion therefore has to tackle the perception of racial discrimination. The reaction that discrimination provokes is critically shaped by how individuals interpret their experience and, in the moment in which experiences of this kind become collective, they are bound to influence the recognition value of cultural capital. If the value of cultural capital is determined not only by its functionality in the labour market but also by individual and collective symbolic struggles, we must expect the experience of symbolic exclusion to differ between that of, for example, an engineer like Mr Mehra, who moved to Canada after seven years of work experience in Pakistan, and

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that of a child of Pakistani parents who received his or her education in Canada. Having obtained the education abroad creates uncertainty, whether potential employers insist on “Canadian work experience” because a good knowledge of local practice is necessary on the job, or they simply do not want to hire an Indian. In our cases Mr Mehra with his engineering degree or Mr Pillai with his computer degree obtained in Pakistan and India respectively find themselves working in basic jobs in the service industry or as a parking lot attendant respectively after years in Canada. In contrast, for someone of foreign descent educated in Canada, there is certainty that his or her qualifications and skills compare well to those of colleagues, but the question remains whether he or she might be treated differently from others on the basis of visibility and how this might shape educational and professional opportunities. In this respect, contrasting the experiences of second-generation migrants with the experiences of those who received their education abroad sheds important light on the structuring effects of symbolic (non-)recognition. In the case of second-generation migrants, the value of a constructionist and experience-related approach to symbolic exclusion is especially obvious (Pendakur and Pendakur 2007). While the wage gap between migrants such as Mr Mehra or Mr Pillai and the Canadian-born population could be explained with factors that are unrelated to discrimination (such as language ability, non-recognition of credentials, loss of networks, etc.), these possible explanations can no longer serve if patterns of social inequality are reproduced in a generation of the visible minority that was born and educated in the country itself (see Kustec, Thompson, and Xue 2007). In this chapter, we therefore broaden our focus from the experience of the highly skilled who migrated as adults to include persons who grew up in the country as children of migrants and achieved an academic degree but who still may feel some degree of symbolic exclusion. First, this enables us, to understand whether experiences of exclusion are tied primarily to a particular period in the status passage of migrants (for instance, the immediate transition after migration) or if symbolic exclusion works in the long term. For many of our interviewees, the latter is the case. Even though they clearly want to downplay experiences of discrimination, such experiences resurface in their narrations as a persistent feature that runs through various life phases. Second, when members of the second generation point to practices that they perceive as symbolic exclusion, we can be relatively certain that these practices are not connected to other “unobserved” differences in cultural capital. As we expect the experience of symbolic

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exclusion to differ between the first and the second generation, we identify problematic situations on the basis of accounts by the second generation, but then go on to ask whether similar experiences can be found among newly arrived migrants, too. One critical conceptual-methodological challenge of investigating racial discrimination from a qualitative perspective is to reconstruct this experience on the individual or group level. At first sight, one could argue that the reliance on interviews falls into the trap of surveys that seek to solicit information about the experience of racial discrimination:12 What do individuals refer to exactly when being prompted to reflect on the experience of racial discrimination? To what degree does a different understanding of the phenomenon in question produce incoherent and, in qualitative interviews, rather impressionistic data that are highly subjective? To what degree is it legitimate to draw more general conclusions from such accounts? In a nutshell, the regular criticism of qualitative studies with a relatively small sample is that they provide anecdotal rather than systematic evidence of a phenomenon such as racial discrimination. We address this basic challenge in two ways: First, as suggested by the documentary method, our interpretative approach, we reconstruct the experience of racial discrimination on the basis of a reflective interpretation of our narrative interviews. This allows us to understand the implicit meaning of narrative accounts addressing forms of social and symbolic exclusion rather than taking individuals’ narrations at face value. This is where the analytical perspective on the narrative interviews is most promising and, at the same time, most challenging: the reconstruction of documentary meaning and the comparison of many interviews provides an opportunity to detect the occurrence and effects of racial discrimination in a manner that goes beyond how the interviewee sees him- or herself in this category. At the same time, however, this requires the scholar to interpret the often indirect accounts of how the interviewees have been exposed to such practices. For example, we refrain from asking our interviewees about discrimination early in the interview unless they themselves hint in that direction. Nevertheless, by constructing typologies on the process of labour market inclusion, we can see if and to what extent ethnicity becomes relevant for selfperception and/or actual labour market trajectories. For example, interviewees who express a high degree of legal and other duress also talk more explicitly about discrimination (see Ofner 2011b). Others assert that they have overcome instances of symbolic exclusion, but we can

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reconstruct from the interviews that they are – to the detriment of their professional perspectives – channelled into ethnic labour markets. Analysing and reconstructing life course experiences in this manner provides a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how and in what social context a group identity is experienced, under what circumstances it becomes relevant for the professional pathways of migrants, and how it relates to other dimensions of a person’s social existence. Second, on the basis of our comparative analyses, we can also assess whether and how a specific type of experienced discrimination is context-specific. For this purpose we focus on two national contexts: Canada and Germany.13 Some ways of thematizing discrimination say a great deal about how public discourse in these countries is experienced by migrants in various life-world and professional contexts. Some experiences of discrimination and struggles for recognition are found mainly in the educational trajectories of the second generation, and others appear to be specific for the negotiation of labour market positions. In the section below on meso-social contexts, the main emphasis will be on how the dynamic of symbolic inclusion and exclusion not only directly but also indirectly affects the value of cultural capital and thereby the labour market position. We then consider the structural effects of migrants’ strategies addressing racial discrimination in the labour market: mainly class-based coping strategies that migrants develop and the ambivalent channelling into ethnic niches of the labour market. In our presentation of empirical findings, we refer to data drawn from the subsample of first-generation immigrants in Canada and Germany, and – to highlight aspects of symbolic exclusion – of second-generation immigrants in Germany. 6.2

Nationally Distinct Modes of Thematizing Symbolic Exclusion

How do migrants react when being confronted with symbolic exclusion? And what impact does symbolic exclusion – intentional or unintentional – have on migrants’ educational and professional career paths? A first step towards understanding symbolic exclusion is to investigate the ways in which such experiences are articulated in the narrative interviews. While we cannot neglect individual differences in the perception of symbolic exclusion, we are more interested in the impact of social structures. Legal exclusion, obviously, is one factor that affects how perceptions of discrimination differ between individuals,

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but also between nation states. Ofner (2010), for example, shows for interviewees in Germany, Turkey, and Canada that modes of thematization clearly depend on the general degree of disadvantage and exclusion experienced, especially by migrants who immigrated during their adult lives. In our sample, some of the most vivid and dramatic accounts of exposure to racial discrimination are those from migrants with a precarious legal status in Germany or Turkey (see chapter 5). In the narratives of these interviewees, the sense of being deprived of a stable legal status (most pronounced among undocumented migrants) is often intimately associated with incidents of rejection or discrimination, based on the individual being a “foreigner” in daily life. These incidents are spurred on in turn by the refugee or asylum seeker’s degree of social isolation from mainstream society. One’s legal status often limits interaction (most importantly in the professional realm) with those outside the individual’s own social group. This contributes to the institutional context in which the sense of symbolic exclusion is articulated, and migrants are perceived in negative terms. However, our internationally comparative perspective also shows that legal exclusion is not the only factor distinguishing nation-state contexts, and that struggles about symbolic exclusion do not merely mirror degrees of legal exclusion: intuitively, one would assume that the experience of racial discrimination is more pronounced in European countries than in an immigrant society such as Canada, with its broad commitment to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity (Hier and Bolaria 2007; Schmidtke 2009).14 Still, our findings paint a somewhat different picture: while discriminatory or racist behaviour is discussed in one form or another across the board, there is remarkable difference between the national contexts under investigation here. In the German sample, we detected primarily an indirect or implicit reference to forms of symbolic exclusion. It is – at least at first sight – surprising to find that among the interviewees from Canada there is a far more explicit thematization of racial discrimination, at least by those who receive their education outside the country; our first-generation interviewees are more articulate and less ambivalent in describing unambiguously, for instance, forms of exclusion from professional opportunities as discriminatory. Yet it is noteworthy that they do this more as a general reflection on racially motivated inequities in society at large rather than as directly linked to their personal experiences. How are we to interpret this finding? Are we to take the manifest evidence in the interviews at face value and extrapolate that indeed racial discrimination is more

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articulated in the Canadian context? Clearly such an interpretation would be short-sighted. When analysing the interviews from an internationally comparative perspective, it is critical to consider that the biographical narratives are deeply embedded in national discourses. It is in those national contexts that expectations about migrants and the host society are formulated and images of the ethnocultural other are popularized. As a result, we find nationally distinct modes of addressing discrimination in the accounts of our interviewees, which in itself allows us to draw some tentative conclusions about the structural environment in which migrants seek labour market inclusion.

Scandalizing Racial Discrimination: The Accusatory Mode in Canada There are two distinct features of modes of speaking about the experience of racial discrimination in the interviews conducted mainly in Canada. First, the accounts of those who were educated and socialized in Canada and those who lived through the migration experience after their formative education are strikingly different. In the interviews with second-generation migrants, it becomes manifest that they no longer even consider themselves to be “migrants” (in some cases, the term minority was used instead), nor do they consider this status as critical to how they conduct their (professional) life in Canada. Second, the highly skilled individuals who entered Canada as adults address discrimination directly and (compared to those interviewed in Germany) explicitly. Racism is not tagged as a general characteristic of Canadian society, however, but as a way of denouncing context-specific experiences predominantly, if not exclusively, in the realm of the migrant’s educational and professional life. One critical issue that surfaced repeatedly was the tension between Canada’s endorsement of ethnocultural diversity and the migrants’ experience of this diversity becoming a vehicle for justifying marginalization, if not outright discrimination. Mr Khan, a naturalized immigrant from India with a Sikh background, who came to Canada in his adult years as a trained accountant, illustrates this perspective: mr khan: But here everybody is equal. interviewer: Right. mr khan: But here thing is also, uh, I felt certain people get more, certain people get- if I am with a turban, and somebody else, so they see, uh, I

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am at customer service, and how people will see. So they will not exactly, directly say no to me, but I will not get job. interviewer: Oh, OK. mr khan: So, because of my way of, my religion or whatever, so I wear this turban, they said, you look odd. You know, other peoples look similar or whatever. Uh, I when I work with one of my employer, I don’t want to say name, he said you will work with this or without this? I felt very bad, I said, of course I will work with this on, it is my religion, I want to wear that. And he said OK. But, uh, there are … interviewer: Differences. mr khan: There are differences. So, it’s not open. It’s not open. People don’t app- don’t say it directly to you, uh, “You are Indian” or whatever, but inside somewhere they feel if, the other guy is from that religion, uh, OK.

The opening statement mirrors Canada’s strong, legally enshrined commitment to race equality and non-discrimination,15 as well as the socially accepted expectation that “everybody is equal.” Yet, according to Mr Khan’s account, there seems to be a disjuncture between a normative emphasis on respect for different cultures and the aim of equal integration of immigrants on the one hand and practices on the other hand. This passage underlines two structural features of thematizing racial discrimination in Canada. First, there is a sense of (politically and socially salient) entitlement resulting from the normative expectations of race equality and the public recognition of difference. The fact that one employer addresses the turban and still accepts it as “OK” is indicative. Second, it therefore is not amazing that, and to some degree undermining the vigour of narrations of racial discrimination, our interviewees struggle to find the appropriate language to speak about incidents in their own life: “They will not exactly, directly say no to me, but I will not get job.” Nevertheless, Mr Khan’s narration shows a clear intention to put a name to discrimination. If Canadian society is by definition multicultural, then the existence of racism and xenophobia that presuppose a strong sense of a dominant ethnocultural group seems almost paradoxical. Yet there are many scholarly accounts of racist practices in Canada and a persistent sense of an exclusionary white Anglo-Saxon cultural elite (Nieguth 1999). Critics of the Canadian multiculturalism model therefore argue that its primary focus on encouraging cultural diversity tends

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to obscure the discriminatory (sometimes even racist) practices that immigrants are exposed to in their daily life and their professional careers (Satzewich 1998).16 Henry and Tator (2002) argue that, despite societal norms of tolerance and diversity, a covert “democratic” racism plagues Canadian society.17 Also, the policies adopted under the heading of multiculturalism have come under scrutiny. By emphasizing cultural difference, multiculturalism policy can unintentionally contribute to the “ghettoization” of ethnic minorities. Some argue that, rather than actively striving for equality of all citizens, regardless of their origin, such a policy sustains (potentially discriminatory) boundaries between ethnically or culturally defined communities (Abu-Laban 1999; Bissoondath 1994).18 As we analyse our narrative interviews in Canada and reflect on the discussion in the literature, we can shed some initial light on the supposed paradox: in Canada, modern multiculturalism and the commitment to legal entitlements of minorities have established socially accepted expectations. Migrants often come to Canada expecting to find a social reality that corresponds to the self-image of this society: a high degree of tolerance, if not public support for cultural diversity. This shapes the narratives of our interviewees. Experiences of racial marginalization or discrimination are encouraged to surface in the Canadian context; they can count on discursive resonance in society. The accusatory tone of the narratives reflects the fact that racial discrimination is widely perceived to be scandalous and potentially subject to legal prosecution. This might also be why in the Canadian interviews there is a notable emphasis on experiences of institutional19 or organizational racism. Since there is a strong normative expectation about the acceptance of cultural diversity in public life, discriminatory attitudes and practices cannot be voiced openly. More often they are disguised by “rational” institutional routines. In addition, the Canadian macro-structural context is distinct not only in normative commitment but also in the legal status of migrants. In contrast to the often precarious legal status of migrants, in particular in Germany, newcomers to Canada can normally enjoy a permanent residence status and thus a legal standing comparable to that of the native-born population. This again has repercussions for how experiences of racial discrimination are thematized and framed: full legal inclusion tends to strengthen a sense of entitlement for full inclusion and fair treatment.

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Discussing Discriminatory Experiences Indirectly: The Conciliatory Mode in Germany Explicitly describing discriminatory practices, as well as presenting and scandalizing them as intolerable behaviour, are largely absent from the interviews with migrants and members of the second generation in Germany – if the migrants have a stable legal status. As discussed above, migrants with a very disadvantaged legal status in Germany and Turkey differ greatly from this general assessment as they complain about the interconnected impact of legal and symbolic exclusion to a high degree (Pusch 2008a; Ofner 2010). The discourse of migrants with legally equal standing in Germany differs substantially from that of adult migrants in Canada, as the mode of discussing symbolic exclusion is shaped by a palpable absence of framing racial discrimination as a systemic issue that would require political or legal intervention. Consider the narrative of Dr Nazar, the medical doctor of Turkish descent who succeeded in entering the medical profession after coming to Germany after his university education (see chapter 4). As the Turkish minority is known to experience some degree of symbolic exclusion, the interviewer prompts Dr Nazar towards the end of the interview: interviewer: Ehm (1 sec. pause) looking back over the time you spent in Germany ehm were you eh confronted with forms of discrimination? Can you say something (1 sec. pause) about this? dr nazar: No (2 sec. pause). In a direct way I never experienced this [breathes] Ehm OK when I say something (.) about this it is more like eh speculation. No. (2 sec. pause) Well, directly I haven’t experienced [breathes in]. Ahhpf Well if I something (.) ah tell it is rather ah speculation I mean, [breathes in] ahh when people see me or ah talk or something [breathes in] then it is like [breathes out], they think at first, ahh either you’re German or maybe Italian or French or something also in Turkey, ahh they don’t really take me as a Turk, as (.) ah ah first effect. And when I tell them (.) sometimes (.) I notice it is (.) yes, some disappointment maybe or something like that but, [breathes in] I (would) not really mention this as a discrimination or ah a- as negative ah (.) not really.

This quote is typical in that Dr Nazar needs a prompt in order to discuss discrimination – in contrast to the majority of our Canadian

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interviewees, who talk of it of their own volition. Dr Nazar’s account also is typical of first-generation immigrants to Germany enjoying (almost) equal legal status by his explicit denial of discrimination. Both at the beginning and at the end of this short statement, Dr Nazar points out that he has not experienced discrimination or that he is reluctant to characterize the experience as discrimination. The account is typical in that Dr Nazar does narrate an experience of subtle devaluation: in the moment that he tells people that he is neither German nor from Italy or France (countries that are held in higher esteem in German discourse), he “sometimes” sees “some disappointment maybe.” We could take this entire statement at face value and agree with Dr Nazar that an occasional feeling of his Turkishness “maybe” being disappointing to his interaction partners is a minor concern. Sometimes this pattern of narration does, however, frame a more explicit discriminatory event that is downplayed in a manner that we interpret as a strong desire to be non-confrontational and polite about incidents of discrimination. This is particularly obvious when we compare this kind of discourse to that found in Canada. In the interview of firstgeneration immigrants to Germany (who are not faced with strong legal exclusion), experiences of discrimination are addressed as a matter of private, individualized encounters. As such, racial discrimination appears almost exclusively in the form of implicit content in our interviewees’ accounts. In marked contrast to the dominant way of thematizing this issue in the interviews conducted in Canada, the accounts of migrants enjoying equal legal standing in Germany are shaped by a high degree of hesitation when openly addressing modes of racial discrimination. If expressed, these experiences are narrated only in an indirect mode and, at times, even with an appeasing or understanding tone. The coping strategy of the migrants is rarely accusatory, as in the Canadian context; the recurrent statement is that single cases of symbolic exclusion exist, but we should not make any generalization about structural patterns in society and the labour market. One interpretation of these distinct forms of thematizing racial discrimination could again relate our findings in the narrative interviews to the broader sociocultural context in which they are situated: in Germany, a critique of racism as a socially and politically salient issue is rarely part of public discourse.20 We suggest that the fact that discrimination is hardly ever addressed in our individual narrations reflects a public discomfort with recognizing the inequitable treatment of migrants and minorities. Racially motivated discrimination is only

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occasionally publicly scandalized. While the open expression of racism is banned as illegitimate, discursive practices have normalized negative stereotypes of migrants and minorities in European societies (Wodak and Reisigl 1999; Wodak 2009). Van Dijk (1992, 1993) describes this provocatively as a “denial of racism” by elites that allows negative racial and ethnic stereotypes and exclusionary attitudes to be reproduced in public discourse. It is within this discursive context that our interviewees make sense of their own experiences. From a methodological perspective, the issue of “symbolic violence” underlines the difficulty of studying the experiential effects of racial discrimination. When interviewees refuse to be depicted in the position of victim and come up with excuses for the perpetrators, this is not merely a psychological coping mechanism. It also responds to conditions of symbolic violence in which the excluded lack the language to point towards their exclusion. This is an effect of what Bourdieu refers to as “symbolic violence”: the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents, who then take the social order to be “normal” and just (Bourdieu 1991; Jedwab 2004; Wacquant 1993; Weiß 2006a, 2010b, 2012). The national context, with its culturally and politically sanctioned discourses and images, is one critical determinant for the way in which experiences of racial discrimination are articulated. Yet, as some of the interviewees from Germany will show later in this chapter, other important contextual variables shape this articulation. For instance, investigating this dimension of symbolic exclusion, Ofner (2010) shows how the willingness and ability to express experiences of racial discrimination is linked to a person’s professional status. Our narrative interviews underline that second-generation migrants who have successfully completed their university degrees and can count on a higher social status through professional achievement feel more comfortable talking about their personal experiences of societal forms of discrimination. It is not by accident that in the German context pronounced accounts of racial discrimination came from migrants who were born in Germany and experienced marked success in their educational and professional careers. We have so far discussed the impact of nation-specific contexts on symbolic struggles. While the spatial extension of symbolic struggles and their outcome may be nationwide, such struggles can also be more local, as in, for example, individual migrants’ attempts to negotiate for the recognition of their skills and knowledge. Symbolic struggles

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can also be inter- and transnational (Bauder 2008; Lusis and Bauder 2010), as, for example, when migrants refer to a post-national citizenship (Soysal 1994). Through migration, the context for defining the content and value of cultural capital changes dramatically, even in the low but rising number of professional fields that assume the full transnational convertibility of educational titles and embodied skills (Iredale 2001). We therefore supplement our analysis of the national context of symbolic struggles with a different angle, the meso-social contexts to which migrants refer when they talk about symbolic exclusion. We do not have systematic evidence for all relevant meso-social contexts in all countries under scrutiny, but the prevalence or absence of some concerns and contexts for discrimination in specific countries does give us some idea of the issues at hand. 6.3

Context-Dependent Experience of Symbolic Exclusion

Non-recognition, prejudice, and discrimination are a pervasive feature of contemporary society. Our interviews provide narratives of this, told with the respective individual’s sensitivity and awareness. These individual narratives are embedded in nationally distinct sensitivities and the public’s attitude towards discrimination in particular nation states. We also know from Ofner’s (2011b) analyses that the legal and social deprivation of individual migrants adds to their indignation and willingness to talk about discrimination. There are fewer studies that also consider the impact of meso-social contexts (Gomolla and Radtke 2002; Moss and Tilly 2001). Difference in context matters, as migrants may, for example, experience symbolic exclusion in the public sphere but feel comfortable in their workplace and personal networks. Also, the long-term impact of symbolic exclusion takes a distinct shape, depending on whether it is embedded in the standard practice of educational institutions or based mainly on interpersonal interaction. In this chapter we take a closer look at the meso-social contexts structuring experiences of symbolic exclusion. First, we show how stereotypes prevailing in public discourse create a normalcy of symbolic exclusion that can affect migrants unexpectedly in day-to-day encounters. In Germany, we have found migrants who know that they will be stigmatized if they do not manage to remain invisible or at least be associated with high-status migrant groups. While stereotypes in public discourse have an indirect effect on migrants’ self-perception and life chances, the contestation of cultural capital by administrators and in

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schools clearly has a direct impact on educational outcome and thereby on trajectories into the labour market. The chapter closes with a description of symbolic exclusion in the labour market, which is a concern in Canada, and in Germany as well.

Public Images and Everyday Racism Public discourse is shaped by distinct patterns of portraying migrants in general, and with reference to specific ethnically, culturally, or religiously defined groups, but it does not have an impact on daily life directly and at all times. Rather, public discourse provides a narrative context in which potent images of migrants are generated and reproduced.21 These images form a reservoir of relatively enduring classifications that can, but need not, be activated during everyday interactions. For instance, Ms Guzman-Berg, a Brazilian lawyer who migrated to Germany after her degree, tells this story of an encounter with a German national in the subway system: You know once was quite funny, (.) well now I find funny then not really. (.) I was on the (.) S-Bahn (.) and (1 sec. pause) then sit a man next to me and he says (.) somehow (.) he start asking questions you know, (1) Well hallo, I think I have a newspaper in hand and he commented on something there and then I (speak) [breathes in] and then I (answered) something and then he asked, “Oh you are a foreigner, where are you from?” (1 sec. pause) Then I said from “Brazil” (.) and then he (.) asked in quite an ordinary voice, “Oh, you are a prostitute?” I say (.), “No, not really. I’m a lawyer.” (.) You know [laughs] (but) that was such a shock [laughs] not any woman coming from Brazil [breathes in] are prostitute- (.) well you know (.) are other (.) do also other things you know.

This narration is typical of the way in which everyday racism is experienced and of the way it can be gendered. Ms Guzman-Berg and her acquaintance start a conversation on the basis of the newspaper that Ms Guzman-Berg is reading. We learn later in the interview that Ms Guzman-Berg is not visible as a foreigner, so it appears likely that her acquaintance notes her accent only during the conversation. What follows is quite interesting, because Ms Guzman-Berg states that the acquaintance asks normal questions, yet in retrospect the episode is a shock to her; we can see from the narration that the content of the questions became increasingly offensive. First the acquaintance notes,

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“You are a foreigner. Where are you from?” Questions of this kind are discussed as depreciating, if not racializing, in the German literature about second-generation migrants (Battaglia, Jacobs, and Wießmeier 2000; Weiß 1998). Coming from abroad, Ms Guzman-Berg does not see this question as a problem and goes on to answer that she is from Brazil. The acquaintance then wants to confirm that she is a prostitute. This question clearly comes as a surprise to Ms Guzman-Berg, as this crude categorization stands in stark contrast to the perceived normalcy of the conversation. It is worth noting that the classification is characterized not only by ethnic but also by gender stereotypes. Ms Guzman-Berg confronts the insult by stating that, actually, she is a lawyer. That the stereotyping comes out of the blue, completely unexpectedly, and in an otherwise “normal” conversation contributes to its potency. Nevertheless, Ms Guzman-Berg can laugh about the incident in retrospect, which is likely the result of the generally good status that she experiences (Ofner 2011b). Everyday negotiations about visibility are in line with the general reluctance by many of our interviewees in Germany to openly address everyday racism, as discussed earlier in this chapter. These migrants deal quite efficiently with symbolic exclusions, but they avoid open conflict and claims-making. This is especially relevant for some groups that are highly stigmatized in public discourse but not necessarily visible in day-to-day interaction, such as the Turks and/or Muslims. We mentioned above that Dr Nazar talked about discrimination only after being prompted by the interviewer. Referring to his first time in Germany, he does, however, mention that he wandered around as a “tourist” and noted then that he was treated with friendliness as long as he approached people in the public space speaking English and they did not see him as “Turkish.” Dr Nazar is outspoken about not “necessarily” describing this experience in terms of discrimination. Yet the symbolic degradation he experiences based on his Turkish background is tangible in some sections of his interview. If particular groups of migrants and minorities are defined by phenotypical identity markers or cultural practices, the risk of their being depicted stereotypically is high. What we find in the case of Dr Nazar is how, among other factors, the legacy of the recruitment under the guest worker category has established a public perception of Turkish migrants that is structured by images of belonging to a less privileged group in German society. These group-specific narratives and their significance for the experiences of our interviewees at times tend to reflect

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nationally specific perceptions of migrants that resonate with dominant political frames and deeply entrenched social experiences and perceptions.22 However, they also show similar features across national contexts. In the German context, it is the image of the Muslim migrant from Turkey that epitomizes those who are deemed “alien” (see also Kastoryano 2004).23 Coming from Southern Europe is not an issue as such, but negative stereotypes against Muslims are found here as well. What is striking about the impact of public discourse on everyday situations is the implicit normalcy of everyday behaviour that does not need to follow explicit rules but, more potent, a shared understanding of social reality condensed into systems of disposition (habitus). Essed (1991) points to the fact that the practice of symbolic exclusion in everyday life means that dominant groups take racism to be normal: “Everyday racism is the integration of racism into everyday situations through practices (cognitive and behavioural) that activate underlying power relations. This process must be seen as a continuum through which the integration of racism into everyday practices becomes part of the expected, of the unquestioned, and of what is seen as normal by the dominant group” (50). Bourdieu (1991) adds to this the recognition that symbolic power also involves acceptance by the dominated groups: “Symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it” (164).24 In the narrations of our interviewees – even among the second generation of migrants in Germany – a social reality of symbolic exclusion emerges as a normal practice that requires, rather than political attention, elaborate strategies of adaption and accommodation by minorities. In the interviews with the migrants in Germany, a recurrent pattern of struggling to blend in as much as possible indicates the degree to which such a cultural code is accepted as part of a normalized social practice. In the Canadian sample, there are incidences of internalized racism and of troubling encounters with individuals that show openly discriminatory behaviour (most prominently in the early school experience of visible minorities). Yet the set of interviews conducted in Canada is clearly distinct in the (limited) situational contexts (mostly peer interaction) in which they occur. In addition, the incidents of racial discrimination in the state bureaucracy or institutions of higher education, which we discuss below, do not appear at all in the narratives of our interviewees from Canada.

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The Implicit Normalcy of Symbolic Exclusion: Racial Discrimination in Institutional Settings It is difficult to show a clear-cut relation between everyday racism and the status passage into the labour market. Symbolic exclusion in institutions is quite a different matter, as negative institutional messages about migrants’ abilities and intrinsic worth have severe effects on usability of their cultural capital. In the interviews conducted in Germany, the institutional contexts in which racial discrimination is experienced vary considerably: they encompass the state bureaucracy discussed in this section as well as schools and institutions of the labour market. Also, the groups of migrants who discuss these respective contexts vary considerably. As mentioned above, the state bureaucracy is criticized mostly by migrants experiencing legal exclusion combined with symbolic exclusion (see also Ofner 2011b). Nevertheless, the experience of symbolic exclusion can be quite distinct at times. Illustrative is the case of Ms Orsolic, who leaves the former Yugoslavia during the civil war in the mid-1990s and migrates to Germany, and who was already discussed in chapter 4.6. As a refugee, she is first confronted with legal exclusion, but even when she can finally gain equal access to the labour market, she still faces severe challenges. According to her account, even though she is a trained economist with vocational experience, administrative staff members in the labour agency that is supposed to aid her search for employment do not even consider her request to have her qualifications recognized. Instead, they suggest accepting offers to work as a cleaning lady or as a caregiver for elders. Her account is similar to the ones found among many first-generation migrants who live under precarious legal circumstances in Germany: in those cases, it is difficult for the interpreter of the interviews to discern what can indeed be attributed to frustrating bureaucratic procedures and treatment by state authorities (experiences shared by many non-migrants as well) and what Ms Orsolic explicitly ascribes to discriminatory practices. This touches on a more general point that we will revisit in the concluding section of this chapter: we may be able to distinguish analytically between the functionalist logic of state regulations and the labour market (and the procedures that apply to migrants and their transition into the labour market) on the one hand, and, on the other, the symbolic (non-)recognition of their skills and qualifications based on ascribed group identities. But, in particular, in the narratives of those migrants who arrive with qualifications obtained abroad, the

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challenges involved in legal-administrative procedures of their migration experience and the symbolic dimension are deeply entangled: in their narratives, experiences of discrimination are regularly related directly to the experience of legal exclusion or professional restrictions in the labour market, which are often perceived as arbitrary forms of exclusion. One promising strategy to gain more direct insight into the symbolic-cultural dimension shaping labour integration is to focus on migrants of the second generation, for whom forms of legal exclusion or bureaucratic obstacles related to the status of being a migrant are practically non-existent. In the German interviews, a powerful repeated image is that of the Turkish guest workers and their children, who are not expected to master bureaucratic challenges effectively or to succeed in the school system (Skrobanek and Jobst 2010). Dr Moradi,25 a young doctor of Iranian descent who was born and raised in Germany, mentions this as a key experience along his educational and professional pathways. He comes from an academically trained family (his father is a medical doctor) that came to Germany as refugees. As someone who is not himself part of the guest worker immigration to Germany, he gives an account of his experience with a public administrator who processed his naturalization papers: “There are beautiful anecdotes on this the official in charge [handled], the naturalization papers well n- on the day of the naturalization and he made a joke which I found an impertinence to read a dictation (.) to me they had forced me to write down from the ahh from the [local newspaper anonymized by the authors] (…) and then I wrote it all down and ah then he said, ‘Well and but there you made a mistake.’ ‘No, this is not true there it was the newspaper to make a mistake,’ and I corrected it you know I was (.) was somewhat annoyed then.” The use of “forced me to” is an indication of how indignant Dr Moradi felt over having to write this German text. The fact that he was able to correct a sentence used in a German newspaper and that the administrator had to acknowledge his procedural mistake after the fact is to underline the absurdity of the situation. This incident and being immediately categorized as a migrant with a deficient command of German are of such importance to Dr Moradi that he mentions the event during his initial narration. In the next passage, he continues with a similar story about his encounter with the German armed forces when he was undergoing a medical examination: Immediately after the army physical was taken fetched this district recruiting form German Armed Forces because then I’m German citizen and am

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also obliged to serve in the Armed Forces and there under (.) degrees he filled in “secondary modern school qualification,” and that immediately without asking me. I said, “You know that I’m studying medicine. You can’t do this in Germany with a secondary modern school qualification.” an you, he looked funny and said, “Yes yes yes yes sorry,” and only then ticked university-track high school (.) you know these are these are you know minor things somehow ahh (.) which you can’t call this discriminating or you wouldn’t believe it after all he ticked “secondary modern school” if now you would tell him he would never get to it himself that it’s because my name is Aaraam Moradi because my hair is black and black yes I attended an advanced course in German literature [in the final two years of university-track high school].

This story is an indication of how forcefully Dr Moradi experiences the symbolic downgrading of his cultural capital: although the bureaucrat is perfectly aware that Dr Moradi studies medicine, and even though students of medicine must have completed a college-track school education with very good grades,26 the bureaucrat ticks off almost automatically the box for the lower pathway in German school education (Hauptschule). Here again the expectation that migrants from a particular background will be underachievers in the educational and professional world proves to be critical. The tendency in public discourse to view all migrants as part of the relatively disadvantaged group of guest workers provides the context for this sense of “normalcy.” Dr Moradi struggles with framing this experience, which, due to an assigned group identity, is shaped by the socially sanctioned expectation of underachievement. He states that “one” would not term this “discrimination”; rather he refers to it as “peanuts,” as things that are the way they are. To refer to it as discrimination would lend this experience a dramatic and scandalous undertone, which Dr Moradi does not seem to intend. Here the perspectives of those who are affected by the symbolic exclusion converge with those who exercise it. Both the perpetrator and the victim adhere to the same notion of normalcy. In the conclusion of his initial life story, Dr Moradi evaluates the cumulative impact of these incidents: “In Germany on the other hand it’s like this (.) this always being subtle you can never (.) grasp it (.) there’s always already such a mh you don’t belong is (.) that’s much more distinguished you can indeed emancipate from this and you can get rid of it and it’s possible but it’s always already such such such some burden is ahh (.) you know for people with my background that’s second-generation, educated, middle class,

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it’s always there (.) you will indeed always notice it when talking to people with a similar background.” What is remarkable about this passage is how the experience of symbolic exclusion is described in terms of both its pervasiveness (“always there”) and its elusiveness. It is framed as being “below the surface” yet still critical in its effects on recognition and acceptance. Dr Moradi’s ambivalence is a reflection of this reality for specific minorities in German society: symbolic exclusion is not necessarily considered open discrimination, yet there is no “emancipation” from the widespread attitude of the native population that certain minorities simply do not belong. This kind of experience is typical of symbolic exclusion in institutional settings, and it is portrayed most vividly in the account of our research participants. In contrast to first-generation migrants, the second generation have been socialized as members of minorities in the country of arrival and therefore are sensitive to a general climate of misrecognition, even if they sometimes lack the words and concepts to name specific practices of discrimination.

Formative Experiences in the School System The school setting is one of the most prominent reference points in our second-generation interviewees’ narratives of symbolic exclusion. It is similar to the institutional settings discussed above but differs in that it has a long-lasting impact on the formation of cultural capital and the habitus of the second generation as members of a minority group. The context of early education constitutes a critical arena in which stereotypical representations of minorities are installed, and dispositions in professional ambition and a legitimate sense of expectation for professional careers become established (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). The German education system is characterized by its early selection of lower, middle-range, and higher educational pathways. Immigrants or members of the second generation are over-represented in the lower school track (Heath, Rothon, and Kilpi 2008; Schittenhelm 2009b; Schnepf 2007). In a process that has been termed institutional discrimination by some researchers (Gomolla and Radtke 2002), this institution reproduces patterns that are historically linked to Germany’s post-war immigration period. Low-skilled guest workers recruited in the 1950s and 1960s either returned after the recruitment stopped in 1974 or were joined by their family members from Turkey, Greece, and Portugal. Given their relatively low socioeconomic background, and given the

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tendency of the German school system to reproduce class background over the generations, there seems to be a self-perpetuating cycle of economic discrimination and cultural marginalization. For some ethnic groups, educational achievement can be explained by socioeconomic characteristics of the parents, but for others – mostly for children of Turkish descent – there also emerges an ethnic penalty (Kristen 2005), which cannot be explained fully in terms of the human capital paradigm. Images of stereotypical occupation for the Turkish community obviously form expectations not only of administrators, as in the case of Dr Moradi, but also of teachers. For the second generation, the contrast between Germany and Canada is striking. In Canada, the cycle of relative deprivation does not appear at all in the narratives of our interviewees. (While racially motivated incidents with peers at school figure in the life stories, they are not depicted as a threat to educational success.) In particular, for the second generation the cumulative downgrading effects in the educational system cannot be detected in Canada, and in our interviews with those born in Canada, the symbolic devaluation of their capital is hardly addressed at all. Clearly this reflects the different socioeconomic background of migrants in Canada. Given the selective recruitment practice, migrants come predominantly from an educated, upper-class background, with a socialization towards higher education. The legacy of structural underachievement (particularly in education) that migrants are regularly exposed to in Europe exists only in exceptional contexts in Canada. In addition, one could argue that multicultural policies have helped to reduce the impact of racial discrimination in Canada. Compared to its German counterpart, the Canadian school system is more sensitive to the multicultural promise of equal opportunities (providing specialized services such as language training, for example). The culture of highly skilled immigration has created a social expectation of career advancement for newcomers that differs markedly from the European experience. Upon closer examination, we can see how institutionalized symbolic exclusion in Germany is experienced by young children of migrants and how much it affects their professional trajectories, even if these children eventually overcome all barriers (Hummrich 2009; Ofner 2003; Pott 2002; Raiser 2007; Schittenhelm 2011). Dr Çiçek27 reports her sense of feeling “different” immediately after her arrival in Germany, upon entering third grade in the German school system. When she began school in Berlin, she was enrolled in the “integration class,” taught by

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Turkish teachers and attended by Turkish pupils, separated from German pupils. As Dr Çiçek28 did very well in these early school years and could rely on the support of one of her teachers, she was eventually transferred to the regular German class. While it had been “normal” to be Turkish in the integration class, she now discovered that her peers rejected her on the grounds that she was a “foreigner.” Dr Çiçek was approached by other students only when they had to ask her for advice and help with schoolwork: “Then in the shortest possible span of time my marks improved very much and then until the end of the sixth form I was the best student of the class and always when the others did not understand something or had any problem they approached me otherwise they weren’t interested in me ah indeed you noticed they invited each other for birthdays or they met in the afternoon and somehow one was excluded already because one was a foreigner and ahh (.) during breaks indeed I was with those with whom nobody else would be.” Dr Çiçek describes her experiences already at this early point as a stark contrast between her significant accomplishments and the experience of being symbolically and socially excluded. In this passage from the interview, she makes an immediate connection between being a “foreigner” and being excluded, relegated almost to the status of an outcast who needs to play with the children that nobody else wants to be involved with. She describes this experience in the same passage that she refers to her good grades at school, suggesting that strong academic performance does not win the respect and recognition of her peers. Similarly, Ms Kemal and her sister are sent to an “integration class” at school, despite the fact that they grew up in Germany. Ms Kemal’s family has a Turkish background, and no family members have any advanced professional training, and they all work in the precarious sector of the German labour market. Nevertheless, Ms Kemal eventually completes high school and trains as a computer scientist at university. Ms Kemal’s first encounter with the integration class included her “classification” as non-German and her exclusion from the “normalcy” of the German school system: “My sister I always speak ehm about both of us eh at school we were sent to special classes somewhat (.) well, you know in those days there was already this kind of classification you know these ordinary classes where quite ordinary as I have it German children were taught somehow well together with others and then somehow at that time there was integration was I think well we become aware of it only in retrospect you know not the topic somehow but they wanted you know to isolate the foreign children of the guest

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workers and that you know they were taught in their own languages or not really at all.” In retrospect, Ms Kemal depicts this group-based classroom setting as a deliberate attempt to isolate not only immigrants but also “foreign children of guest workers,” who, in her narrative, are subject to the same disadvantageous treatment by the German school system. She states explicitly that these children were not meant to be taught “properly.” As notable as these incidents of organizational segregation of German and “non-German” pupils is the experience of informal symbolic exclusion, which also has a negative impact on educational trajectories. As Dr Çiçek did well academically, she soon realized her ambition to succeed in the German school system. Yet regardless of her excellent performance, her teacher suggests that she enrol in the vocational school (Realschule), which does not prepare students for university. I knew exactly what I wanted and already then I made it my aim if you want to be somebody in this society you must appropriately work much and by certain goals you achieve you can indeed make it and it did work what confused me so much in those days my teacher always praised me, “You are very diligent, you are very good,” and also she always well (.) how could I say praised me towards the German parents and said,“She is really a model of a student.” Nevertheless in the sixth form when it was about secondary modern secondary general well secondary modern grammar school I was absolutely sure that I would be recommended for grammar school. Then it said, “No I won’t recommend you for grammar school because you come from a Turkish family After all your family doesn’t speak German” and you would find it enormously difficult, and that would be a burden for you.” Others who were worse than I had only best and second-best marks, they were recommended for grammar school.

The informal recognition by her teacher contrasts with the more powerful assumption about the normalcy of migrants’ career paths. The teacher praises her as an “exemplary” pupil, then recommends that she take the intermediary school track. The teacher assumes that the university-track high school (Gymnasium) would have been simply too difficult for a child with a Turkish family background. Although Dr Çiçek would eventually overcome these obstacles and complete Gymnasium, she felt hurt for years by this experience. Yet her anger at this perceived injustice is accompanied by a resolve to commit fully to succeeding in the German educational system. Her case describes

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an important feature of the institutional setting shaping the societal integration of migrants in Germany: the organizational structure of the German school system – its early streaming of children into segregated classes, paired with socially normalized expectations that migrant children ought to be funnelled into the lowest stream – establishes a very powerful mechanism for reproducing inequality and exclusion. The experiences of Ms Kemal during her school years are similar in treatment by teachers: she describes the systematic discouragement of children with an immigrant/ Turkish background from pursuing a university-track high school diploma. Here, discrimination against working-class children and those with an immigrant background overlap and present a significant challenge to the principle of equal opportunity in the school system. In the German context, the school appears to be a place that, early in the life course of our interviewees, sets the stage for a strong sense of social-symbolic exclusion. The contrast between Ms Kemal’s tendency to downplay this experience by describing it as “normal” and her emotional reaction to such belittlement is striking: “Yes well (.) you know it was bad because the teachers at once said, ‘You won’t make it anyway’ (.) so right from the beginning eliminated us and said,‘Well you won’t get along with it anyway there’s no need trying at all you won’t get along with it anyway’ (.) [sighing, sobbing] you know that was some motivation.” Nevertheless, the experiences of Dr Çiçek and Ms Kemal differ at two critical points: since Ms Kemal remains in a segregated-school environment, she never feels the personal isolation that characterizes Dr Çiçek’s experience. Ms Kemal is part of a larger group of migrant children who are kept “comfortable” in the lower echelons of the German system. This also means that Ms Kemal’s acceptance into a university program is a rare exception: after completing a non-academic education, she continues school as a young adult on a late track chosen by a small fraction of a cohort completing basic school training (Hauptschule). Dr Çiçek, on the other hand, finishes the direct track to an academic education with excellent grades, enabling her to obtain entry into a medical school – the most exclusive educational track available in the German university system. She does, however, continue to suffer from symbolic exclusion – an issue to which we return in the next section. That their social status is continuously contested as the result of ascribed cultural or ethnic identities is an experience shared by many second-generation migrants with domestic educational titles in Germany. Already in their childhood and youth they have had to fight for being

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recognized as “normal” members of society. Struggles over recognition and integration are experienced in the years of habitus formation during early education and shape the aspirations and self-confidence of migrants at an early stage. These experiences distinguish migrants with domestic educational titles from those who received education in their home countries. The latter were brought up in an environment in which recognition was not bound to a specific group identity. For second-generation migrants, normalcy was always contested.

Work-Related Environments and the Experience of Symbolic Exclusion In our discussion of experiences of symbolic exclusion in the German school system, it became clear that institutional devaluation impacts negatively on the acquisition of cultural capital in the second generation. We also discussed social segregation experienced especially by those members of the second generation who were able to enter academic tracks against all odds. This experience of subtle exclusion seems to recur in the labour market. As mentioned above, Dr Çiçek eventually becomes a doctor and succeeds in her profession. Nevertheless, the issue of ethnic segregation remains. When she works as a young doctor in a hospital and is engaged in a scientific research project, one of her superiors assumes that because of her Turkish background Dr Çiçek is one of the cleaning ladies and not one of the medical staff. “In those days the project happened in [X Street] at the women’s hospital and indeed I had some minor problems then I had a certain Professor (.) [coughing slightly] names are unimportant after all and this individual received me by saying when I come to A2 [ward], ‘And the Turkish cleaning women in the kitchen see me they always make coffee for me.’ It took this individual almost three years to accept that I was not the cleaning women at A2 but a doctor.” Such belittling treatment by this particular professor continues for three years, despite the fact that Dr Çiçek establishes herself in the hospital and becomes increasingly successful, presenting her research in public. Yet as with her experience in school, she is not discouraged but, rather, is driven to prove her professional excellence. Dr Çiçek describes at some length how she eventually impressed this professor with one of her presentations. The way she tells the story indicates both how hurt she must have felt when confronted with the stereotyped representation

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of Turkish women and the effects of devaluing her educational or professional achievements. This type of experience is in no way restricted to those who were born and raised in Germany. However, members of the second generation who are enjoying success in their careers are somewhat more outspoken about these experiences than are first-generation migrants with legally equal status. While in general less explicit and direct, the narratives of some migrants who arrived after obtaining their university qualifications provide telling accounts of how in particular phenotypical differences can become important identity markers. This may be due to a form of symbolic exclusion that we did not fully explore for the German sample, namely, symbolic exclusion directed against Africans and AfroGermans.29 A case in point is the interview of Mr Kasongo,30 an IT specialist from Gabon, who comes to Germany as part of the Green Card Initiative for computer experts. He contrasts his professional experience in the Netherlands with his experience in Germany: One company got my one company got my (5 sec. pause) mm (2 sec. pause) CV (2 sec. pause) and well (2 sec. pause) before in all my CV I never had put my picture (.) into because well pff (.) I didn’t want it after all that hasn’t got anything to do with racism, we (.) talked with him (.) on telephone, that was in English, an (.) they didn’t know that I was (.) a black man (2 sec. pause) and they invited me to an (.) interview, (.) I went (.) there, (4 sec. pause) and (2 sec. pause) the (.) first word this manager spoke when seeing me was [imitates an expression of shock], “Haaaa (.) but you are black” (2 sec. pause), and I had [laughs] (2 sec. pause) and I was (2 sec. pause) very disappoint, (.) and I [said] [imitates expression of shock], “Haaa (2 sec. pause) but I didn’t know (3 sec. pause) I was asleep yesterday and I I (.) I thought I was blue.”

This is one of the most dramatic narratives in which skin colour is critical for an employer: if he had disclosed the colour of his skin earlier, Mr Kasongo may never have received an invitation to attend the job talk. The reason for the candidate’s invitation – the symbolic evaluation of his cultural capital – becomes secondary. Mr Kasongo is able to confront the potential employer on this and he does eventually succeed in his pursuit of a professional career in Germany, albeit catering primarily to a clientele from Africa. Yet it is not necessarily the crudest phenotypical ascriptions that become the sole reference point of discriminatory practices. In other

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narratives, and in particular for our cases in Canada, we also found more subtle incidents of discrimination in the labour market. This is striking in an unlikely case for symbolic exclusion: a Caucasian migrant in Canada who spoke English as his mother tongue. Mr Forester originally comes from South Africa; he lived in the United Kingdom for a year and a half before migrating to Canada in 1995. In South Africa, he completed an apprenticeship that included a mechanical diploma. In addition, he also completed diplomas in business management and project management. Mr Forester explicitly expresses the challenges of social exclusion that he faced upon his arrival in Canada. He begins by reflecting upon the difficulties finding a job in his trained profession that reflects his previous work experience and educational credentials, and that allows him to utilize his skills and knowledge, even though he was admitted to Canada on the basis of his profession and credentials. “I found going for interviews and that here was, I think a lot of it was the differential from coming from a position of respect where I had 300 plus people working for me and I was in a senior position, to these interviews which ended up being for $10-an-hour menial jobs, where they were interacting with me as though I was (2 sec. pause) stupid, I don’t know, as if I was less cognitively able than wanted [laughs]. They’d explain the most simple things to me and I wanted to say, ‘Look, I know all of this, I’ll do it, it’s OK.’” Mr Forester explains that he felt as if he were being viewed as stupid; his knowledge was not taken into consideration when things were explained to him. It becomes clear that this was something he wanted to “rebel” against; it was already, perhaps, hard enough having to take on a job that was well below his foreign-acquired skills and knowledge. He seems to recognize that the status he once had was not immediately achievable in the new labour market. He was confronted with negative expectations and treated like a novice in his professional position. It is noteworthy, however, that in contrast to Ms Çiçek, he is not exposed to ethnic and gender stereotypes about his “proper” place in the workforce. Mr Forester also experienced organizational discrimination in a quite different situation. He provides his boss with a shortlist of applicants for a particular position. The employer justifies hiring immigrants on the basis that they “are way cheaper.” Although he was not the intended recipient of his employer’s remark, Mr Forester still feels offended: I was doing all the hiring down to shortlist, so we were looking for new engineer, a design engineer so I put an ad out and I interviewed like five

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or six people and ended up with a shortlist of three and took it to the boss who was a Calgarian-Canadian who owned the company. And, uh, I offered him the shortlist of three and he went through and the one guy on the shortlist was a Russian guy who was just an immigrant and he said, “We should look at the Russian guy because immigrants are way cheaper.” And I was like, “You forgot that I’m an immigrant?” [laughs] and I put it down on his table and walked out and I didn’t say anything, he came later in the day and said, “You know I realized, I’m terribly sorry.”

This narrative relates to a form of discrimination that might be driven more by the organizational logic of taking advantage of cheap labour than by a form of internalized racism. Formal requirements such as the recognition of foreign degrees or domestic work experiences can provide a tool for exploiting migrants. As Mr Forester points out in this excerpt, immigrants “are way cheaper” – even though they may have the skills and qualifications that are sought-after commodities in the labour market. The status of an immigrant can be used by employers to pay less for labour than would be justified from a market-driven human capital standpoint. It was also after a move within Canada that Mr Forester was able to utilize his cultural capital fully, as the employer allowed him to “manage” the factory floor to increase productivity in the plant. From this part of the interview, it is clear that Mr Forester feels comfortable with his role in the factory, as it is similar to his foreign-acquired cultural capital; in effect, his role symbolizes symbolic inclusion in the labour market, where his knowledge and skills are fully recognized by the employer. At the same time, however, Mr Forester recognizes the limits of his credentials, which present an obstacle to his continued success in the factory. When an opportunity to move up the managerial ladder (to the position of general manager) presents itself, Mr Forester experiences symbolic exclusion once again: his credentials and previous experience, including his three years with the company, do not count as adequate for the next level. Mr Forester explains, “So when it got to the next level, and they expanded and they were looking to hire a general manager to run the whole show, and I applied for that job, I wasn’t entitled to because I didn’t have a degree, so, um, this guy who’d worked in a factory and who had a history degree got hired and I was supposed to teach him about this factory that I’d been running for three years,… So I quit … Yeah, I was a little pissed off. So that’s part of why I came back to school, I felt like I’d hit that credentialist ceiling, like if

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you don’t have the credentials, no matter how much you know, it’s not going to happen.” From Mr Forester’s perspective, his credentials and knowledge were valued only to a certain extent by the employer. It is interesting to note that an employer’s decision in favour of formal qualifications would seem perfectly rational in a human capital approach. And this “credentialist ceiling” would apply to migrants and non-migrants alike. Considering that Mr Forester did have the embodied cultural capital necessary to run the factory, however – illustrated by the fact that he is expected to explain the running of the factory to the “better qualified” person – we can see that this is an instance in which symbolic exclusion may matter nevertheless. Coming from another country, Mr Forester is less likely to have the formal degree. And the fact that he has the necessary experience both in Canada and abroad is not recognized. Here, exclusionary practices are not necessarily described with reference to openly racist attitudes. Rather, the status of migrants as newcomers can become a mode of distinction, a reference point for shielding a particular sector of the labour market from unwanted competition or a strategy for exploiting migrants as cheap labour.31 A similar pattern can be found in the case of Ms Blochin,32 a highly trained migrant from Russia who is not able to rely on her professional experience in chemistry and instead begins a professional career in Canada in the hotel industry. Her limited command of English proved to be a critical factor in her first experiences in the Canadian job market. She shows considerable understanding about being passed over for the managerial position because of her language difficulties. Yet her account about how her strong Russian accent continues to pose serious problems in her professional career suggests an additional symbolic meaning attributed to a foreign language beyond the functional aspect of effective communicative interaction. The selection of cases in this section resonates well with earlier discussions. Mr Kasongo narrates a tale of outright and striking discrimination while at the same time justifying the fact that he did not include a picture in his CV. Mr Forester, on the other hand, speaks of subtleties in interaction but does not hesitate in his critique. The difference between the discursive contexts of Germany and Canada should not distract from the fact that the importance of soft, communicative skills surfaces across national contexts as being a critical component of success in the labour market. In the labour market, misrecognition of migrants’ institutionalized cultural capital often is connected with a presumed

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lack of soft skills. In Ms Çiçek’s case, her superior not only identifies her as holding a subservient position but accuses her of being “not nice,” as she is not making coffee for him (the implication being that other Turkish women do). In other cases, the use of dialects is depicted as a symbolic indicator of professional (in-)competence – something that Mr Forester experiences, both with (see chapter 7) and without reference to his language skills. In her comparative study on medical doctors in Canada and Germany, Yvonne Henkelmann (2009, 2012) points to the pivotal role of language as a gatekeeper for professional opportunities. She argues that in Canada (and in particular in Quebec) the labour market is the place where the dominance of official languages is enforced, and related forms of exclusion are reproduced, even if this undermines the professional advantages resulting from the command of minority languages. Language and its pronunciation are here less a medium for communication and more a mechanism of symbolic in- and out-group distinction-making (see Bourdieu 1981).33 Symbolic exclusion in labour markets on both sides of the Atlantic often makes reference to cultural and linguistic skills as well as behavioural patterns.34 Yet in contesting these issues, migrants also were actively involved in negotiating the “value” of their cultural capital. Training in interview techniques, taking language courses, and, most of all, learning the norms of personal conduct in professional environments (see chapter 7) were used as effective strategies in compensating for negative evaluations, even though this training often comes with a considerable time delay. 6.4

Effects of Symbolic Exclusion and Migrants’ Coping Strategies

Discrimination does not necessarily establish an impenetrable mode of exclusion. As cases in our German sample demonstrate, these barriers have not only led to frustration and apathy in educational and professional aspirations. Rather, in some of the life stories analysed here, they have strengthened migrants’ resolve and the determination to overcome social and symbolic exclusion by hard work and professional accomplishments. Most prominently, this has been the driving force in the cases of Ms Çiçek and Ms Kemal, who, in spite of or in open opposition to institutional and symbolic exclusion, made the deliberate decision to prove wrong the social projection of failure as the “normal” course for their educational and professional development.

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Apart from the individualized coping of the upwardly mobile, which has been identified in many of the narrations quoted above, we can identify two more systematic patterns. Coping with symbolic exclusion can be eased by the higher-class background of one’s family. Also, the availability and the options offered by ethnic niches in the labour market are negotiated both by migrants with foreign degrees and by members of the second generation.

Class-Specific Effects of Symbolic Inclusion and Exclusion The family plays a critical role as an enabling social context for social mobility. The more migrants are able to rely on economic and social capital, the more they are in a position either to ignore the degrading effects of symbolic exclusion or to openly challenge them in the public arena. Clearly there are limits to this empowerment. Yet, as the case of Dr Moradi shows, the belittling effects are more easily shaken off and contested on an individual level. For Dr Moradi, the expectation of pursuing a university degree and following in the footsteps of his father and his friends, all medical doctors originally from Iran, shaped his resolve in his educational and professional career. Two socially critical expectations collide in this respect: the symbolic degradation of migrants and the normalcy of underachievement on the one hand, and, on the other, the sense of entitlement resulting from a socially privileged upbringing. The impact of a higher-class family background can be described in two respects. First, the family becomes important in the socializing effects it has on migrants and their children. (In our cases, it is apparent how professional aspirations are closely tied to family support structures.) This has a considerable effect on how and in what contexts migrants are exposed to forms of symbolic exclusion and how they react to these experiences. Second, the family can become important in the social networks that it provides.

Symbolic Exclusion and the Ethnicization of Cultural Capital When migrants are exposed to symbolic exclusion from mainstream society, a cycle of social exclusion may be triggered, as well as the migrants’ (self-)imposed restriction to ethnic social networks in the search for employment. These ethnically defined labour market niches can be regarded, on the one hand, as a rational response to the devaluation of migrants’ skills and experiences in the mainstream labour

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market. They offer opportunities in the labour market both in catering to the needs of a particular ethnic group and providing a vibrant social network (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993). On the other hand, however, this strategy might result in isolating this labour market and thus intensifying the self-reinforcing symbolic exclusion and socioeconomic deprivation (Esser 2004). Light (1972) characterized this as a form of “blocked mobility” (see also Light and Gold 2000), a professional trajectory that would make it extremely difficult for migrants to access the mainstream labour market and its opportunities (see also Min and Bozorgmehr 2003; Preston, Lo, and Wang 2003). In the life stories of our interviewees and the degree to which migrants pursue their professional career in “ethnic niche economies,” we find robust evidence of this ambivalence toward sustainable professional opportunities in the qualified labour market. Somewhat surprisingly, in Canadian cities where we have established ethnic communities, the overwhelming majority of our interviewees have not benefited from such social networks. In addition, most of them are reluctant to resort to family or ethnic group networks to promote their professional careers. There is an articulated belief that migrants should succeed on the job market in their own right, without relying on the help of family or friends. These attitudes and coping strategies were found both among those who had come recently to Canada as adults and those who had received their education in Canada. In the interviews, there is a prevailing desire not to resort to any social network but, rather, to “make it” on one’s own. This attitude very much reflects how the North American immigration regime tends to describe itself in terms of individualistic, meritocratic virtues: the idea that immigrants can “earn” their place in the new society, that they can be successful through hard, disciplined work, is a forceful image that shapes the attitudes and behaviours of migrants, as much as it might be at odds with reality in Canadian society. On the other hand, niche economies provide important opportunities for the professional careers of newcomers by offering an essential social network through which labour market access is facilitated. And, depending on their scope and viability, niche economies can challenge – or better circumvent – the non-recognition that migrants’ cultural capital might encounter in mainstream society. They are therefore of critical importance in establishing different modes and social contexts for valorizing the cultural capital of migrants. At the same time, as we have seen in the case of Canadian newcomers avoiding the

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help of ethnic communities, the real issue in academic labour markets is individual achievement. Most of the debate about ethnic mobility traps focuses on migrants who are either unskilled or whose cultural capital is not recognized in a foreign labour market. In our sample, a socioeconomic marginalization through integration into completely ethnicized labour markets was found primarily among highly skilled migrants whose labour market access was blocked by legal exclusion (Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen 2007; Weiß 2010a). Nevertheless, there is a related process that we could observe in skilled labour markets. In specific cases, relying on ethnicized cultural capital and the community that endorses it proved to be a feasible option to promote one’s career. For instance, providing services for particular ethnic groups or using one’s linguistic skills for professional purposes helped newcomers especially to overcome obstacles in the status passage into the labour market. The case of Dr Liu,35 a doctor in Canada who came to the country as a general practitioner hoping to continue his career in this professional field, represents this reliance on ethnically coded cultural capital. As a result of the severely regulated and restricted access to the medical profession in Canada, Dr Liu could not find a position as a doctor in the Canadian health care system. Instead, he took a detour by teaching traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture at an educational institution. After two years, he was invited to direct the school and was able to open an office where he could treat patients in Chinese medicine. His reliance on his skills from China and his choice to cater primarily to patients of Chinese descent helped him to become established as a doctor, albeit one who is not allowed to practise within the Canadian health care system and is largely dependent on patients paying privately for his services. His ethnic specialization means he is a less privileged doctor who has to pay an “ethnic premium” for being employed in his original professional field. We can characterize this case as a reactive ethnic identity formation that, taking advantage of “marketable” skills associated with a particular group, valorizes migrants’ cultural capital. This pattern can also be found among some second-generation migrants.36 This is interesting because they are channelled into ethnic niches even though they do not hold foreign degrees and are not excluded by legal barriers. This is especially obvious in the case of Dr Çiçek, who chose a nonethnic educational track early. In the last year before her graduation in medicine, she has to finish a one-year internship. Three months of

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this internship are completed at a hospital with, as she puts it, “a high proportion of foreigners, that is to say, a high Turkish proportion.” It is not easy for graduates of medicine to find employment as an assistant doctor in a hospital after graduation. Considering the hospital’s need for a “Turkish doctor,” Dr Çiçek had expected to receive a position as assistant doctor right away. Nevertheless, she waited for eight months even though the need for a Turkish doctor remained and she had the appropriate qualifications. Clearly her entry into the labour market is characterized both by a disadvantage in social capital – stemming from her lower-class migrant background – and by manifest discrimination. Nevertheless, the need for a Turkish doctor to cater to Turkish patients finally is decisive in ensuring her a job in medical research about Turkish clients. Dr Çiçek herself is ambivalent about being associated with all issues related to patients of Turkish descent: on the one hand, it is through this clientele that she carves out a professional niche for herself and quickly acquires responsibility in the hospital. On the other hand, she complains that these cases are simply “passed on” to her. She feels burdened by the habitual referring of particular patients to her without any consideration of whether her language abilities are actually needed: “It was always so strange when it said then well your fellow countrymen and there are patients again or there are patients how could I say mh everything with a Turkish background was placed on my back then I was always to care for these patients without asking at all, ‘Do they speak German, don’t they speak German, what is the problem after all?’” Dr Çiçek is determined to overcome the social expectation that she be a doctor who treats only Turkish patients: “Now since September 2002 I’ve been here with my German colleagues it was quite important for me that it is a Turkish-German ah: community [residency in which several doctors cooperate] because I didn’t only want to be the Turkish doctor for Turkish patients but I simply wanted to be a doctor that’s what was important for me simply these …” Although Dr Çiçek advances her career without the social capital often used by highly skilled Germans with middle-class family background, she is able to do so only by partially accepting an “ethnic ascription” and becoming an expert for Turkish patients. What is important for the context of this chapter on symbolic exclusion is how being seen primarily as a member of an ethnic group can lead to professional career paths that are not necessarily a matter of choice.

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Clearly there are important differences between the cases of Dr Çiçek and Dr Liu, which reflect primarily the different institutional contexts in which they pursue their careers: like so many doctors who come to Canada, Dr Liu is excluded from the mainstream medical profession and, using the traditions of his home country, exploits a demand for non-traditional modes of treatment. In contrast, Dr Çiçek completes her medical degree in Germany and is entitled to practise medicine. For her, catering to a multicultural clientele is a strategy to promote her career within the dominant medical system. Still, there are some similarities between the cases in how cultural capital becomes “ethnicized”; the cultural ascription of particular skills and competencies can become important social mechanisms for regulating access to opportunities in the labour market. Also, in the cases discussed here, we can speak of a form of “reactive ethnic identity formation” as it is strategically oriented in professional niches.37 The observation of similar coping strategies, despite completely different educational and legal situations in the first and second generation of migrants, affirms a theoretical point made in the beginning of this chapter: clearly, legal and symbolic exclusion are interconnected. Forms of symbolic exclusion can fortify forms of legal exclusion and thus cement socioeconomic disadvantages in society as a whole and in the labour market in particular. This is particularly pertinent if a specific immigrant group is in an unfavourable socioeconomic position. The German context is a case in point: guest workers were hired for low-paying and low-level jobs, and members of this group in the beginning were disadvantaged legally38 and continued to have a low socioeconomic standing throughout their stay. This relative deprivation has been reproduced well into the second and third generation. One critical element seems to be the symbolic representation of this group in terms of legitimate entitlements and its “proper place” in society. What we see in retrospect is a downward social spiral of exclusion, first based on legal and symbolic exclusion hand-in-hand with socioeconomic deprivation, which, through a complex system of educational opportunities and symbolic exclusion, served as considerable barriers to professional success, even for the second generation. It remains to be seen whether this vicious cycle will also affect children of highly skilled migrants who experience a high degree of legal and symbolic exclusion. Recent findings on the impact of legal exclusion on educational achievements are ambiguous. Söhn (2011) shows with micro-census data in Germany that legal exclusion

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has, overall, a clearly identifiable and significant negative impact on children’s educational achievement. Yet parents with academic degrees are able to soften or break down their children’s educational barriers through the transmission of cultural capital in the family, despite legal exclusion. That said, second-generation individuals who are not subject to legal exclusion clearly have options other than their parents. Ironically, it is Ms Kemal, whose educational trajectory remained in an ethnic niche for a long time, who later finds a non-ethnicized job through professional social networks (Schittenhelm 2011). This feat may be easier in her professional field, computer science, as qualified workers are in high demand. Yet the case of manager Mr Ecevit also shows that the second generation has options, even in areas prone to ethnicization.39 Mr Ecevit is the son of Turkish labour migrants, but he does not want to accept special responsibility for his company’s commercial relationships with Turkish enterprises. Instead, he adopts a strategy of obtaining more advanced training qualifications. After graduating from university-track high school (Abitur), he completes a vocational traineeship before entering university. Upon finishing studies in economics, he completes a graduate program in the United Kingdom before being trained at and working for a multinational company located in Germany. In his narrative account, he argues that, since he is a Turk in Germany, he has to work twice as hard as a professional to compete with his native-German colleagues. His convictions are similar to those of Dr Çiçek, but in contrast Mr Ecevit succeeds in avoiding the ethnic niche.40 Ethnicized cultural capital can become a “marketable” feature and thus a professional advantage in societies that demand linguistic, cultural, or social skills related to particular communities. Still, there are severe limitations to using ethnic identity markers as a reactive strategy in response to social exclusion: most importantly, doing so relies on a sufficiently robust social context in which an ethnicized cultural capital is appreciated and can be “converted” to access to labour market positions. In addition, relying on this form of cultural capital for advancing a professional career is generally at odds with the ambitious mindset of highly skilled migrants. It is a recurrent theme in our interviews with this group of migrants that the emphasis on individual self-reliance and meritocratic values conflicts with the very idea of having to depend on providing professional skills to a segment of the labour market that caters to an ethnically defined clientele.

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6.5

The Context-Specific Dynamic and Effects of Symbolic Exclusion

Our interviews reflect the problematic nature of coming to terms with racial and ethnic discrimination: the difficulty of articulating it as a systematic force that shapes social relations. They mirror the highly contested scholarly debate about what constitutes racial discrimination and how it should best be conceptualized. In the interviews, it is telling to see which experiences are labelled as discriminatory attitudes or practices based on an ascribed group identity. In the German sample of migrants enjoying equal legal status, we found strong evidence that incidents of symbolic exclusion are rarely addressed directly. This might have to do with the intrinsically emotionally charged issue at stake: being confronted with stigmatizing images or discriminatory behaviour is an experience that is difficult to narrate with detachment. Such events involve issues of power relations, victimization, and identity that are not easily addressed in an interview situation. And national contexts establish a discursive framework that can be favourable to or discourage the articulation of these experiences and the development of coping strategies. Our interpretation using the documentary method reveals the important effects of such discriminatory practices on migrants’ status passages into the labour market. Reconstructing the implicit meaning assigned to experiences of social and symbolic exclusion exposes the subtle, albeit pervasive and compelling impact of such practices. One of our key findings is how the recognition of cultural capital often is intimately tied to classificatory struggles over collective identities. Unlike the suggestion, in the human capital tradition, that the labour market integration of migrants is due to the “economic value” of individuals’ competencies, knowledge, and personality attributes, our research shows that labour market experiences are also subject to powerful symbolic struggles over ascribed ethnic, religious, and cultural identities. The “value” of cultural capital that migrants hold is critically dependent on the cultural and institutional recognition it receives in diverse meso-social contexts in the country of destination. In this respect, our narrative interviews underline the point that specific institutional rules and cultural norms of national and meso-social settings provide a crucially important environment in which these struggles for recognition and inclusion play out. It is all too easy to make assumptions about how forms of symbolic exclusion and discriminatory practices shape the labour market

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inclusion of migrants, however. It is important to exercise caution when suggesting relationships. In particular for those newcomers who received their education abroad and arrive as adults, it is difficult to demarcate symbolic struggles over the legitimacy and “value” of their cultural capital from “rational” selection processes in the labour market that follow a functional rather than a discriminatory logic. We must ask where employers refuse migrants access to a qualified job because their linguistic ability is indeed too limited for the professional assignment. Where do they use “language” as a strategy to exploit migrants’ cheap labour, and in which cases does the experience of being refused a job because of limited language proficiency provide a symbolic code for identity-based, discriminatory behaviour? The potential for ambiguity can also be observed in the recurrent reference to domestic work experiences (in particular in the Canadian context): what can be interpreted as a rational selection procedure for newcomers to a professional field can also be read as a subtle way of legitimizing the exclusion of non-natives. It is the subtlety of these forms of symbolic exclusion that accounts for their pervasiveness and effectiveness (i.e., it is difficult to “scandalize” such behaviour as racist). One of the ways in which this chapter addresses this challenge is to focus primarily on migrants of the second generation who do not suffer from legal exclusion and, having been educated in the country, have cultural capital that should be comparable in its “marketable value” to that of non-migrants from a human capital perspective. Another important dimension in identifying persistent patterns in the narrative interviews is the temporal structure that underlies the experience of racial discrimination. Among the second generation in Germany, accounts of implicit racial discrimination could be found even among persons holding native educational degrees and full citizenship. Symbolic exclusion in Germany seems to persist as a crossgenerational experience. In contrast, in the interviews from Canada, there is clear evidence that narratives about discriminatory behaviour are widely tied to the transitory period during the immediate migration experience. Among those who were born and received their education in Canada, there were hardly any accounts of unfair treatment based on an ascribed group identity. National contexts have proven to be distinct in establishing a discursive universe for images of migrants – classifying identity markers and the binary coding of Us versus Them, for example – that can produce various exclusionary effects. In Germany, for instance, we find a

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pervasive negative image attached to its traditional guest worker immigrant group from Southeastern Europe and Turkey, which manifests itself as a powerful, socially sanctioned expectation of underachievement in the life stories of our interviewees. Negative images attributed to group identities are the product of deeply engrained cultural practices and, in our interviews, surface in incidents of internalized racism or direct social exclusion, which are also institutionally reproduced. Even when descendants of guest workers have been able to earn academic degrees, or when they come to Germany as highly skilled migrants themselves, they are regularly perceived and judged on the basis of the depreciative guest-worker identity. This is manifest in the accounts of our second-generation interviewees in Germany – how they have been categorized as unfit for qualified jobs, relegated to positions far below their qualification levels, or systematically ignored for promotions. In the interviews conducted in Germany, one of our key findings in this regard is the normalization of discriminatory images and practices. Even as migrants protest unfair treatment, they remain bound by accepted forms of symbolic exclusion and a related degradation of their cultural capital as part of socially dominant perceptions of migrants and minorities. Theoretically, this finding can be described in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence: a subtle system of discrimination and exclusion as a modus operandi, organizing the hierarchical relationship between particular groups of migrants and the dominant group, informs these group relations, even when there is symbolic struggle. Migrants themselves are not immune to what is perceived to be “normal” in their educational and professional achievement. Even if they rebel against the devaluing of their professional achievements – as many of our interviewees in Germany implicitly or explicitly do – they tend to do so individually, by personal merit and extraordinary professional ambitions. The normalcy of symbolically excluding groups on the basis of their ascribed identity is rarely described as a public political scandal but, rather, as a reality that privileged and hard-working individuals can escape. These individual coping strategies range from a strong work ethic in those determined to succeed, despite widespread prejudice, in the educational and professional arena, to the desire to assimilate into mainstream society. In light of our empirical findings, how are we to reinterpret the paradoxical finding that we referred to in the introduction of this chapter – that is, that in Canada, the “multicultural mosaic paradise,” interviewees were most articulate about the social reality of social and

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symbolic excision on the basis of race? Some illumination can be gained by looking more closely at how these allegations were formulated and how they are brought up as part of the migrants’ life story. The next chapter explores how migrants react to socially sanctioned expectations, in particular those of employers. What strategies are developed in response to these obstacles to successful labour market inclusion? How do migrants succeed in an environment that tends to devalue the cultural capital of migrants and their descendants?

7 Up- and Downgrading Cultural Credit: A Cross-Country Comparison

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 of the migrant’s previously acquired qualifications is assessed by the state and potential employers. In this sense, cultural capital is the result of expectations and assumptions related to the migrant and his or her qualifications. This relation may change throughout the status passage and may also imply the (re-)distribution of a social status (see chapters 2 and 3). However, cultural capital is not dependent on only the relation between the qualified migrant and the labour market. As the migrant’s status passages are multidimensional, the migrant’s transition into the labour market is overlapped and possibly modified by other dimensions of experience as well: simultaneous or consecutive trajectories in the private life domain also shape the migrant’s motivations and eventual establishment in the receiving country. Above all, the status passage encompasses the transition into the new country, with all the experiential and institutional problems and opportunities encountered during the pre-migration and transition phases, as well as in the initial and establishment phases. As the concept of the status passage suggests, cultural capital is not only relational in place but also in time: privileges and disadvantages in earlier phases of the status passage,

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with its various dimensions, affect the migrant’s eventual status in the receiving society (see chapters 3 and 4). In this sense, the re-evaluation of cultural capital during the status passages of highly qualified migrants is a phenomenon in which agency and structure interact. One important element in the relational character of cultural capital is migration control exerted by the state. While migration policy is usually referred to as a structural aspect of the migration process, from the perspective of migrants’ trajectories, even such state institutions as immigration law are enmeshed in the agency of those “subject” to them. A first point of connection is the biographical orientations that motivate people to migrate. For some motives (among them, marriage to a citizen of the receiving country), there are institutional arrangements that allow swift and full legal access to the labour market. Other motives (such as amelioration or asylum seeking) are met with more restrictive regulations. As a second point of interconnection of agency and structure, in the face of migration control, those who seek to capitalize on their knowledge and skills may develop strategies to overcome institutional barriers and find their way into the labour market. Not all migrants are successful, however, and there are some whose trajectories have been severely affected by restrictive migration policy and whose cultural capital has been significantly devalued (see chapter 5). Immigration laws are discriminatory by nature, distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, that is, between those with legal access to the country and those without. Migrants are also confronted with more subtle, implicit modes of discrimination during their status passages. It is important to note that the experiences of symbolic exclusion based on ethnic difference are not randomly distributed. The modes of experiencing and discussing symbolic exclusion, among both first- and second-generation migrants, differ significantly according to the migrants’ respective country. Symbolic exclusion is thus another important element in the relational character of cultural capital: for those of the second generation who have been raised in the receiving country, racial discrimination has already exerted its influence on the socialization and education process, during the time when the preconditions for having cultural capital at one’s command are set. During the transition into the labour market, when migrants are assessed by their future employers, they may at times face judgments based not only on their knowledge and skills but on their supposed ethnic affiliation or skin colour as well. In such instances of symbolic exclusion, it is

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particularly difficult to turn knowledge and skills into cultural capital (see chapter 6). Against the background of our empirical findings, this chapter focuses on how highly qualified migrants gain the trust of (future) employers, how they inspire employer confidence in their competence, and, in short, how they adapt their knowledge and skills to the anticipated expectations of the labour market.1 We investigate various (implicit) strategies of the highly qualified to improve their chances of labour market success. We focus on those phases of the status passage in which migrants are most concerned with their labour market inclusion, that is, the initial and establishment phases. During these two phases, those migrants who have not yet lost hope of a professional career try to boost what we call their “cultural credit” via further education, or, in other words, by enlarging their portfolio of knowledge and skills. Others who have lost hope of a career become resigned to the devaluation of their qualifications, even though some still try to find opportunities to use their knowledge and skills in lower positions within the labour market. Closing the gap between employers’ expectations and employees’ competencies is challenging, given that this gap is constituted not only by “objective” discrepancies between supply and demand but also by informally institutionalized beliefs, prejudices, and habits.2 The empirical analysis in this chapter is therefore not confined to the study of individual cases, as abstracted from society. Instead, we investigate the implicit strategies of the migrants as they are shaped by distinct social contexts, which vary between countries and occupational fields. We want to understand what kind of labour market expectations the migrants face. By carrying out both a cross-country analysis and a comparison of different professional fields, we distinguish empirically between beliefs, prejudices, and habits institutionalized informally at the level of occupational field as well as country. In chapter 4 we highlighted the status passages of foreign-educated migrants with full legal labour market access in Germany. In chapter 5 we widened our empirical perspective and considered the situation of migrants with foreign academic titles in Germany, Canada, and Turkey, taking into account both those with full legal access to the labour market and those without. Chapter 6 added second-generation migrants to the scope of our research. In this chapter we focus on specific case groups of (first-generation) migrants with foreign academic titles. Some of these case groups were discussed in the German context

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in chapter 4; now we compare them with equivalent case groups in Canada and Turkey. The combination of three general principles has guided our choice of case groups in this chapter: First, as we are interested in those migrants who experience the need to adapt their qualifications to anticipated labour market expectations or the need to boost their cultural credit, we tighten our perspective by excluding all those migrants whose knowledge and skills are transnationally recognized as cultural capital (see chapter 4). Second, we focus on case groups that represent specific and distinguishable occupational fields for which we have discovered a specific mechanism of adapting qualifications. Third, we include case groups of migrants who fail to re-enter qualified occupational fields altogether, in order to understand how they finally succeed in obtaining a job. Fourth, for reasons of comparison, we consider only those case groups that can be found in more than one country. Three case groups that met these criteria were of specific theoretical interest to us: (1) managers and consultants who must gain credit for their academic degrees on the free market and who make their way into specific work organizations that supply ample opportunities for informal education – that is, non-organized, everyday learning – and for non-formal, further education – that is, organized learning, albeit outside the formal education system;3 (2) medical doctors and dentists, who, according to professional law, have to undergo a statecontrolled process of temporal devaluation of their cultural capital combined with further education; and (3) migrants who put up with additional formal education, that is, learning in order to receive an institutionalized degree, only to discover that their cultural capital is thereby reduced.4 By choosing these three case groups for our crosscountry comparison, we gain insight into the mechanisms and significance of informal and non-formal further education in two different professional fields (case groups 1 and 2) as well as the failure of further education (case group 3). We compare the biographical accounts of the three “typologically situated case groups” (see Nohl 2009 and 2013, and the appendix to this volume) in Germany with similar cases in Canada. The Turkish context is analysed only in regard to the first case group, that is, the managers and consultants, because for empirically evident reasons we could not find equivalent case groups for the other two. As discussed in chapter 5, foreign medical doctors were not allowed to work in Turkey at the time of our research. And non-formal further education that

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adapts foreigners’ knowledge and skills to labour market expectations, significant for the third case group, is essentially unknown in Turkey. By drawing on only those cases that share typical patterns with the cases of migrants interviewed in Germany, we seek to identify peculiarities of adapting knowledge and skills to anticipated labour market expectations specific to the respective country and/or the respective case group. Our research design was not geared towards gaining a comprehensive “representative” understanding of countries or entire occupational fields. Our comparison of typologically situated case groups should therefore be seen as one way to identify the particulars of contexts from the bottom up, that is, to situate groups of cases within contexts that can coincide with a given country but also with an internationally homologous or even transnational occupational field (Weiß and Nohl 2012). Our inquiry starts with those individuals who enhanced their knowledge and skills during a management or consultancy career. We then compare those cases where we have identified trajectories based primarily on professional law (doctors) and include training on the job. Then we consider case groups in which a loss of cultural capital due to or in spite of further education can be identified. 7.1

Managers and Consultants: Improving Cultural Credit via Further Education during Free Market Careers

Students of highly qualified migration have frequently pointed to managers and consultants as holders of transnationally accepted qualifications, as members of a new transnational class with highly esteemed cultural capital and a high degree of mobility (Carroll 2009, 2010; Kanter 1997; Robinson 2004; Sener 2007; Sklair 2001).5 Although such cosmopolitans are represented in our sample, too, in chapter 4 we have shown that their trajectories into the German labour market are shaped not only by transnational cultural capital but also by significant biographical orientations (concerning partnership and family), which motivate them to stay in the receiving country. However, we have also seen in chapter 4 that there are managers and consultants who need to adapt their knowledge and skills to labour market expectations. With this case group we can reconstruct the strategies of migrants in an occupational field that is not regulated by the state at all.6 Nevertheless, this labour market has its own specific structures that are predominantly informally institutionalized.

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It is surprising to note that, in an occupational field that in public discourse is so much identified with global economy, cosmopolitanism, and the free movement of goods and labour, migrants actually face strong expectations to adapt their knowledge and skills to peculiarities of the labour market of the respective country.7 The first expectation is language skills, and the second is the local codes of labour in each country. The analysis starts with an exploration of the ways to acquire language skills and then considers how migrants learn the codes of labour in Germany, Turkey, and Canada. Our comparative analysis will then lead into a more theoretical discussion on the relational character of cultural capital.

Formal and Informal Ways of Acquiring Appropriate Language Skills During the status passage of highly qualified migrants, language plays an important role. In our own findings, we explored ways that language potentially matters. In chapter 6, for example, we considered cases where migrants faced symbolic exclusion on the basis of their supposedly insufficient language skills. Language is not only a strong device for boundary making, however. Our analysis of foreign managers’ and consultants’ biographical accounts reveals that language is also experienced as an important asset when migrants apply for qualified jobs in the labour market. Moreover, for management and consultancy positions, evidence suggests that one needs not only a good command of the official language of the country but also an embodied knowledge of the subtleties of language use in very particular situations. The extreme contrasts to the narratives of the medical doctors and to those of the natural scientists (see chapter 4) indicate that language and its intricacies are a universal feature of highly qualified migration, and a particular feature of the specific professional field of management and consultancy. The foreign managers and consultants whom we interviewed in Germany discovered early on the importance of acquiring proficiency in the German language. In contrast to those managers who held transnational cultural capital and had already learned German before migration (see chapter 4), migrants who did not know German upon entry into the country first struggled with the complex grammatical structure and vocabulary of the German language before they could begin to address accent and idiom. Migrants in Germany also faced the expectation that

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they speak German very well, and not only for purposes of labour. One migrant recounted her experiences when she applied for a work permit in the Hamburg foreigners’ office: “That was really complicated: I couldn’t speak German and the office couldn’t speak English. And then there sit two people who haven’t got a common language.” In Germany, German proved to be viewed by the government and its employees as the only legitimate language. One of our interviewees, Ms Morales-Aznar8 from Portugal, who came to Germany to marry her long-term boyfriend (see chapter 4), felt the need to learn the language at the same time that she was “getting to know the culture of this country.” She attended courses at a language institute until she received certification that she “has a command of the German language” and – most important for her – that she felt indicated that she was “really unrestrictedly employable in every part” of her professional field. However, Ms Morales-Aznar did not restrict her efforts to formal language courses. Although she was oriented towards practising law, in the beginning every job was “OK” for her because – as she stressed – it would have given her the opportunity to be “among people” and learn the language. Learning the language included not only active speaking competencies but also “understanding” skills. Even though she hoped to be employed as an expert in international law, Ms Morales-Aznar soon understood that for her profession (she would finally work as a bank manager), it was important to speak and write German effectively: “But with my job things are different; you know, you really must be linguistically very (.) talented to achieve, ahh well a certain effect or so (.) to (emphasize) or, yes (.) a result or so, and you have to know very well what you can do can say and how to say it. And, well (1 sec. pause) so I thought that not only language is ah important but also ah that that writing is ah as important or even more important.” Comparing her own situation to that of her husband, a medical doctor, Ms Morales-Aznar insisted that her profession was “different” and required such a good command of the language that one “achieves a particular impact” both in speaking and writing. In her emphasis on the fact that it is not only what one needs to say but also how one says it, she points to the difference between what Bourdieu (1991, 54–5; emphasis in original) calls the “capacity to speak, which is virtually universal,” and the “socially conditioned way of realizing this natural capacity, which presents as many variants as there are social conditions of acquisition.” The latter serves to “produce sentences that are likely to be listened to”

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(55; emphasis in original). The right way to acquire the latter competence is to learn by practice, that is, in the very situation of conversing. In Canada as well, the need to know the English language is experienced by managers as a matter of course.9 This is evident, for example, in the case of Ms Blochin (discussed in chapter 5), who used to be a chemist in her home country of Russia before she made the decision to migrate to Canada. She expressed astonishment about how she had been hired as an “assistant housekeeping manager” without knowing the language at all: “In two weeks I was hired … but was fired in three weeks, because of English … because I didn’t speak a word.” After being fired, Ms Blochin realized that her English needed to improve, and she enrolled in a language course. She started working first as a chambermaid and then was promoted to a lower managerial position. Especially for higher-level and more qualified positions, not only is a good command of English necessary, but a good command of local, idiomatic English is also important.10 This becomes most evident when we reconstruct the interview with one of the native speakers of English in our Canadian sample. Mr Forester, a migrant from South Africa, who used to work as a manager in the building construction sector, gave details of nuances in language usage: The pressure was there, subtly, for instance going into the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine and the lady says, I dunno, you’ve asked her for a bottle of [Gavurstein] or [laughs] whatever and when she’s taking it she’s like, “Sorry I didn’t hear anything you said – I was listening to your accent.” You know, it’s cool, but you talk to people and you have little communication, even though I’m speaking English, just because of the accent you have little communicational difficulties like, um, at work we were talking about a purchase order and I said, “Have you seen the last purchase order?,” as in the previous one, and someone must have heard me, the a as an o and thought I’d “lost” a purchase order, I mean little things like this, even within the same language, seem to be a challenge, so I started to adapt my language when I was talking to Canadians so that it was easier for them to understand me, and that took away the discomfort of the interaction, but, um, eventually I was like, “Well, hang on a minute, I have some responsibility, but also some responsibility lies with the other as well,” so I stopped trying so hard [laughs].

According to Mr Forester’s experience, grammatically correct English did not necessarily result in one’s getting along successfully in Canada.

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The two examples related by Mr Forester pertain to quite different language situations. In the liquor store example, Mr Forester interacts with somebody who notes specifically (and maybe even appreciates) the fact that he is not Canadian born. In the purchase order example, Mr Forester’s colleagues overlook the fact that he speaks with a different accent, which results in minor pronunciation variations. In both cases, however, it is the accent that led to the communication failure. While at first Mr Forester tried to change how he verbalized his communication, he later concluded that the Canadians with whom he conversed also must bear some of the responsibility: they had not really made enough effort to successfully interact with him either. Mr Forester was able to informally “improve” his Canadian-accented English in the work place or, more exactly, during the lunches he had with his supervisor: “Um, I think, also it’s a bit of luck who you get for co-workers or supervisors, you know, that, uh, I had one supervisor who was really helpful with the little cultural things that you don’t think about, just learning and understanding what ‘kitty corner’ means or what bangs are or what poutine is, [laughs] you learn quickly what poutine is.” While Mr Forester acquired the Canadian accent during everyday situations, he learned the idioms specific to Canada at his workplace. Interestingly, it was not during working hours that Mr Forester had opportunities to learn Canadian idiom but during coffee break and at lunchtime, when his supervisor made special efforts to teach him Canadian colloquialisms.11 Mr Forester’s case shows that even if a migrant’s mother tongue is English, she or he may also be expected to exercise a good command of the region-specific peculiarities of English, in both accent and idiom. This raises the question whether language serves not only as a device for communication and mutual understanding but also as a means for boundary making. Chapter 6 indicated that migrants may experience racial discrimination and symbolic exclusion on the basis of supposedly insufficient language skills. The foreign managers discussed here experience language not only as a device for symbolic exclusion but also as a legitimate labour market expectation; the making of symbolic boundaries and the recognition of knowledge and skills go hand-inhand. An individual’s language skills, like other skills, help position him or her within the broader social environment and are viewed as indicating both technical competence and social status. When they are in Canada, foreigners are expected by employers to speak English,

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including Canadian idiom. Native Canadian employers also tend to privilege those endowed with a Canadian accent since childhood. Thus they secure their own position in the labour market of the country: “The dominant competence functions as linguistic capital, securing a profit of distinction in its relation to other competences only in so far as certain conditions (the unification of the market and the unequal distribution of the chances of access to the means of production of the legitimate competence, and to the legitimate places of expression) are continuously fulfilled, so that the groups which possess that competence are able to impose it as the only legitimate one in the formal markets (the fashionable, educational, political and administrative markets) and in most of the linguistic interactions in which they are involved” (Bourdieu 1991, 56–7).12 In Turkey, foreigners are usually perceived as tourists and generally are not expected to speak Turkish fluently in public or in everyday life, let alone in local idiom. However, when we turn to a case group of managers and consultants comparable to those investigated in Canada and Germany, we understand that, concerning labour market expectations, these migrants exhibit similar patterns of language acquisition and usage, despite their formally subordinate legal labour market access.13 Among our interviewees in Turkey, there were two migrants who followed a consultant and management career path. Mr Sak, an economist born in 1947 in Turkestan and raised in the capital of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, easily learned the difficult Turkish language. Even before he migrated to Turkey, he understood that his Turkic dialect was very different from the language spoken in Turkey. As the dean of a university institute, he had talked to Turkish businessmen visiting his country: “I understood that our languages are different and I bought the necessary books and tried to develop my Turkish.” These initial efforts, made when he was still in Uzbekistan, were not overly successful: “Of course I cannot say that I learned it very well … in my home country.” It was only after his migration and during his first assignments as a manager that Mr Sak acquired full proficiency in Turkish. For Mr Lor, a German who immigrated to Turkey as the spouse of a teacher at a German school, it was impossible to rely on any cultural and linguistic proximity to the Turks as Mr Sak did. Hence, Mr Lor experienced his lack of Turkish language skills as a major obstacle during his first steps in Istanbul and entry into the labour market. Although he tried to learn the Turkish language, his language acquisition facilitated only his everyday life and was not sufficient for the Turkish labour market.

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Soon after Mr Lor began to work in a small IT counselling business, he discovered that he could not perform this job to the requirements of his employer, because he lacked proficiency in Turkish. This was his major motivation for enrolling in Turkish language courses again, and he received a Turkish language diploma. Mr Lor soon realized, however, that formal language training did not ensure one’s proficiency in the appropriate application of the language. As he emphasizes in his interview, “it only begins” after the diploma. His subsequent efforts to improve his Turkish language skills were accompanied by disappointing experiences in the labour market. During interviews for positions in Turkish companies, he understood that one needed to “speak Turkish perfectly and to move around in Turkey like a fish in the water.” Mr Lor eventually overcame the obstacles posed by the challenge of Turkish language acquisition when he “by chance” found a job in pharmaceutical development. His new employers acknowledged his specific qualifications concerning the “body of regulations” involved in the development process. Because Mr Lor had these qualifications, his language problems were “not so important anymore.” As evident in both cases, language courses and language books were necessary but not sufficient for the acquisition of appropriate (as opposed to grammatically correct) language. For migrants in the Turkish labour market, as for individuals in Canada and Germany, informal language learning was a must for management and consultancy posts. Mastery of the language is an expectation that alludes to certain power structures in the country. If the native people of a country (or at least the employers) expect foreign-educated migrants to speak the country’s language perfectly, this expectation privileges people raised in the country and handicaps migrants (Henkelmann 2012). Against the background of these implicit expectations, which legitimize only official languages, we have discovered clear homologies among migrants in Canada, Germany, and Turkey. First of all, in all migrant interviews analysed for this section, there is a thorough orientation towards the acquisition of the receiving country’s language. It may be seen as natural that a migrant would attempt to learn the language of the receiving country. However, as soon as we consider another typologically situated case group in the inquiry (see below), we shall see that this language orientation is a peculiarity of those migrants who follow a career in the free market as managers or consultants. Second, in all interviews it is clear that language acquisition does not stop at (non-)formal learning,

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that is, by the participation of the interviewee in language courses. It is only by informal learning (at work or during leisure time) that migrants are able to acquire skills in the colloquial application of language, using the right idioms in the right place and speaking convincingly.

Turkey and Germany: Learning the Codes of Qualified Local Labour There is a strong link between informally acquiring the legitimate language and learning the codes of local labour. For managers on the free market, there is a clear difference between Turkey and Germany on the one hand and Canada on the other. While in all three countries familiarity with the codes of local labour is something the migrants experience as a conditio sine qua non for obtaining qualified labour market positions, in Canada it does not matter if this familiarity with local labour is based on experience in unqualified jobs. In Turkey and Germany, however, a relatively high-level entry into the labour market is documented. In Turkey, both interviewees considered for this case group had undergone a period in which they first had to acquaint themselves with the expectations and standards of the Turkish labour market. Although Mr Sak repeatedly highlighted his cultural proximity to Turkey, in his account we can identify a period in which he first had to get acquainted with the do’s and don’ts of Turkish business. He came to Turkey upon an “agreement” between his country and the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce in order to complete an internship in the latter because such an institution was unknown to the Uzbek public. When he was offered a job by a company on the free market – a job in which he could, as an “economic advisor,” use his knowledge of business in (former) Eastern Bloc countries – he also learned the important elements of successful consulting (“research,” “evaluation,” “reporting”): “In general I was assigned with economic consultancy. I have worked on investment projects. I can say that I have produced nearly five projects myself. It was my assignment to go the countries and regions where investment was to be made, to analyse the factories in their place, to evaluate, then to write the report. As far as I know there wasn’t anybody else in this firm who could do this. Afterwards when I went to such field analyses … I became more experienced. Enough experienced. I also learned the situation here in a good way. I started to feel myself very sure. Most times my advices received positive feedback. And this is how life went on.”

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Mr Sak had proposed several international trade “projects” to his company, and by elaborating these projects he had, as he stated during the interview, “gained experience.” This experience pertained not only to the countries where he located the projects but also, as he added, the “situation here,” that is, in Turkey. Similarly, Mr Lor had first worked as a consultant in a company. During this job, and of course during his second, more qualified position as a chemical consultant, which he held at the time of the interview, he gained some insight into the codes of labour that were crucial for him. For example, Mr Lor observed a striking difference between the “Turkish” way of handling problems and the style he was used to, both as a German and as a more scientifically oriented expert. He described how his Turkish colleagues worked “more imprecisely” and only just managed by chance to “somehow” get around problems they face during work, such as preparing files for the state administration. In doing so, argues Mr Lor, they relied on knowledge passed on by colleagues who themselves had also only just scraped by. According to Mr Lor, in Turkey this did not constitute a problem because the administration itself was not taking things too seriously. However, the process contrasted with Mr Lor’s practice of solving problems “from the ground” and thereby “producing progress.” We cannot and need not judge whether Mr Lor’s observations are true; it is clear, however, that from personal experience Mr Lor was very well aware of the peculiarities of local codes of qualified labour. Not only this, but he assumed these differences were irreconcilable with the codes of qualified labour in Germany. Nevertheless, he accorded some merit to the “Turkish way” of handling problems insofar as it was – at least in the short term – successful. This shows that Mr Lor, like Mr Sak, had to first become familiar with the local codes of labour, starting with qualified job positions. As in Turkey, the migrants interviewed in Germany who follow management careers in the free market learn the codes of local labour in more or less qualified positions. Ms Morales-Aznar found her first job in the press department of an electronics company. There she had the opportunity to “learn how to get along with people,” to “see how German persons treat foreigners,” and to observe how a “group in a company develops.” Although this job was not related to her field of expertise (i.e., law), she concludes that she “learned quite a lot.” Although Ms Morales-Aznar gained her experience in the local codes of labour outside her field of expertise, she soon shifted direction and began a career in a bank, where she could draw on her experiences

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in the electronics company. Working in the bank, Ms Morales-Aznar received non-formal further education as well, though not within a trainee program. Mr Bergström (see chapter 4), who had graduated as an economist from a Swedish university, first found a management position in a company that operated in filter production in East Germany. There he collected first experiences in leadership and marketing. As he recalls in the interview, on his first day in the company he stood in front of fifteen blue-collar workers, who were far older than he and previously socialized in the socialist part of Germany. He managed this difficult situation by reminding them that they all were dependent on the company’s success and therefore had to cooperate. It is clear from his narration that Mr Bergström had anticipated hostility directed towards himself, the youngster from Sweden, and that he had developed a strategy to cope with it. In addition to this leadership experience, Mr Bergström also took his first steps in marketing by visiting all previous customers of the company in order to check if there was still a market. When he became increasingly discontented with this job, Mr Bergström applied for a management trainee program with the Dresdner Bank, for people with academic degrees different from accountancy. His application was successful, and in the following months the bank provided him and the other trainees with education in the “everyday bank business” and gave them time to acquire the basic skills needed. While entry into the bank position had been quite easy, the trainee program came with “high expectations” from the bank and “hard work” to be completed by the trainees. The in-house training that Mr Bergström and Ms Morales-Aznar received in the bank was closely related to their jobs and organized by their employers. This means that the knowledge and skills acquired during their further education can be presumed to have met the expectations of their respective employers.14 To sum up, in Turkey and Germany there are certain homologies in the typologically situated case groups of these managers who follow free market careers and are not endowed with transnational cultural capital. In both countries, our interviewees have learned the local codes of labour at a considerably high level of qualified jobs, including through non-formal education. In Canada, as the following section will show, it is not the level of work experience that matters but the fact that one has Canadian work experience.

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Cultural Credit as a Term At this point, it is important to note again that, although the case groups compared in this chapter are typologically situated in a similar way, the managers and consultants in Turkey have a rather limited legal access to the labour market; in Germany, we included only those managers who had obtained legal labour market access and soon after arrival found themselves in the group described here. In Germany, migrants with subordinate legal access did not succeed in a management career in the free market (see also chapter 5). These commonalities and differences between countries show that, from the perspective of our interviewees, the social conditions – that is, the “social alchemy” (Bourdieu 1986b, 248) – of each country attributes cultural credit to foreigners’ knowledge and skills. Whereas in Germany a precondition for achieving cultural credit is full legal labour market access, in Turkey such access seems to be less important. As we shall see in Canada, the way cultural credit is bestowed may differ greatly as well. Whereas in Germany and Turkey foreign educational titles are valued even if the migrant lacks local work experience, in Canada local experience is, as the analysis will show, crucial. Hence, at the threshold to a labour market position (e.g., at a job interview), the “credence” (Bourdieu 2010, 120) or credit given to the foreigner reflects features other than professional skills. We deliberately use here the term cultural credit. As we emphasized in chapter 2, knowledge and skills should not be equated with cultural capital. Only when the knowledge and skills that migrants bring with them are accepted in the labour market do they constitute cultural capital. However, in this chapter we are not concerned with how migrants actually use their knowledge and skills in the economic system, that is, with how they capitalize on their qualifications and are rewarded for them. Rather, we consider their strategies for adapting their knowledge and skills to anticipated labour market expectations in order to present features that are more likely to appeal to employers. At the threshold to a labour market position, knowledge and skills are given credit by the employer (or not), but they are not yet used at work. Cultural capital then exists where people are rewarded and/or recognized for an activity, the mastering of which is attributed to previous learning processes. The relational character of cultural capital (which we wish to underscore by speaking of knowledge and skills only if their value is not yet recognized and by using the term cultural credit when knowledge and skills are just recognized at the threshold to a labour market position)

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Figure 7.1 Cultural credit

Cultural capital in the labour market as reward and/or recognition for an activity, the mastering of which is attributed to previous learning processes Cultural credit given by employers on the threshold to the labour market Knowledge and skills acquired in the educational system, including further education

time

is very well represented in the comparative analyses in this chapter. When we state that in different labour markets different cultural credit is attributed to migrants’ knowledge and skills, we confirm that what Bourdieu has termed “cultural” is not confined to culture. Rather, with the terms cultural credit and cultural capital we denote a relation that includes the structural aspects of the labour market and economy. Ultimately, culture, in Bourdieu’s perspective, is deeply enmeshed in societal and economic process structures.

Canada: Accepting Unqualified Jobs for the Sake of Local Work Experience In Canada, migrants who later became successful managers or consultants started their status passage into the labour market with unqualified jobs. Mr Forester, a manager who had “300-plus people working for me” in his position in South Africa, understood that in Canada he would first find only “$10-an-hour menial jobs”:15 “I think a lot of it

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was the differential from coming from a position of respect where I had 300-plus people working for me and I was in a senior position, to these interviews which ended up being for $10-an-hour menial jobs, where they were interacting with me as though I was stupid …, as if I was [laughing] less cognitively able than wanted. They’d explain the most simple things to me and I wanted to say, ‘Look, I know all of this, I’ll do it, it’s OK.’ But there was this insistence that this was how it had to be done.” This demotion from manager to gofer is documented in all the interviews we conducted with managers and consultants in Canada who became successful. An experienced manager from Germany, for example, first worked as a waiter. The migrant who experiences this degradation must then learn “how it had to be done” and – as coined by Mr Forester – the “etiquette of how something worked.” This subordination of highly qualified managers reminds us of other “degradation ceremonies” (Garfinkel 1972) – in the army or during vocational training, for example – in which novices are put on a career track leading to higher positions. But while in these examples novices are temporarily degraded within one organization that offers a clear view of promotion, the degradation of migrant managers in Canada, although transitory, takes place across different organizations in the labour market, and the rewards are more elusive or less likely to be offered. Nevertheless, this degradation is also transitory insofar as those migrants who became successful, on the basis of their first unqualified occupations in Canada, find underqualified jobs in their field of expertise and finally advance to the level they had occupied before migration.16 Mr Forester, for example, was later employed as a sales manager and was eventually hired as a human resources manager. This pattern of learning the codes of local labour (most importantly, how to behave at the workplace and how to adequately communicate with colleagues, supervisors, and customers) by accepting unqualified jobs early on is again documented in the interview with Mr Hofmann, a German-Swedish manager who holds a master’s degree from Germany. He recalls his last job application: “The new job I have, starting the 4th of January it didn’t require that at all. They said, ‘Oh, OK, you have a master’s, OK fine, what is your Canadian work experience?’ That’s what they go for.” Mr Hofmann gained the post only because, like Mr Forester, he had entered the labour market with unqualified jobs, followed by underqualified or non-permanent and poorly paid

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positions, until he found positions that took full advantage of his professional capabilities. For the managers interviewed in Canada, it has been important to accept any kind of (even unqualified) work where they had this learning opportunity. Several migrants who undertook costly further education because they were unemployed later found themselves deeply in debt, working as truck drivers (see below). In contrast, none of the successful managers reported any (non-)formal further education. This is because the central question these migrants had to answer during job interviews was “What is your Canadian work experience?” And then, as Mr Hofmann stated, it is helpful if you have “built some references here in Canada, from former jobs.” The importance of references indicates that the migrant elicits trust in his or her knowledge and skills not only by learning the local codes of labour but also by gaining “Canadian work experience,” during which a “durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” establishes the individual’s “credit” (Bourdieu 1986b, 248–9). Where work experience also serves to obtain “references,” step by step the individual establishes “social capital” (in the sense of Bourdieu 1986b), which is enmeshed with cultural credit. In this respect, the knowledge and skill sets acquired abroad along with work experience don’t count anymore. The importance of Canadian work experience as well as the prevalence of unqualified jobs during migrants’ first years in Canada is also underscored by a longitudinal study done by Statistics Canada (2005) in which 9,300 immigrants were interviewed two years after their arrival, 76 per cent of whom were admitted under the conditions of the skilled workers program. This analysis showed that an 80 per cent majority of those immigrants found employment within two years after their arrival. However, even among the skilled workers program immigrants, only 48 per cent of those with employment “found a job in their intended occupation. Four in ten (40%) did so during their first year in Canada, while another 8% did so during their second year” (Statistics Canada 2005, 9).17 The study summarized the most serious problems faced by these immigrants during their first two years in Canada: “Skilled worker PAs who encountered problems most often cited lack of Canadian work experience (26%) or lack of acceptance of their foreign experience or qualifications (23%). Another 16% said there were not enough jobs available and 9% cited language barriers as the most serious problem they faced” (11).

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Another analysis of this survey maintains that four years after arrival, among economic immigrants (a group within which different subcategories, among them the “skilled worker PAs,” are combined) “lack of Canadian work experience was mentioned most often (50%), followed by lack of contacts in the job market (37%) and lack of recognition of foreign experience (37%) and foreign qualification (35%)” (Schellenberg and Maheux 2007, 8). These are “‘overlapping’ problems” (9) insofar as 30 per cent of job seekers “encountered two” of the four major problems and 26 per cent even three or four (9). These figures show that the labour market in Canada works differently from the political system. While Canada conceives of itself as a multicultural society and highly values the professional experience of immigration applicants in its point system (see Schmidtke 2006), apparently in the economic system the guarantees supplied by social relations in the workplace (“Canadian work experience”) are preferred. Only these social relations make the knowledge and skills of immigrants worthy of credit. Hence, “Canadian work experience” may serve implicitly to socially and symbolically exclude newcomers.

Enhancing Cultural Credit To sum up, the comparison of cases across countries and status groups reveals features common to all migrants whose life stories have been analysed in this chapter up to this point as well as patterns specific to a country and/or the legal access to the labour market. As a comparison with the case group in the next section will show, these results are also specific to the particular typologically situated case group under investigation, that is, migrants who enhance their knowledge and skills and finally become consultants or managers on the free market. In all three countries, learning the local codes of labour is an important task for foreign managers. However, whereas in Canada those migrants who later became successful started their status passage with unqualified jobs that they accepted only for the sake of “Canadian work experience,” the entrance level into the labour market in Germany and Turkey turned out to be quite high, that is, on a qualified level.18 In Turkey this pattern of the status passage has been identified among migrants with subordinate legal access to the labour market, while there has not been a similar case in Germany. Another difference between Turkey and Germany lies in the role of non-formal further education: while in Turkey non-formal education used for the adaption of knowledge and

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skills of migrants is essentially non-existent, in Germany non-formal further education plays a significant role. In the cases of Mr Bergström and Ms Morales-Aznar, non-formal further education is a major element of career advancement. In all three countries, migrants whose foreign educational titles were not fully accepted as cultural credit in the beginning were still able to use their knowledge and skills in order to continue learning, either non-formally or informally. We therefore must distinguish between two aspects of cultural capital: while local codes of labour are still being acquired, the migrant’s knowledge and skills certainly do not receive full cultural credit (i.e., they are not accorded the same value by employers as they were accorded in the country of origin); however, the “use value” of migrants’ knowledge and skills is certainly important when they are adapting their professional capabilities to the local labour market. In other words, foreign knowledge and skills may not yet be given cultural credit by employers, but they are used by the migrant as he or she adapts to labour market expectations, improving the opportunities to receive cultural credit in the labour market.19 The use value of skills is especially important when it comes to learning the country’s language. All managers interviewed, regardless of where they worked, placed emphasis on informally learning the appropriate use of language. Such informal learning processes are usually situated in the context of work. Here migrants acquire what they consider to be the necessary skills in the local language. The analysis in the next section will reveal that this transnational feature is by no means generalizable but, rather, specific to the typologically situated case group of the managers and consultants in the free market. 7.2

Training on the Job within Career Tracks Ruled by Professional Law

In Canada, Turkey, and Germany, the profession of the manager is not regularized by the state, but there are career tracks that are highly regulated by professional law. One of these career tracks is that of the medical profession (see Englmann and Müller 2007, 33–85; and Boyd and Schellenberg 2008; see also chapter 5). In Turkey, state regulation goes so far as to exclude all non-citizens from the medical profession (see Sezer and Yıldız 2009). Given the strong professional regulations for further education during the medical career track, other, more informal or non-formal experiences of further education remain rather marginal

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in the narrative accounts given by doctors in Germany and Canada. Even language acquisition does not seem to be so important, although the reasons differ from country to country. Our analysis considers narrative interviews conducted with medical staff in Germany and Canada, while setting aside those interviews with doctors who were unemployed or working in unqualified jobs in Turkey.

The Importance of Formalized Further Education for Doctors Both in Canada and Germany, the medical profession, highly regularized by law, allows foreigners to work as doctors only if they meet specific standards of training and if they are prepared to receive further education in their field of expertise. Hence, in both national contexts the trajectories into the medical labour market are rather formalized, albeit with some differences. Mr Duani, originating from Algeria, had first failed the English version of the US-Canadian entrance exam for the medical profession. As he had already studied medicine and worked as a doctor in Frenchspeaking countries (France and Belgium), he then decided to take the French-language version of this exam in Quebec.20 After he passed this exam, he had the opportunity to either immediately write a second exam and receive a professional licence as a general practitioner or begin an internship as part of a well-paid, specialized training for gynaecologists, followed by another exam. Mr Duani chose the latter, but then failed the exam. He then changed his specialization and started training as a radiotherapist. It is interesting that, during the interview, Mr Duani did not mention anything he had learned during his (paid) internship that would help him in the professional licence exam. Although the internship was part of the formalized further education for gynecology and radiotherapy, it gave Mr Duani space and time to independently prepare himself for the professional licence exam. Finally he received both his professional licence and his specialized training as a radiotherapist. In the case of Mr Mbé, a young general practitioner from Niger, the specialized training was so much in the foreground of his narrative account that he did not even mention any exam. This certainly has to do with Mr Mbé’s general enthusiasm for studying and for gaining new experience, as is evident in an excerpt from the transcript in which he narrates his migration to Canada: “Before, I have done general medicine, as a general practitioner; so I worked in a hospital and then I worked in a private practice where I did it [general medicine]. I did this

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for two years, and as I see myself today, I love learning most, learning, and I said, listen one has to have experience, that is French experience, so one must go to France or to Paris, and as well one has to have North American experience, so [that was this moment] when I have decided to come here” (Henkelmann 2007, 95). Prior to migration, Mr Mbé had worked in hospitals in Benin. Reflecting on his sense of self, he pointed out his general eagerness to learn and to gain “experience,” which – according to him – had been the reason for his considering France and North America as possible destinations of migration. When he got to know a medical doctor from Quebec, Mr Mbé took the opportunity and migrated to French-speaking Canada with the assistance of his new friend. While initially he had intended to go back to Niger on the completion of his specialized training, he decided to stay in Canada. Mr Mbé makes no mention of the exams he had to pass in order to start his internship and receive his full professional licence. On the other hand, as in Mr Duani’s account, the internship was seen as the specialized training. Apart from the internship, neither doctor mentioned any course he had to take in order to learn the subject of his specialization. The internship itself was described in matters of time (“after one-anda-half year of internship”) but not of content. The formal aspect of the specialized training stayed in the foreground of the narration, albeit in a fairly unfocused way. Indeed, in Canada the accreditation of medical titles, as discussed in chapter 5, is rather formalized and standardized through a central exam, the Medical Council of Canada’s Evaluating Examination (MCCEE).21 In contrast to Germany, in Canada the access to this exam is unrestricted for residents of Canada. Still, many foreign doctors fail to pass this exam and thus cannot work in any medical position (Boyd and Schellenberg 2008, 6). Statistical material also shows that the probability of being employed as a medical doctor is significantly lower for doctors who have immigrated at more than twenty-eight years of age than for those trained in Canada. Furthermore, the situation of doctors with their own practice is worse than that of those working in hospitals. For the latter, it is necessary only to have passed the MCCEE. But to open one’s own practice, first one has to go through specialized training (as our interviewees did) and pass the respective exams; then one has to apply for and obtain one of the residencies controlled by the province’s administration. In 2005, only 13 per cent of those foreign physicians who had successfully completed all required exams and had applied

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for a residency were accepted into a residency program (8). The reason for this small number of residencies assigned to foreign doctors is a peculiar administrative procedure that discriminates against foreigneducated doctors and benefits doctors trained in Canada (4).22 During the career track regulated by professional law, foreign medical doctors face two different hurdles in their attempts to receive cultural credit for their foreign educational titles. First, similarly to the managers discussed earlier, they require credit for their academic titles as well as for their more informal knowledge and skills by employers (hospitals, etc.) that would hire them. At the same time, but in contrast to the managers, foreign doctors also require cultural credit institutionalized by the state. Only if their knowledge and skills, tested in the exams discussed above, receive institutionalized cultural credit can migrants seek a labour market position in their field.23 In Germany, as in Canada, the medical training of foreign doctors needs to receive cultural credit institutionalized by the state. As discussed in chapter 5, German professional law offers two different statuses for medical doctors with foreign degrees: the minor professional licence (Berufserlaubnis) and the full professional licence (Approbation). To be employed in a hospital or independent practice under the supervision of a fully licensed doctor, one needs Berufserlaubnis. Although the regulations for this minor licence differ from one federal state to the next, this licence is usually valid for a limited period of time and on the condition that one has completed a medical study abroad comparable (but not necessarily equal) to such a course of study in Germany. The state bureaucracy has ample scope to regulate the conditions for this minor licence: it can broaden or narrow the areas in which the foreign doctor might legitimately practise, it can demand that the doctor write (and pass) an exam of equivalence after a certain period (e.g., two years), and it can single out specific groups for which the minor licence is granted for longer, even unlimited, periods of time (e.g., for those married to a German or for those who are recognized asylum seekers). If one wishes to avoid the arbitrary nature of state regulation, one must obtain a full professional licence. However, even this licence, which allows the doctor to work without supervision and to open a private practice, is bound by two conditions: First, the physician has to pass an exam of equivalence (which was introduced in 2002), and second, the doctor must be, or be on the way to becoming, a German citizen or an EU national.24 German and EU citizenship are thus treated as institutionalized symbolic capital or even – as long as it is provided on the

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basis of ius sanguinis – “racist symbolic capital” (Weiß 2010b), which privileges one social group even as it symbolically discredits the other. In spite of these institutional differences between the Canadian and German systems (the exam-lined career path in the former, the additional importance of institutionalized symbolic capital in the latter), one can identify similar patterns of experience in the further education systems of the two countries. In particular, further education is rather formalized and strongly fixed to the professional career. At the same time, migrants experience this further education as a matter of formalized internship rather than as an opportunity to adapt their own knowledge and skills. We have already discussed in this book the experiences of several doctors, including doctors who experienced a high degree of legal exclusion. None of them mentioned learning experiences that go beyond very particular skills, such as “new techniques in ultrasound” and the like. Throughout their narrations, physicians focus on the formal part of the status passage. Dr Nazar, a general practitioner from Turkey, was offered a position as a “medical doctor in internship” (Arzt im Praktikum) by a member of the Turkish doctors’ association that he worked for as a volunteer (see chapter 4). He then easily obtained the minor professional licence, with which he could work under the “supervision” of a fully licensed doctor for two years. After his wife, herself of Turkish origin, had been granted German citizenship, he was able to obtain German citizenship as well. As Dr Nazar said during the interview, “I have been granted [German citizenship] in ’98. And after I had obtained this I have also obtained my full professional licence.” Neither in this part of the interview nor in any other did Dr Nazar mention anything he had learned during his internship as an assistant doctor.25 Instead he emphasized the importance of “German citizenship,” that is, institutionalized symbolic capital.26 For Dr Mendelson, a Lithuanian gynaecologist of German descent, the internship with the minor professional licence was not an opportunity for further education, either. However, when she failed to receive recognition for her specialization in Germany, Dr Mendelson started her specialization training again. Dr Mendelson gave a (comparatively) detailed account of her further education in gynecology. During her specialization training, she worked in various different practices. Interestingly, the only field of expertise mentioned in this context is the “facultative further education in endocrinology,” which wasn’t required for her recognition as a gynaecologist.

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Dr Uslu, a general practitioner who migrated from Turkey after he married a Germany-based Turk, did not mention his internship for the minor licence at all. Instead, the whole narrative is framed by his struggle to find opportunities to continue his “specialized training,” which he describes as a succession of different medical practices in which he had worked. He received specialized training as a general practitioner. Against the background of these different workplaces, Dr Uslu’s account of the “eighteen months” he spent in a residency is given in greater detail. This may be because in the “medical practice specialized in diabetes” he received new knowledge and skills on diabetology, for which further training (e.g., the “courses” taken) was not a compulsory part of the specialization training but, rather, a result of Dr Uslu’s personal interest in the subject. If one compares the three cases analysed above, three patterns of further education can be identified: 1. The doctors did not see their internship for a minor professional licence as an opportunity to adapt or enhance knowledge and skills but, rather, as an obligation to fulfil before receiving a full professional licence. This regulation-centred attitude towards the internship is even intensified by the obligation to obtain German citizenship (which takes at least the same length of time as the internship). 2. Those who want to start or continue with specialized training (e.g., as a gynaecologist or as a general practitioner) are very concerned with the formal aspects and challenges of this task. The frequent (and obviously necessary) change of workplace stays in the foreground of the accounts. 3. Only when the doctors mention voluntary further education do they place more stress on the content of the courses and internships. Further evidence is provided by the case of Dr Zadeh (see chapter 4), which reveals homologous patterns of experiencing further education. Yet Dr Zadeh is a dentist from Iran, who, in contrast to his colleagues mentioned above, had to pass an exam in order to receive his full professional licence: Well I was granted German citizenship and now I could apply for the full medical licence (1 sec. pause) ah but I had second problem, my studies were in a foreign country; so I had to go to an examination an expert

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commission; of course that wasn’t really easy, first ah my studies were several years before and second ah well that was in different language, but it was possible, I had experience, and I’ve been doing further training all the time, and so I succeeded, ah with passing this exam and then I could apply for medical licence. That’s what I did, and that was 2003, then I mh well took over this surgery ah where I was working and since then I’ve been well independent dentist.

Again, German citizenship turns out to be institutionalized symbolic capital, which Dr Zadeh had to obtain before he could apply for the full professional licence. In 2002, a federal court decided that all foreigneducated migrants had to undergo an examination of equivalence in medicine and dentistry, which Dr Zadeh then had to pass. Interestingly, Dr Zadeh emphasized the importance of “having had many further education courses” during his time as an “assistant dentist” but did not seem to consider the position itself as an opportunity for further education. In this sense, the pattern in the cases above is reproduced even in the case of Dr Zadeh, whose career path differs considerably from that of the others. With the 2002 introduction of the examination of equivalence, German procedures for foreign doctors now are similar in some ways to the Canadian regulations (although they are considerably different in other ways). Even if the applicant has worked with a minor professional licence in Germany for many years, if his or her knowledge and skills have been obtained outside the European Union, they are reviewed again if he or she wishes to obtain a full (and permanent) professional licence. In such a case, competences lose their “ambiguity” (Bourdieu 1998b, 117–18): the “social dignity” of the educational title is lost, and the knowledge and skills (the “technical competence,” as Bourdieu has put it) are re-evaluated, much the same as happens in the MCCEE.27 The German exam, which is intended to ascertain the knowledge and skills of a foreign-educated doctor vis-à-vis those of the German physician, is far less standardized than the exams in Canada, however. The bureaucratic procedures and results of these exams, which we have sampled for different German federal states for 2003 through 2006, proved to be quite heterogeneous. In some states, one was allowed to repeat this exam as often as desired; in other states, it could be rewritten only once. The success rate of medical doctors proved to be quite high in general, as much as 90 per cent in some years, whereas that of dentists was generally lower and very volatile: in 2006 in Hamburg and

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another federal state, the success rate was approximately 53 per cent, whereas in Berlin it ranged between zero and 25 per cent.28 Such exams, as we have observed in both Germany and Canada, re-accredit the knowledge and skills of the foreign doctor. In order to subject the foreign doctor to this re-accreditation, his or her professional knowledge and skills are first discredited, that is, the trust usually enjoyed by the doctor is taken away. However, by undertaking internships and achieving a passing grade on exams, the foreign doctor can re-institutionalize his or her cultural credit. The re-accreditation of knowledge and skills and the ensuing reinstitutionalization of cultural credit do not imply that every migrant who passes the exam is able to find an adequate position in the labour market. A minor or full professional licence is, after all, only an institutionalized cultural credit accorded to the foreign-educated migrant by the state. As we have shown in chapter 4, only the economic system – that is, the medical labour market – can determine whether a particular physician’s medical knowledge and skills will be valued or not. As discussed in chapter 6, however, in the German labour market, there is subtle ethnic discrimination: medical doctors with unfamiliar accents or foreign surnames may not be invited for job interviews.29 Moreover, we have found overt ethnic discrimination. In the advertisement of the official association of dentists, some positions were explicitly reserved for “Germans” or people with a “German exam.”30 On the other hand, many (if not all) of the medical doctors and dentists we interviewed in Germany were first employed in practices that had been seeking a physician or dentist “who knows Turkish” or “who is fluent in Russian” (as other job ads of this association read). To work in (or even to own) a “Russian practice,” as one of our interviewees described his own residency, may not be an intentional shift towards an ethnic niche or into the “migrants’ economy” (see Kontos 2005). Along with the symbolic discrediting of foreign doctors by their “native German” colleagues, foreign-language fluency provides job opportunities in the immigrant districts of Germany’s big cities that foreign doctors cannot but make use of. (For the social meaning of ethnic niches, see also chapter 6.)31 In the case of foreign doctors in Germany, we can speak of a bifurcation of symbolic credit, which itself overlaps the value assigned to knowledge and skills. This symbolic credit is split because what is used to exclude foreign doctors (i.e., their ethnic and migratory background) is also an important tool for symbolic inclusion in the niche economy.

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Hence, the symbolic discrediting foreign doctors may face can be a symbolic credit as well. However, it is not only the commonalities of an ethnically defined background that is important for this pattern. In general, foreign doctors are apparently preferred by patients with migratory background, even if the patients do not share the doctor’s supposed ethnicity. The social position of migrant doctors or of doctors who are members of a minority makes them attractive among patients who also occupy this difficult position. Along with social proximity, a foreign doctor’s language competencies, especially if he or she knows languages in addition to the mother tongue, can be used to the doctor’s advantage.32 In Canada, on the other hand, a region’s official language (whether English or French) turned out to be dominant in the medical sector (see Henkelmann 2007). This did not constitute a problem for the migrants interviewed by Henkelmann because they had all chosen Quebec as their host region because French was dominant. In general, in Canada we could not observe a migration-related niche economy of doctors as we did in Germany. This may have to do with the fact that most foreign doctors in Canada are employed in hospitals, and only a few of them are able to open their own practice (see above). 7.3

Downgrading Trajectories: Further Education as a Loss of Cultural Capital

Further education may improve cultural credit in the sense that it enables the migrant to use his or her academic degree on an appropriate level or even to obtain a higher position in the labour market. Earlier we discussed a case group of managers and consultants who were able to follow an upgrading career path in a non-regulated professional field by continuously improving their knowledge and skills. We also considered a group of medical doctors who were able to improve their cultural credit via further education, though in a highly regulated field. However, further education may also lead to downgrading career paths, or the loss of cultural capital, as the following analysis will reveal. There are two types of non-formal further education as a loss of cultural capital, two types that seem to be specific to the particular countries in which we discovered them. The first type may be described as “downgrading education,” for it includes migrants with academic titles who, after a period of unemployment, in one way or another attend non-academic training courses and then use these newly acquired

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non-academic knowledge and skills in the labour market. This first type was identified in Germany. In Canada we are confronted with cases in which migrants attend academic-level adaptation courses but do not succeed in using their adapted knowledge and skills in the labour market and instead end up with poor jobs and heavy debt loads.

Germany: Downgrading Cultural Credit by Attending Non-Academic Education In Germany, we find several cases in which a combination of welfare state regulations and downgrading education is characteristic (see also chapter 4). Mr Shwetz had been trained as a car engineer before he left Russia in 1993, bound for Germany. As an ethnic German, he had the right to unemployment benefits, and the employment office was especially eager to help find him a job.33 However, after a year of unemployment, Mr Shwetz was ready to take part in a “retraining” course as a “car mechanic,” although this meant that his previous academic education as an engineer would be devalued.34 Nevertheless, this welfare state–guaranteed downgrading education turned out to be successful in the sense that Mr Shwetz found a job selling spare parts for cars. Here he could use not only his technical knowledge but also his communication skills as an individual with an academic education. Later, he opened a car dealership of his own. A similar combination of welfare state and downgrading education has been identified in Ms Shwetz’s status passage into the labour market. Ms Shwetz had been a teacher of mathematics and physics before she began work as an IT expert in a data-processing centre back in Russia. After her migration to Germany, and on the basis of her social identity as an ethnic German, Ms Shwetz was eligible for unemployment benefits and for training by the employment office: Well and now about this professional career. (2 sec. pause) I was until (3 sec. pause) when we came (.) here to Krefeld there was another retraining, at the Krefeld job centre. At first (.) they wanted (.) ah to offer office clerk (1 sec. pause), but don’t even know if they (.) if funds were too tight or, don’t even know why that (.) why that didn’t work really. Ah well a- a quite an ordinary (.) training. I don’t even know (.) really. There was something (.) some problem with the job centre; and then they offered (.) such a training course at [breathes in deeply] ah at the Deutsche (.) Angestelltenakademie, that’s kind of (2 sec. pause) school for further training

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in Krefeld [breathes in deeply]. Well this system (.) this data system used by well almost all tax accountants in ah in the F- [breathes in deeply] in the Federal Republic. Almost all at that time anyway all well has changed much already. Make already many programs of their own (.) their own and (.) so I learned about this program for ten months, (1 sec. pause) well that was a real system. Quite a mobile and quite a powerful system; [breathes in] by which you process all data for tax declaration and so on.

Although she had first been scheduled for a “normal” training as an “office clerk,” she then was redirected to a shorter course in which she was trained in a data-processing program used by tax accountants. On the basis of this course, the length and content of which was defined by the employment office (without considering Ms Shwetz’s wishes), the former programmer was degraded to an operator of computer programs. Like her husband, Ms Shwetz then found an adequate job with a tax accountant. Ms Shwetz used this job opportunity with its limited remuneration to acquire the knowledge crucial to tax accountancy (i.e., the “statement of financial condition”). Doing so improved her employability, making her competitive with people who had received a “normal training” as a tax accountant assistant. Later, when she was laid off by her first employer, Ms Shwetz was able to use her non-academic knowledge and skills, acquired both by formal and informal learning, to easily find a new job with another tax accountant.35 There are also migrants who receive downgrading education outside their original field of expertise. For example, Mr Baako, a Nigerian physicist trained in Czechoslovakia (see chapter 4), did not pursue his (academic) career in Germany (where only a part of his studies had been acknowledged by the university) but worked as a taxi driver and jobber. Whereas at the beginning he enjoyed a life of leisure and (modest) luxury, after his marriage and the birth of his child he settled down in Berlin and looked for a more continuous job. Mr Baako was not entitled to unemployment benefits based on the virtue of his ethnic identity (in contrast to Mr and Ms Shwetz, who received benefits because they were ethnic Germans). However, after several years of working legally as a taxi driver, he became entitled to unemployment benefits. He then took part in “further education” as an “IT-system analyst,” which was financed by the employment office. With this further education, Mr Baako could take advantage of his previous interest in computers. After a time, during which he had to resume taxi driving, he finally found a job as an expert for computer networks.

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As is evident from the cases analysed above, the status passages of these migrants (and several others) have to be considered within the framework of the welfare state. All these migrants have – either by virtue of their social identity or by their previous contributions to unemployment insurance – attended retraining courses that were financed by the employment office. Hence, in theoretical terms, cultural capital here is restructured (rather than re-accredited, as it was with the doctors) and then either acknowledged by the labour market or not. The restructuring process is dominated by the employment office, which provides for a huge number of non-academic training courses but does not take into account the academic motivation and previous education of the migrants. As the adaptation of university degrees in Germany is not supported by the employment office on a general basis, only a few individuals gain access to academic (re-)training, financed either by the employment office or by a foundation (e.g., the Otto-Benecke-Stiftung).

Canada: Unsuccessful Academic Training While welfare state regulations have played a major role in downgrading the cultural capital of migrants in Germany, in Canada the university and its inscription fees, or the fees of other academic courses, are obstacles for the migrants. For example, Mr Sinha, who holds a BA in computer science obtained in Kashmir, India, was advised to redo his degree in the form of lengthy and costly training courses. This led to a two-year educational program designed to provide him with a certificate for working in the IT sector (Oracle). He completed these courses while working full-time in menial jobs. In the end, this additional educational training did not really make his knowledge and skills compatible for the Canadian market. Although the course was highly recommended to him by immigrant agencies as a way into his traditional professional field (computers), it only left him with a debt that was hard to shoulder as a recent immigrant: “Oh. I have been taking these courses, like, I took this seminar course, they’re about $600 each, not, and I spent $15,000 on my Oracle. Oracle didn’t come free. I went to school full time, so I’m just ending up with debt after debt and when I will go looking for a job, I don’t know, [laughs], maybe it’s my bad luck or my bad timing, But (2 sec. pause) they want Canadian experience.” But not only did Oracle leave Mr Sinha in debt. It also made his life extraordinarily stressful, as he recounts: “But when you have two kids at home, I have to take them for soccer, I have to take them for baseball,

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I take them for swimming, at the same time, I cannot go to school, so it’s, I know how much it took a toll on me to do Oracle full time for five exams, $15,000, it’s not that easy. Believe me, I was the only one who was working full time and going to school full time (2 sec. pause) I used to start my morning at 5 o’clock and then come home at midnight, and then again morning and used to do, and then work week, it’s not that, it’s almost, it didn’t go well, it didn’t work much, because still you had to start all over again.” Mr Sinha was not only under pressure to finance both his family and his courses (including exams); he also did not find an adequate job. Interestingly, he does not relate this to the bad advice he was given by the immigrant agencies, who failed to inform him about the importance of “Canadian experience” in the labour market, but refers instead to “bad timing” and “bad luck.” Apparently in his professional field, in contrast to that of the managers (see above), working in menial jobs was not considered to be sufficient Canadian work experience. Mr Khan, an experienced accountant from India, voices very comparable sentiments and experiences during the time he sought to find employment in his field of training. Like many others, Mr Khan not only suffered from the non-recognition of his degree and foreign work experience but he also experienced a lack of coherent and transparent standards for required training and further education. Although he finally took up a retraining course, Mr Khan was not able to find an adequate position in the labour market. A similar story can be found in the narrative of Mr Sarin, a young Microsoft systems engineer who hoped that a two-year training course would be his entry into the Canadian labour market. After completing this course, he did not see any opportunity to land a qualified job: “I mean, a new immigrant comes and you put an $11,000 loan on him, where is he gonna, I mean I’m still paying my loan. Because of that I can’t get a credit card because I have missed my payments, to tell you frankly. And I did a two years course, a CDI course, and they tell you, ‘You’re going to get a job, you’re going to get a job.’ Completed this course, and 80 per cent of these guys didn’t get a job. The only guys who got a job were people who knew someone inside the company.” Having been advised to go into these educational programs by Canadian government officials, Mr Sinha, Mr Sarin, and Mr Khan undertook elaborate training exercises only to find themselves without a qualified and well-paying job at the end of the process. All three were caught in a downward spiral of material pressures, the need to re-qualify, and an

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uncertain professional situation. When asked if he could use his new training, Mr Sarin is quite explicit about the bad pay-off: “Oh no, no, no, no. I’m driving a truck.” When one looks at these cases in Canada, the professional situation of these migrants is clear enough: although they were eager to adapt their knowledge and skills to the expectations of the Canadian labour market, their expectations were never realized. It would be premature to conclude that this professional situation is due to the lack of welfare state regulations and of sound information on the labour market. As Mr Sinha suggests in his interview, his labour market failure may also be due to his lack of Canadian work experience within the professional field. All the migrants in our sample whose Canada-based further education could not be turned into an upgrading career path later adapted themselves to work in areas of the labour market for which they required little qualification – for example, as a truck-driver or other unqualified labourer.36 7.4

Advancing One’s Cultural Credit: Transnational and National Features of the Adaptation of Knowledge and Skills to Labour Market Expectations

The three case groups analysed here illustrate the importance of adapting further education to labour market expectations. Managers and consultants enhanced their knowledge either by receiving training from their employers (in Germany) and informally learning on the job (both in Turkey and Germany) or by working their way up the job ladder (in Canada). In all these contexts they could ensure that their new knowledge and skills met the expectations of their employers. Medical doctors and dentists, both in Canada and Germany, need not care about the fit between their further education and the expectations of the labour market because their trajectory into the labour market is stateregulated. Nevertheless, in Germany we can see a distinct tendency for them to work in ethnic niches of the medical labour market. The migrants in Canada discussed in the last section were further educated by state agencies and universities not directly in touch with the labour market. Apparently in these courses the production of knowledge and skills did not anticipate their reception in the labour market (see Bourdieu 1991, 76–7). Hence, these migrants found it difficult to adapt their knowledge and skills to the specific expectations of future employers. In these cases, further education could not boost cultural credit. In the

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German context, we found cases of downgrading education as well. Here the welfare state and some of its bureaucratic peculiarities appear to have encouraged migrants in this case group to pursue non-academic further education, whereupon they found employment. The empirical analysis of ways to adapt one’s knowledge and skills to labour market expectations reveals the relational character of cultural capital. During the status passages into the labour market, knowledge and skills are (re-)evaluated and improved in connection with several important features, varying from country to country and from one typologically situated case group to another. There is one pattern recurrent in all three countries, both with those migrants who have subordinate legal access to the labour market and with those who have equal legal access: adaptation of knowledge and skills, be it through informal, non-formal, or formal further education or social capital, is a good means to improve one’s career if one is already included in the labour market. For most of the unemployed among the migrants interviewed and for those who worked only for the sake of subsistence (and to pay the fees for re-education), further education led to downgrading either to a non-academic (though still professional) level or to the level of unskilled labour. Thus, even if it is acquired in the host country, further education is not easily turned into cultural capital. The case groups discussed in this chapter reveal the closeness of the link between working in a qualified position and further education. Thus, knowledge and skills obtained in the education system are not necessarily valued by the economy, even if they are certified with a diploma. Economic organizations tend to give cultural credit to knowledge and skills acquired on, or in close connection with, the job. This general pattern gains significance when we examine specific case groups and individual experiences. Figure 7.2 summarizes peculiarities of typologically situated case groups, national features, and comparative distinctions as well as legal status. Theoretically, the transformation of knowledge and skills acquired in university into labour market positions can be expressed in terms of cultural resources, cultural credit, and cultural capital. Knowledge and skills, even if they are certified in the form of university diplomas, are only cultural resources. During the job search, they may be given credit or not. Only when such cultural resources are being used in the labour market are they introduced into the production process, becoming cultural capital in the strictest sense. During the transformation of cultural resources into credit and capital, resources newly acquired

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Figure 7.2 From knowledge and skills to cultural capital

Enhancing use value and exchange value via further education Cultural capital in the labour market

Boosting exchange value via acquisition of social capital (“Canadian work experience”)

Cultural credit on the threshold to the labour market Knowledge and skills

during further education may enhance the credit assigned to the university degrees. However, there are also other factors structuring the transformation of cultural resources into capital, including, for example, institutionalized symbolic capital37 as well as ethnicized symbolic (dis)crediting and acquisition of social capital. Learning the codes of local labour is an important task in all three countries, although doing so is restricted to the managers and consultants in the free market, and its meaning differs from country to country, too. For the managers and consultants interviewed in Canada, learning the codes of local labour had taken place already and only in unqualified jobs, enabling them to find at least underqualified but still skilled positions in the labour market afterwards. The accumulation of “Canadian work experience” in the long run suggests that the migrant is able to work in a position commensurate with the knowledge and skills he or she had already acquired abroad. Hence, Canadian work experience

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not only enhances one’s professional skills but also enables the migrant to accumulate valuable “references.” In a sense, knowledge and skills are capitalized on by improving one’s social capital.38 Migrants interviewed in Turkey and Germany learned the codes of local labour in higher positions as labour market entrance tends to be into qualified jobs. In subsequent informal or formal further education, the use value (as opposed to the exchange value) of foreign knowledge and skills is important in order to enhance their exchange value by further education. Formal further education has been an indispensable feature in the careers of all doctors working legally in Germany and Canada. If these migrants are given initial institutionalized cultural credit, regulated by professional law, they have to complete an internship and/or take part in further education conceptualized as specialization training. However, whether the physician takes on an internship with a minor professional licence or the specialized training, both opportunities for further education are experienced as formal requirements for either obtaining the recognition of the diplomas the physician originally obtained in his or her country of origin or receiving an upgraded licence as a medical specialist. The knowledge and skills the doctors (are meant to) acquire during this further education are not even mentioned during the interviews – in contrast with the knowledge and skills learned voluntarily (e.g., knowledge about diabetes in the case of Dr Uslu). The contrast between medical and managerial careers reveals significant differences between university degrees and state-controlled degrees. Whereas university degrees are valued on the free market, medical degrees are issued and/or controlled by the same state agency that structures the migrants’ access to the labour market. This indicates that the relation between university degrees and cultural capital seems to become looser if the distance between the educational system and the economic system grows. The formalized character of further education for doctors contrasts with that of managers in yet another aspect. Whereas managers have to persuade potential employers of the value of their newly adapted or acquired knowledge and skills in order to receive the position they desire, doctors’ further education is immediately turned into institutionalized cultural credit. That is, migrant doctors not only receive a certificate for their further education (be it the full professional licence or the licence as a specialist) but the worth of this certificate is directly acknowledged as cultural credit by the respective participants of this

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segment of the labour market, most importantly by the bureaucratic health care system and the patients. In other words, instead of migrant doctors being forced to persuade others of the value of their certificates, these certificates entitle them to specific positions in the labour market. However, this entitlement does not go so far as to accommodate the doctor with a specific job. In Germany, migrant doctors who had been subject to the difficulties of acquiring institutionalized symbolic capital (German citizenship) now are faced with an ethnically segmented labour market for doctors. Being symbolically discredited on the basis of their ethnic ascription as non-Germans, they sometimes are able to obtain specific symbolic credit by capitalizing on their migrant background and their language skills (bifurcated symbolic credit). Case comparisons reveal that country-specific differences may be less important than those peculiarities specific to typologically situated case groups. This is also evident in the role of language, which differs greatly from the case group of managers to the case group of doctors but is in itself quite similar from country to country. Among managers, in all three countries we find migrants who not only attended language courses and hence engaged in (non-)formal language learning but also, as evidenced in the interviews, placed much emphasis on informally learning the appropriate use of language, too. Such informal learning is usually situated within the framework of the workplace. For doctors, language acquisition plays a minor role in labour market inclusion. With the Quebec cases, knowledge of and skills in the official language of the region in fact are a conditio sine qua non. But as the migrants know the language prior to migration, they do not have to adapt themselves to it. In Germany, language acquisition is not such an important prerequisite for labour market inclusion either – but for other reasons. Here the migrant doctors can easily raise the exchange value of their medical knowledge by using the languages of their study places and/or home country. Doing so, their lack of an excellent command of the official language of the country is of less importance for their labour market inclusion.39 To summarize, the adaptation of knowledge and skills to labour market expectations reveals several patterns that differ not only according to the countries where migrants work but also in the case groups under scrutiny. In different occupational fields we found different mechanisms of both symbolically discrediting knowledge and skills and boosting one’s cultural credit by acquiring language and other skills via further education as well as by enhancing one’s social capital. Cultural capital,

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then, is not only relational in the sense that it depends on state regulations for migration and labour market access (chapter 5) and may be influenced by processes of symbolic in- and exclusion (chapter 6). There are also more informally institutionalized beliefs, prejudices, and habits concerning foreign credentials that shape the trajectory of foreigneducated migrants and their struggle to receive credit for their cultural resources in order to capitalize on them in the labour market.

8 Conclusions

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 that can be justified, considering the economic benefits of hiring such migrants to fill these positions. In this respect, the debates in the scholarly community and in the policy arena prove to be shaped fundamentally by the conceptual limitations imposed by the “human capital” approach. From this perspective, the competencies and knowledge that migrants bring into the country of immigration are seen as a fundamental production factor, having an intrinsic economic value whose expected rate of return is the dominant, if not the exclusive, concern of the labour market. Only limited information or market intransparency would prevent rational actors from taking full advantage of the foreign “capital” brought into the labour market by migrants. Our scientific curiosity was piqued by the apparent disparity between the widely held trust in the self-regulating capacity of the labour market and the empirically manifest failure to allow migrants an entry into the labour market that would reflect their qualifications. Our research stems from a conceptual premise vastly different from the one articulated in the “human capital” approach and its underlying assumptions. This again offers us a fresh perspective on the reasons

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for the difficulties that highly skilled migrants face when trying to establish themselves professionally in a new country. On first examination, the comprehensive narratives of the migrants’ life stories suggest that an overwhelming number of complex elements contribute to the difficulties faced by migrants in the labour market: depending on a host of structural factors – national and professional environments in particular – our interviewees had to overcome legal hurdles, fight for recognition of their degrees, deal with the sociocultural expectations of the labour market, learn the intricacies of the application process, build a supportive and professionally enabling social network, and so on. One key feature that quickly emerged from the narrative interviews was that migrants are engaged in a continuous and context-specific negotiation of the value of their “capital.” Building on the insights of a sociological approach, for which we are indebted to Pierre Bourdieu, we developed an interpretative lens that brought us closer to the lived reality of migrants – closer than would be possible were we constrained by the logic of an economic focus, with its underlying rational actor model. The concept of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986b) enabled us to shift the focus in our empirical analysis away from measuring the value of migrants’ capital solely as a marketable resource, to the processes in which its actual “value” in the labour market is negotiated. Bourdieu argues that the value of cultural capital depends on its recognition, and our empirical findings offer ample support for his perspective. Migrants’ cultural capital is a profoundly relational category, whose actual worth is determined by the specific context in which it is used. The process of determining the value of migrants’ capital needs to be understood accordingly and described as an elaborate – and partially institutionalized – system of classificatory struggles. 8.1

Opportunities and Restrictions for the Utilization of Cultural Capital Acquired Abroad

Our empirical investigation started with a group of migrants who feature prominently in the globalization literature: highly skilled experts whose cultural capital is assumed to be completely transferable across countries. Although the interviews widely confirmed this assumption, our reconstruction of the more implicit patterns of their life stories revealed that these migrants’ careers were indeed regularly dependent on enhancing knowledge and skills during the transition phase of their

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migration – for example, by completing a master’s degree in an internationally recognized study program. We found considerable differences in the process of recognition of cultural capital among various professional groups: whereas the natural scientists interviewed in Germany conducted their career in a professional environment that is international in character and thus dominated by the English language; the managers and consultants, working in a language-sensitive domain, profited from German language skills acquired even before migration. These cases can be understood only if we consider cultural capital as a relational category that must be validated in specific segments of the labour market. Even those managers and consultants whose skills and qualifications seem to be easily transferable across national borders often had to struggle to see their knowledge and skills accepted by their employers (see chapter 4). One critical element in this respect is the migrant’s command of the local language and the cultural competence associated with that command. This competence concerned not only communicative skills in the official language of the country but also the particular and peculiar use of language in very specific contexts. For instance, even native speakers provided evidence for how an accent or the use of idioms can lead to being branded as “an immigrant” and thus less “valuable” in the marketability of their cultural capital. Language, in this sense, is not only a functional device but also “linguistic capital,” which secures “a profit of distinction” (Bourdieu 1991, 56). The comparative analysis provided ample evidence that the transnational validity of cultural capital (itself ridden with prerequisites) is dependent on its acknowledgment in the particular spatial and cultural context in which it is employed in the labour market. The range of cases investigated was of course not restricted to migrants with transnationally recognized cultural capital. While some managers and consultants held transnationally transferable cultural capital, others had to adapt their knowledge and skills to labour market expectations after migration. But even within the latter group we discovered significant differences (see chapter 7): interviewees in Turkey and Germany, after landing in the new country, began their careers (if successful) regularly in qualified positions within their fields of expertise, from where they advanced by improving their professional skills via further education. The career tracks of managers and consultants in Canada were of quite a different nature. Here migrants tended to begin with unqualified jobs (e.g., as waiters or chambermaids), only to find themselves

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in underqualified positions later on, from where they were upgraded to jobs on a level matching their university degrees. The acquisition of new, professional knowledge and skills seemed to be secondary to “Canadian work experience,” gained even in unqualified jobs, which helped to “build some references here in Canada, from former jobs,” as one migrant stated. This again emphasizes that the value of cultural capital is decided in relation to specific “labour market as meso-social context” conditions. While our empirical case groups and professional fields are not necessarily congruent, it is worth noting that strategies for using one’s foreign education in the labour market are to a large degree characteristic of a specific occupational field or, more precisely, a specific profession. In contrast to working as a natural scientist, manager, or consultant, practising as a foreign doctor or dentist is, even prior to informal labour market expectations, regulated by the state. At the time of our inquiry, while Turkey categorically excluded foreigners from the medical professions (see Sezer and Yıldız 2009), Canada and Germany, drawing on professional law, first discredit the foreigners’ medical knowledge and skills only to re-accredit them during a long process of internships and exams. If and when their academic education becomes, upon its recognition by the state, institutionalized cultural capital, these migrants may look for a job in the labour market. Furthermore, the interviews conducted in Germany reveal that doctors and dentists are confronted with an ambiguous symbolic in- and exclusion. On the one hand, they face (sometimes even overt) ethnic discrimination in a labour market in which private practitioners look for doctors whom they can employ in their practice. On the other hand, they benefit from symbolic credit accorded to their supposed ethnicity by patients with migratory background. Hence, in this case group we understand that the value of knowledge and skills may also be shaped by a symbolic credit that is bifurcated, because what serves as a means to exclude the foreign doctors (i.e., their ethnic and migratory background) is also an important tool for symbolic inclusion in an ethnicized niche economy. In a nutshell, the three typical ways of using foreign academic education that we have discussed here provide evidence for our basic assumption that “cultural capital” is a genuinely relational category. In a strict sense, we should speak of cultural capital only when it can be effectively used in the labour market, that is, when the holder of knowledge and skills is rewarded for his or her qualified practices. As our empirical investigations reveal, knowledge and skills may also remain

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“cultural resources,” unacknowledged by any employer.1 It is during classificatory struggles – which may include additional education, local references, and ethnic discrimination – that foreign education, on the threshold to the labour market, is accorded “cultural credit” and then can be turned into “cultural capital.” 8.2

Multidimensionality and Temporality of Status Passages

The trajectory from unacknowledged foreign education, which is gradually accredited and later turned into cultural capital, already implies a temporal structure that we must consider when inquiring into migrants’ life stories. When highly skilled migrants access a foreign labour market, we are not looking only at a transition between (foreign) educational institutions and the labour market but also at the transition from one country to the other, that is, migration. In our research we conceived of this temporal process as a “status passage” (Van Gennep 1981; Glaser and Strauss 1971), thereby emphasizing two aspects (see Schittenhelm 2005): during status passages, the status of the person involved is not only changed (e.g., from citizen of the home country to migrant in a foreign land) but also redistributed. As the typical ways of capitalizing on one’s education, outlined above, make clear, migrants are accorded varying statuses in the labour market during processes of classification. We emphasize that status passages are multidimensional processes (Schittenhelm 2005; Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011). Migrants’ status passages into the labour markets are hereby analysed with various perspectives in mind: as an entry into the labour force, that is, as a change in status between educational accomplishments and professional status, with its attendant social risks and need for reorientation; as a process of migration, that is, as a change in status that results from a transition between nation states with their specific educational systems, labour markets, and citizenship regulations; and furthermore, as a change in private life domains (family, partnership, and other lifestyles) (Thomsen 2009; Von Hausen 2010b; Pusch 2010a). The multidimensionality of the status passages means that interactive effects between different dimensions of the status passage can be observed. The life stories analysed in this book are all shaped by both the immigration process and the transition into the new labour market. As most of the migrants are relatively young, the status passages also include transitions in the private life domain, such as starting a

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long-term partnership or having children (see chapter 3). Such an effect of the private life domain in the status passage is evident even in the above-mentioned case group of managers and consultants with transnational cultural capital. These “global players,” who are often assumed to be able to utilize their knowledge and skills wherever they wish, with the aim to maximize their profit (Osborn 1997), often stay in the country despite economic crises and other hardships in the advancement of their professional careers. A closer examination of the multidimensionality of their status passage reveals that after immigration some of these individuals developed new biographical orientations that bind them to their destination country: they start new relationships, marry, and/or have children. These steps in their private life domain resulted in the development of local ties. Some of the “global” high achievers in our sample had chosen to remain in or return to a country, even when job opportunities in other countries appeared on the horizon (see chapter 4). The interest-driven pursuit of opportunities in the international labour market is one motive, yet by far not the most exclusive motive, that shapes critical decisions in the lives of highly skilled migrants. This is only one of many instances in which developments in one dimension of the status passage influence other dimensions. This is most certainly the case when migrants’ academic certificates undergo re-accreditation because, after landing in a new country, the value of the certificates in the new labour market is perceived to be unclear, that is, the transition between educational system and labour market is complicated by the intersection with migration. Another connection between these two aspects of a multidimensional status passage may occur when migrants decide to migrate because they wish to maximize their cultural capital by using their academic skills in a new country whose labour market looks more promising to them. In all countries under investigation in this volume, there were interviewees who had come to the country in order to improve their professional situation. While this “amelioration” motive is strongly connected to securing one’s material position in the new country, preferably by capitalizing on one’s knowledge and skills, other biographical orientations in migration may even contradict the primary goal of swift labour market inclusion and prevent individuals from profiting from their academic education. A considerable number of interviewees had been motivated to immigrate by biographical orientations in their private life. Either they had accompanied their partner, who had decided to work abroad, or they had started a serious relationship with a resident of the receiving

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country. This complicated their search for a career significantly, as they had to overcome barriers caused by migration, in addition to the status passage between educational system and labour market. Nevertheless, given the migrants’ need to overcome the barriers of professional law (in the cases of doctors and dentists) or to adapt and enhance their cultural capital (in the cases of managers and consultants), the context of a long-term relationship, which was helpful in legal matters and sustained them both financially and morally, could also be beneficial. In such cases, one dimension of the multidimensional status passage into the labour market contributes to success in two other dimensions. The supportive effects of such a partnership become evident vis-à-vis the contrasting case group of migrants who had to accept a significant downgrading of their cultural capital. Both in Germany and in Canada (see chapter 4 and chapter 7), we have reconstructed a typical trajectory into the labour market, characterized by a considerable loss of cultural capital. In Germany, after working in unqualified positions, these migrants had gained the right to unemployment benefits and subsequently were included in non-academic further education courses financed by the state. In Canada, migrants often attended academic further education courses recommended by state agencies, but financed these themselves, and later failed to capitalize on their newly acquired knowledge and skills. In spite of this contrast, the trajectories of all these migrants (both in Germany and Canada) critically overlapped with a biographical orientation towards supporting one’s family, either newly started in the country of immigration or brought along with the migrant from the home country. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the status passages under scrutiny, therefore, it is important to consider the interactive effects between different dimensions of the status passage and to reconstruct how the biographical orientations of the respective migrants change over time. For example, those who were motivated to migrate in the hopes of ameliorating their living conditions before migration may, after landing in the country and discovering that their hopes were not realized, nevertheless stay in the country for the sake of their family. Here, one biographical orientation, dominant in an early phase of the status passage, is later – on the threshold to establishment – replaced by another orientation. The typical labour market trajectories discussed above underpin the importance of reconstructing not only the multidimensionality of status passages but also their temporality. Processes unfolding in one

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dimension may not only affect other dimensions (e.g., private life issues on migration) but also shape opportunities and restrictions in later phases of the status passage. In order to detect such upgrading or downgrading effects over time, we have sequentially reconstructed the status passages. Only by analysing the temporal progression of each life story were we able to understand even implicit long-term effects of actions and decisions taken early on (see chapter 3). This sequential analysis then led to the identification of typical phases of the status passage. We were able to distinguish empirically between the pre-migration phase, and the transition, initial, and establishment phases (see chapter 4). In each phase, different – and sometimes overlapping – biographical orientations shape migrants’ action strategies. For example, for those doctors who married German spouses in the pre-migration phase or who had quickly gained full labour market access based on other visa categories, characteristically the transition phase was rather short, leading to an initial phase in which they took important steps to re-accredit their medical knowledge and skills. In contrast, the case group of professional women who had the option to become spouses, but refused to marry because they did not want to be reduced to being a spouse, experienced a rather risky transition to the new country. In their efforts to balance professional careers and life choices, the initial phases of migration offered many challenges, both in their private life and their professional life. In this case group of women who balance private life choices and professional careers, the restricting effects provoked by legal restrictions connected to specific biographical orientations over a certain period of time are rather implicit. While these female migrants use academic qualifications restricted to jobs connected with their home country or region – a manifestation of “location-specific cultural capital” (Weiß 2005) – they nevertheless are able to work at an academic level. In stark contrast to the intricate connections between life domains and their often implicit impact on trajectories into the labour markets, several case groups of migrants whom we studied in Turkey and Germany did not really have a chance from the outset. These are migrants without documents but also those refugees in Turkey who fail to gain access to the EU and refugees in Germany who are refused asylum. While in Turkey and Germany migrants without documents are forced to take any kind of (illegal) job, we found a case group of refugees specific to Germany who were supported by substandard welfare and refrained from accepting informal employment. By the time they were granted

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a work permit, after about eight years, their academic knowledge and skills were usually outdated. Migration in general is usually associated with interruptions, delays, and detours as characteristics of migrants’ professional trajectories. A main goal of our comparative analysis was to determine whether and to what extent the migration regimes of the host countries can be conceived of as contributing to detours, devaluation, or even loss of immigrants’ cultural capital. We found that some of the main disadvantages are potentially a result of similar hurdles in the national contexts under investigation: legal barriers, the migrant’s lack of language skills, the non-recognition of foreign educational titles, and the migrant’s lack of country-specific knowledge and job experience. Overcoming these hurdles means a loss of time and, as a matter of course, an additional delay in immigrants’ career trajectories. If this delay cannot be compensated for, and if the downgrading effects are compounded by additional barriers – as observed in cases of migrants who faced legal barriers in Germany – a loss of cultural capital is unavoidable. Although our highly skilled interviewees in this case group remained strongly motivated to find employment, the passage of time took its toll: when they finally received legal access to the labour market, they found not only that their academic qualifications were outdated but also that in some cases their health was impaired, their family lives needed more attention, and so on. Niki von Hausen (2010a) has termed this pattern a vicious cycle in the unskilled segments of the labour market. For migrants who either are confronted with a very high legal barrier or have to successively overcome a large number of institutional barriers, the loss of biographical time erodes the validity of their cultural capital, even when they finally achieve full formal access to the labour market. One significant long-term trajectory that we found is characterized by cumulative down-grading effects. According to our empirical findings, working in the domain of underqualified labour with an unstable occupational status can be linked to a process of cooling out in the sense of Goffman (1962). This is especially evident if opportunities to reach better professional positions seem to be out of reach. The goals sought by the migrant earlier are gradually abandoned and surviving under difficult conditions becomes the main focus. This reorientation has been observed in a wide range of cases, from those of highly skilled migrants with a long time out from qualified labour, to those of unsuccessful members of the second generation. However, even though we could identify a dynamic inherent in a succession of downgrading transitions,

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these trajectories also depend strongly on the institutional arrangements of the host countries. Issues such as greater social mobility in the educational sector, flexible market regulations, opportunities for educational advancement, settlement services for migrants, and a more welcoming sociocultural environment can all been seen as important factors in shaping migrants’ long-term labour market trajectories. 8.3

Institutions Enabling and Barring Labour Market Integration

The importance of temporal delays is a finding that provides the basis for some of the critical policy implications of our study: in the most basic terms, our empirical findings allow us to point to a conceptually naive and, in its expected outcomes, at times misguided approach to managing skilled labour migration. Again, the human capital approach shapes the current dominant understanding: the capital that migrants bring with them tends to be viewed as a production factor that can be employed and used in a prearranged fashion, much like financial or infrastructure capital. Yet our study demonstrates that the biographical orientations of migrants and their coping strategies often display their own logic and modes of labour market inclusion. In this respect, policies in this field tend either to yield results that are not necessarily planned for or to create unintended effects. Some of the legal regulations in the field and their long-term implications for migrants’ professional trajectories are a case in point. In addition, the integration of migrants into the labour market is regularly perceived to be a task for public policy that facilitates the initial phase of finding employment. Yet, as our study showed again and again, re-establishing a professional career routinely takes place over a lengthy period of time, with distinct challenges and requirements regarding, for instance, family subsistence, additional educational resources, language training, and so on. Similarly, the effectiveness of policies designed to assist migrants in their efforts to find employment is highly sensitive to timing and the distinct challenges involved in each stage of individuals’ trajectories into the labour market. In order to understand the long-term impact of institutional regulations on labour market trajectories, we have employed a distinct comparative perspective. By placing Germany in the centre of our institutional analysis and contrasting this case with legal exclusion in Turkey and the trajectories of migrants who enjoyed an equal legal status in Germany and Canada, we were able to highlight the impact of legal exclusion on,

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for example, the trajectories of migrants in fields governed by professional law but also on the less fortunate migrants whose chances of success in the labour market were severely compromised by legal (and sometimes symbolic) exclusion. In light of our interest in the paradox between nation states wooing highly skilled migrants and the exclusion of these migrants from skilled labour markets, we have placed a particular interest on institutional regulations and narratives in which the unintended and paradoxical effects of migration policy can be seen. As these paradoxical effects are closely connected with the particulars of a country-specific legal framework, we focused this analysis on cases in Germany; however, we may safely assume that some of the four mechanisms found in our study are not found in the German context alone (see Castles 2007).2 First, many of the migrants discussed above as entering Germany with an amelioration orientation (chapter 4) were ethnic German resettlers and thus received German citizenship upon entry into the country and were provided with vocational training by the German labour agency. Since the labour agency usually does not finance academic education, this resulted in a downgrading of the migrants’ cultural capital and their eventual (self-)employment in the non-academic sector. The interconnections between an amelioration orientation (later the desire to support one’s family) and an institutional structure that offers support, albeit in a downgrading manner, are typical of this case group. This interconnection offers a causal explanation for an apparent paradox: despite a degree of legal privilege, ethnic German resettlers are the only sub-segment of potential employees in which those holding a foreign academic degree have a higher unemployment rate than those with a foreign vocational education (BrückKlingberg et al. 2011, 21). A second unintended effect of institutions highlighted in this book relates to persons who had to flee their country (see chapter 4 and chapter 5). In an effort to deter these “unwanted migrants,” Germany has enacted a legislative framework that offers substandard welfare but effectively excludes these refugees from the labour market in the long term. The original policy goal of deterrence failed in hundreds of thousands of cases, so paradoxically welfare dependence of this group of migrants was enhanced by migration policy. A third effect not officially intended by migration policy concerns the pathways offered to potential migrants. For instance, given the restrictiveness of Germany’s immigration regime, marriage to a German resident offers the only path towards regularization for many migrants in

Conclusions 253

Germany (see chapter 5). Marriage is a highly personal matter in many contemporary societies, and we found that migrants exhibit strongly diverging justice orientations (Biehl 2008), independent from their need to actually achieve legalization. This is a case in which personal orientations and practices of migrants contribute substantially to labour market outcomes in a specific legal setting: for legally excluded migrants in Germany, the willingness (and ability) to enter semi-strategic marriage resulted in legalization and good labour market positions, whereas those who shied away from marriage on the basis of their strong meritocratic or human-rights orientation lacked other options for legalization and remained in very disadvantaged professional positions. A fourth unintended effect of migration regulation was salient in the cases of migrants who enjoy a relatively secure legal status as highly skilled experts or professionals. Here the effects of legal exclusion are less pervasive, but they also appear to be contradictory at times. Take the cases of professionals experiencing “interwoven institutions” (chapter 5): we could show that they are governed not only by at least three distinct institutional frameworks but even more by the interactive effects among them (see Penninx 2005). The inability of both migrants and administration to fully comprehend the complex system of regulations has a negative impact on labour market prospects. Uncertainty and unpredictability of administrative decisions proved to constitute a major impediment to successful labour market inclusion. Besides their inherent incomprehensibility, complex institutional systems also create a multitude of “special” cases, which leaves substantial leeway for individual administrators, who – as we can tell from the accounts of our interviewees – sometimes use that leeway at their discretion. Under these conditions, legal exclusion and symbolic exclusion have a mutually reinforcing effect. Legal exclusion creates the spaces for arbitrary decision making, and symbolic exclusion results in these spaces being used to the detriment of the concerned migrants – although we should add that it is also used to the migrants’ advantage in the case group of wanted experts. 8.4

Societal and Institutional Discrimination: Reproduction of Disadvantages

One critical factor contributing to downgrading effects that unexpectedly bar highly skilled migrants from full achievement is closely related to social processes of symbolic exclusion and discrimination. When

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we compared narrative accounts from Canada and Germany (supplemented by interviews with second-generation migrants in Germany), a point of critical concern in the European interviews proved to be the presence of a powerful, yet elusive sense of symbolic exclusion (Eder et al. 2002). Our interviewees from Germany give the impression that they have been subject to this symbolic exclusion on various occasions, regardless of the fact that some of them were raised and educated in their current country of residence. Our narrative interviews allowed us to reconstruct the specific institutional rules and cultural norms of national and meso-social settings in which struggles for recognition and inclusion unfold (chapter 6). Be it while interacting with the administration or employers, migrants provided narrative accounts of how their cultural capital is subject to a subtle yet pervasive struggle for symbolic recognition. One key finding in terms of an implicit meaning in the narratives about identities and day-to-day encounters is the power of degrading and stigmatizing images of migrants. These images appear as what Bourdieu (2003) refers to as the implicit normalcy of everyday behaviour that does not need to follow explicit rules, and are more potent, as the result of a shared understanding of social reality condensed into systems of disposition (habitus). The images establish expectations of normalcy in terms of what migrants ought to achieve in the educational and professional world. In this respect, national contexts provide a discursive universe of images of migrants that, in their depreciating effect on their cultural capital, is prone to produce substantial hurdles to access to qualified employment. The effects on the (non-)recognition of migrants’ cultural capital are palpable in the often implicit meaning of our narrative interviews: qualifications from these groups are devalued, skills are questioned, and group members are faced with the normalized assumption of a glass ceiling for individuals from migrant communities in the job market.3 In this respect, our results can also be read on their own, as a contribution to the debate on the reproduction of social inequality in contemporary society. Our findings show that migrants regularly experience social exclusion from equitable access to opportunities in the labour market, while the pivotal points of exclusion are shaped in very diverse ways. Also, traditional modes of social inclusion through the labour market (Soysal 2012; Schmidtke 2012) have been called into question by recent neoliberal adjustment of labour market relations and social policy perspectives. In particular, the less privileged migrants living

Conclusions 255

under precarious legal circumstances are extremely vulnerable to the imponderability of the increasingly deregulated labour market and the gradually eroding social safety net in Europe. Yet it is worth underlining that highly skilled migrants as a group are highly heterogeneous in their social status and thus are affected in vastly different ways – our empirical study has provided ample evidence on this point. There are highly skilled migrants who, as a sought-after commodity on the global labour market, have greatly benefited from new mobility and opportunities across national borders. Still, even among those with a seemingly marketable “capital,” many migrants are indeed caught in vicious cycles of precarious employment and symbolic exclusion, which subsequently produce various forms of marginalization. While this book has outlined barriers to success and the fact that many highly skilled migrants end up in dead-end careers and underemployment, it also reflects the fact that many highly skilled migrants succeed professionally and master the diverse challenges that we have outlined. Our narrative interviews allowed us to reconstruct those circumstances and strategies that facilitate these migrants’ successful labour market inclusion. The ingenuity and perseverance that migrants showed when pursuing their professional careers does not concern only IT specialists and managers for multinational companies, who are the focus of attention in current public debates. Rather, migrants from a whole range of professional fields, levels of training, legal statuses, and family situations proved to be able to seize professional opportunities and establish their careers in their destination countries. It is in this respect that dominant public perceptions and policies in this field regularly underestimate what, for instance, skilled family dependents or refugees can potentially contribute to society and the economy. One of the driving forces behind the success stories that we describe in this book – and this point is often neglected in political debates on migration – is the form of dedication and perseverance that migrants regularly demonstrate, and the importance of support by family and friends. Much of the ambition, resourcefulness, and determination that migrants show in their efforts to “make it” in the new country is regularly lost when it comes to providing them with equitable opportunities in the labour market. It is a pivotal political task to create a legal and social environment in which this motivation can thrive rather than cool off.

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Appendix 1

A1.

Comparative Design in a Multilevel Analysis

Status Groups: A Basic Level of Comparison Our study of migrants’ transitions into the labour market compares status groups: we categorize groups by their right of residence and legal access to the labour market. Furthermore, we differentiate between foreign-trained and indigenously trained people whose last educational degree was acquired in the receiving country.1 Our sampling’s core selective criteria are educational degrees and residence permits, whereas the interviewees’ countries of origin and their migration categories (according to the host country’s migration policy) may differ.2 • The first and main target group of our comparative analysis consists of highly qualified migrants, with a foreign educational degree acquired before migration and a formal legal equality comparable to that of native-born residents. “Formal legal equality” means, in this context, that migrants have no legal problems with their right of residence and work permit that would put them at a disadvantage in the labour market, as compared to the native-born population. • Second, in order to understand the impact of legal barriers on migrants’ status passages into the host country’s labour market, a second status group in our comparison includes foreign-trained migrants with a subordinate legal status that offers limited rather than full access to the labour market. These migrants have also received their academic degrees abroad and are entitled to find employment only under conditions of legal exclusion from the

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host country’s labour market. In other aspects, this status group is broadly defined: it can range from undocumented migrants to persons having received an entry visa and a work permit only for a particular position for which they are specifically qualified. An additional status group holding an academic degree from the host country and that can rely on an (almost) equivalent legal status in their access to the labour market is included as a contrasting group. As we shall describe in the following section, the main focus of our empirical study is on highly qualified persons with an educational status received abroad. Yet the comparison of the different status groups described above allows us to compare and contrast contexts for status passages into the labour market. Another level of comparison that we employ goes beyond the nation state. Here we consider equivalent status groups across countries and analyse how their status passages are affected by the context of the respective country (see Nohl 2013, 121–9; Weiß and Nohl 2012; Smith and Favell 2006). We investigate equivalent status groups in Germany, Canada, and Turkey. As discussed in our introductory chapter, the selection of macro-social contexts is determined by the specific features of our status groups.

Country Comparison The country comparison is an important tool for the reconstruction of the meso- and macro-structural contexts of labour market integration. Our country comparison focuses on key aspects of how certain groups go through the status passage; its main goal is to better understand the significance of institutional conditions (such as migration and labour market policies as well as regulations on educational titles and residence permits) for the status passages into the labour market and also to consider country-specific sociocultural practices of exclusion. Across countries, we compared similar status groups whose transition into the labour market is based on both educational degrees and residence permits. The national contexts chosen as a contrast for our comparative analysis enable us to analyse key aspects of meso- and macrosocial contexts for each of our status groups in Germany. In Canada our comparative perspective focuses on highly qualified, educated foreigners as the main target group, to be compared with immigrants

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259

in Germany.3 In Turkey we consider the experiences of those highly qualified, educated foreigners with a subordinate residence permit or no legal access to the labour market. A2.

Fieldwork, Sampling, and Data Collection

Before starting to discuss our sampling strategies in the field, it is worth noting that different teams and researchers have been in charge for each of the status groups and countries. On the one hand, varieties in sampling strategies during the fieldwork are a result of specific conditions of the target groups of our inquiry. For instance, among those with a subordinate legal status, there are highly vulnerable migrants. Collecting data in this field means dealing with sensitive information on the precarious legal and social status this group often has to face. As a matter of course, the researchers’ strategies to engage with potential research participants differ from those employed by teams that interviewed academics with legal access to the labour market. On the other hand – and this should not be neglected – the individual researchers in our teams acted differently according to their customs and styles of doing fieldwork (2005–2009). For the purpose of this book, we draw on the data collected in different projects of the collaborative international study group by choosing main results for the status groups and by focusing aspects of major importance for the comparative perspective on different immigrant societies.4 Our discussion of the overall sampling gives a short overview of the sampling strategies and fieldwork conditions of the associated projects. As discussed previously, the core selective criteria for our sampling – educational degrees and residence permits – were adapted to the national contexts according to our comparative research design. With the aim of querying those migrants with a cultural capital of transnational value, we concentrated on three professional groups: health, natural sciences and technology, and management and consulting. Thus, our overall sampling strategy is not focused on national-ethnic categories, which have often been used used in migration research but, rather, on theoretical considerations and comparative methodology.5 According to principles of qualitative research, we practised purposive samplings, in the context of which researchers select cases according to the theoretical ideals and strategic goals they have in mind (Cohen and Crabtree 2006; Gobo 2004).

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For a comparative design, sampling equivalence (in our study, across status groups and national contexts) is a basic demand. Yet equivalence does not necessarily mean a comparison of equals in each regard (Pepin 2005; Faas 2010). Instead, sampling equivalence is a context-related term and refers to phenomena with equivalent functions in relation to the distinct contexts under evaluation (Schittenhelm 2005, 249). Furthermore, equivalence does not necessarily refer to entire subsamples within a comparative design.6 Yet a comparative research design has to provide data sets with equivalent cases and case groups to give a baseline for systematic comparative analysis (Schittenhelm 2012). The extent to which this has been realized is a matter that has to be taken into consideration throughout the whole research process, that is, throughout fieldwork, evaluation, and, finally, data presentation (see Schittenhelm 2009a). In the following section we provide information on the sampling criteria and strategies along with the conditions of fieldwork on the two main status groups selected for this book, from the database of our international status group.

Sampling Overview: Main Status Groups and Country Contexts Below is a short overview of the sampling strategies and criteria of each project, which provides a description of the database from which cases have been drawn for this book (see tables A1.1 and A1.2).7 Apart from the common criteria for sampling in both countries, the range of migration types and motivations differs: in Canada, mainly labour migrants (based on the immigration scheme) have been interviewed, whereas in Germany, the migration motives and migration types (according to the receiving countries’ categories) show a broader variation.8 For the comparison of cases in Germany and Canada, we did not primarily consider the motivation for immigration (marriage, job opportunities, seeking refuge from persecution, and so on). Instead, according to our core criteria, the specific legal access to the labour market was decisive for including cases in our comparative analysis across the national contexts. In this regard, the cases of managers in Germany and Canada correspond to each other, whereas the case of medical doctors in Germany is equivalent to that of doctors in Canada only if those in Germany are married to a German citizen or have otherwise received a residence permit granting full labour market access.9

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261

Table A1.1. Status group: Immigrants with foreign educational degrees and full legal access to the labour market (40 interviewees in Germany and 31 interviewees in Canada) Common sampling criteria

Sampling criteria that differ between country contexts

Main professional groups

Canada: labour migrants (immigration scheme)

Visible minorities relevant for the national context

Germany: broader range of migration motives

Equal representation of gender

Table A1.2. Status group: Immigrants with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status (25 interviewees in Germany and 20 interviewees in Turkey)

Common sampling criteria

Sampling criteria that differ between country contexts

Equal representation of gender

In Turkey, full range of informal labour

Professional groups, extended to cover the full range of excluded positions

In Germany, sampling included students achieving a second academic degree in Germany and experiencing some degree of legal restriction

Visible minorities relevant for the national context Variation of subordinated legal status relevant for the national context

As research on the target group of immigrants with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status (see table A1.2) is sparse in the German context and access to undocumented migrants is difficult, the iterative approach of qualitative sampling strategies proved to be important, meaning that the researchers gradually completed their criteria in the course of inquiry and data analysis. When starting the fieldwork, the project team was fairly familiar with the living conditions of migrants holding temporary or conditional visas. The aim was to reach asylum seekers and those who were undocumented. Thanks to cooperation with migrant students during fieldwork, the restrictiveness of student visas was recognized and the team agreed that foreign students should be one of the target groups.10 As a starting point, we found access to asylum seekers via organizations aiding refugees. Access to research participants who do not hold a permit at all was

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achieved through fieldwork by two graduate students, both of whom were migrants themselves. One of these students was originally interviewed for the study, but her narrative was discarded as a part of the sample when she joined the research team. Despite intensive efforts, it was difficult to find undocumented migrants or those with a precarious legal status (if they could not be accessed via refugee camps and organizations), and the team therefore decided to include migrants who do not hold a degree in the professional fields targeted by this study – at least when researching the very disadvantaged categories. We reasoned that the content of the degree would be of lesser importance if the undocumented migrant has no labour market access to the field of his or her original academic title.11 In hindsight, as we reflect on the process of data analysis, we could have considered more fully whether or not the team was justified in extending the sampling group beyond those holding degrees in health, sciences, or economics. Medical doctors seem to be in a particular position, even if they do not have full labour market access. In this regard, the professional group still matters. Yet for other interviewees found in the same type of legally excluded migrants who receive some kind of substandard welfare, such as benefits for asylum seekers, we found that educational degrees made little difference. Also, for the similar type of those legally excluded who receive no welfare benefits, we do not think that our sampling in Germany fully covers the heterogeneity among undocumented migrants in Germany, as access to the field was so difficult. In Turkey, the sampling strategy aimed at including typical immigrant populations within the status group with subordinate legal access to the labour market, including the main groups of visible minorities in the Turkish context. Furthermore, the strategy aimed at selecting cases that served as confirming or contrasting cases in order to reach a maximum range of variation and to understand potential limitations of the research findings. With regard to highly skilled people who received their last educational degree in the receiving country, that is, in Germany or Canada, apart from the core criteria of educational titles in main professional groups and residence status, the issues of equal gender representation and equivalent locality (rural and metropolitan areas) have been taken into account (Schittenhelm and Hatzidimitriadou 2010). This status group, however, is not the focus of the book. In sum, the research of the whole study group incorporated more than one strategy of qualitative sampling (such as snowball sampling, informants, and maximum variations), according to the conditions and

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263

challenges of the specific field, and the researchers’ preferences. We take this into account in our discussion of the main findings and results presented in this book. Hence, in the comparative analysis, we do not consider equivalence with regard to the entire subsample but, rather, with regard to concrete contexts and dimensions reflected and explored throughout the research process (see Schittenhelm 2009a).

Narrative Interviews The empirical analysis is based on narrative interviews (Schütze 1992, 2006), which are a main tool for biographical research (Rosenthal 2004). Interviews began with an initial question intended to generate a narrative, and interviewees were asked to tell their life stories in great detail. By referring to narrative interviews as a crucial set of data, the comparative case studies aimed for a better understanding of the constitutive elements of the immigrants’ trajectories, along with the impacting factors in the receiving countries. Furthermore, using this method for our analysis aims at identifying sets of everyday knowledge that interviewees had to develop in order to cope with their educational and professional paths. Narrative interviews are dependent on the interviewees being able to express themselves in an open and inviting environment. In the status group of immigrants with a subordinate legal status, a number of research participants did not want to talk about informal work in great detail (see also Thielen 2009). Furthermore, linguistic competence is of considerable importance in this respect. In some cases we had to be inventive to address language barriers or work with the help of translators, as some of the research participants did not speak the researchers’ common languages well and therefore could not fully express themselves. In the overall project, interviews have been conducted in different languages. Unless noted otherwise, interviews were conducted in the language of the country in which the interview took place. A3. Data Analysis Using a research strategy that aims to generate theoretical ideas and concepts based on a collection of qualitative data, our data evaluation follows the epistemological traditions introduced by the early grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967). For data analysis we adopted the documentary method based on Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1952, 1997), which comprises several successive steps,

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among them the comparative analysis of cases and sequences as a principal element of the procedure (Bohnsack 2010a, 2010b; Bohnsack, Pfaff, and Weller 2010; for interviews, see Nohl 2010, 2012).

Documentary Interpretation of Interviews One premise of the documentary method, along with the narrative interview (Schütze 1992) and current approaches in biographical research (Rosenthal 2004), is that what is communicated verbally and explicitly in interviews is not the only element of significance for empirical analysis but that it is necessary above all to reconstruct the meaning that underlies and is implied. For instance, the interviewees themselves may not be aware of the peculiarities of their practical orientation, but an analysis of narrations in the tradition of reconstructive interpretation can reveal implicit levels, that is, the “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1966) of their meaning. Using the documentary method of analysing interview data (Bohnsack 2010b; Nohl 2010, 2012), the interpretation seeks to understand the coping strategies that interviewees have employed during their career trajectories and how the ways of mastering and representing one’s own life history are embedded in their implicit sets of knowledge and daily routines. In our investigation, the analytical approach aims to collect detailed information on the transitions and stages of the career trajectory, including the ways respondents perceive their own living conditions and seek to handle them (see Schittenhelm 2011). But how do we gain access to the documentary meaning of habitual action and social knowledge that is not part of the intentional and reflective meaning? In this respect, the documentary method takes the path of sequential analysis as it is practised with hermeneutic procedures by combining two steps of data analysis – formulating interpretation and reflecting interpretation – with a comparative approach (see for more details Bohnsack 2010a, 2010b; for the analysis of qualitative interviews, see Nohl 2010, 2012). Following this two-step interpretation, we can distinguish how and to what extent the narratives have been reformulated by the researcher (in his or her formulating interpretation by paraphrasing the topics and content of the interviewee’s account) and “when – at which point – the researchers bring up their own interpretations in reflection of the implicit self-evident knowledge of those under research; this is what we call reflecting interpretation” (Bohnsack 2010a, 113, emphasis in original).

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From Comparative Case Analysis to the Construction of Types For the documentary method, as for other procedures of qualitative data analysis, comparative analysis is a means, not an end. Apart from facilitating and validating interpretation, comparison potentially serves for generating typologies and thus for assessing the extent to which empirical results are valid beyond the single case.12 After all, the interpretation of different text sequences in various cases and the reconstruction of their respective orientation frameworks should not happen by chance but should be embedded in a systematic variation of cases and a resulting type formation. A first step in type formation is discovering patterns of experience or orientation that not only pertain to one single case but are detectable across different cases. It is a matter of further comparative analysis to understand in which way the finding of the single case refers to typical patterns, such as to regularities in transition processes or to immigrants’ action strategies (Schittenhelm 2005, 2009a). The typologies in our study are based on a multi-step procedure of comparative analysis (see Bohnsack 2010a, 111–12; see also Nohl 2010, 211–14) and seek to identify the interviewee’s orientations and coping strategies during the transition processes and, as a second step, the constitutive contexts in which they occur. In this regard we follow the analytical strategies of an explanatory case study research (Yin 2009, 141) instead of a mere exploration and description of the field. Following Weber’s elaboration on typologies, we highlight “typical” patterns that seem to persist for more than one case. “Typical” means that a specific pattern is both empirically observable and theoretically salient. On the one hand, typologies are more theoretical than a mere summary based on frequencies, and that is why Max Weber (1949), for instance, speaks of “ideal” types: they highlight the salient aspects of a pattern. On the other hand, typologies must be firmly grounded in empirical work, mostly in systematic comparison, which can distinguish between the persistent and salient features common to one type and the contingent features that may be the result of individual specifics. Typologies should also highlight where types clearly differ from each other.

Research Strategies in a Multilevel Analysis In our design, comparative analysis serves as an analytical tool for transnational studies in that we do not consider national contexts as an entity but focus instead on specific contexts both between and beyond

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nation states.13 In the course of our analysis, it was possible to focus on the range of variations in our compared units of analysis (status groups and/or country contexts) based on: • Comparative studies, by choosing cases or comparison groups of theoretical interest,14 and • Empirically grounded typologies and the respective case groups. The previously described status groups were useful for distinguishing empirically distinct groups of migrants. That is, our numerous interviews showed that it really made a difference where one had acquired one’s knowledge and skills, and under which legal restrictions one utilizes them in the labour market. However, although we had meaningfully defined our status groups, their heterogeneity within turned out to be considerable, and overlap between the groups was significant. For example, we found different ways to acquire and capitalize on knowledge and skills inside each status group, and we discovered different migration motives, social networks, and phases of the status passage. Hence, although it was our aim to compare status groups with each other, we first had to accomplish extensive comparisons within each status group. We now understand this to be one of the project’s strengths. If we had compared only the theoretically defined status groups, then the results of this comparative analysis would not have gone much beyond our theoretical assumptions for this comparison. Instead, our theoretical question, which had guided the differentiation of status groups, was transformed into an empirical starting point for inquiring into the importance of place, legal frame, and level of knowledge and skills. As we have uncovered the empirical heterogeneity within each status group, it was no longer possible to compare any one case of one status group to any one case of another. Instead, we were able to consider both the internal heterogeneity of status groups and the extent to which we have equivalent (i.e., comparable) sets of cases in each status group and country context (see Schittenhelm 2009a). For this reason, one of the comparative research strategies used was to draw on “typologically situated case groups” (Nohl 2009, 2013) within each status group. For example, in order to understand the social meaning of legal restrictions in the labour market, researchers drew on the typologically situated case group of doctors who capitalized on their knowledge and skills by catering to migrants whose language they knew. This case group had been detected among migrants with

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foreign educational degrees, both those with full legal access and those with restricted access to the labour market, and could be empirically differentiated from other typologically situated case groups (see Weiß and Nohl 2012). Thus, while the researchers were still analysing the significance of legal restrictions for labour market inclusion, this comparison was now specified by a certain context, that of the respective typologically situated case group. While both the typologies developed within the status groups and the comparisons between them were genuinely empirical, neither of them was confined to empirical analysis as an end. Instead, constructing typologies aided the development of empirically grounded theories. In brief, our application of the documentary method for data analysis was a multi-step procedure carried out in a comparative design. On the one hand, our strategies of comparative analysis served as an analytical tool for transnational studies. On the other hand, those strategies were a means for conducting a kind of theoretically oriented qualitative research, as our ambition went beyond a mere description of empirical findings and aimed to develop empirically based theoretical conclusions.

Appendix 2

Table A2.1. Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and full legal access in Germany

Field of degree

Total

Male

Female

Medical professions

11

7

4

Science and technology

18

10

8

Business and accounting

5

1

4

Others

6

0

6

Region of origin

Africa

4

Asia

5

EU member states

7

Latin America

3

Middle East Southeastern Europe Others Total interviewees

40

18

22

No.

8 12 1

Appendix 2

269

Table A2.2. Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and full legal access in Canada Field of degree

Total

Male

Medical professions

5

1

Science and technology

9

6

3

Business and accounting

11

8

3

6

1

5

Others

Female

Region of origin

No.

4

Africa Asia

Total interviewees

31

16

2 18

EU member states

6

Latin America

2

Middle East

0

Southeastern Europe

0

Others

3

15

Table A2.3. Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status in Germany Field of degree Medical professions

Total

Male

6

2

Female

9

5

4

Business and accounting

3

1

2

Others

7

4

3

25

12

No.

Africa

5

Asia

2

4

Science and technology

Total interviewees

Region of origin

13

EU accession states

2

Latin America

5

Middle East

5

Former Soviet Union

5

Others

1

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Table A2.4. Interviewees with foreign educational degrees and subordinate legal status in Turkey Field of degree

Total

Male

2

0

2

Science and technology

10

6

4

Business and accounting

3

2

1

Others

5

3

2

Medical professions

Total interviewees

20

11

Female

Region of origin

No.

Africa

2

Asia

5

EU member states

3

EU accession states

3

Middle East

3

Southeastern Europe

3

Others

1

9

Table A2.5. Interviewees with local educational degrees and equal legal status in Germany Field of degree

Total

Male

Female

Medical professions

11

7

4

Science and technology

11

8

3

Business and accounting

8

6

2

Regions of origin

Africa

5

Asia

7

EU member states

1

Latin America

1

Middle East Total interviewees

30

21

9

No.

16

Appendix 3

Table A3.1. Cases and interviewers (in the order they appear within the chapters) Case

Interviewer

Chapters 2–3 Mr Mehra

Oliver Schmidtke

Chapter 4 Mr Katekar

Sarah Thomsen

Ms Sonne

Sarah Thomsen

Ms Yan

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Blochin

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Brahmi

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Ziegler

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Shwetz

Yvonne Henkelmann

Ms Shwetz

Yvonne Henkelmann

Mr Baako

Steffen Neumann

Mr Nazar

Arnd-Michael Nohl

Mr Zadeh

Yvonne Henkelmann

Ms Donato

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Piwarski

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Guzman-Berg

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Bergström

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Morales-Aznar

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Gonzales-Montejo

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Orsolic

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Pasic

Ulrike Ofner (Continued )

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Work in Transition Table A3.1. (Continued) Case

Interviewer

Chapter 5 Ms Hernandez

Anja Weiß

Mr Ziegler

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Forester

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Ms Blochin

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Mr Young

Barbara Pusch

Mr Ashot

Anja Weiß

Ms Kotek

Anja Weiß

Mr Nuhu

Anja Weiß

Mr Mendez

Anja Weiß

Ms Damerc

Anja Weiß

Ms Fernando

Anja Weiß

Ms Mazali

Ulrike Ofner

Chapter 6 Mr Moradi

Regina Soremski

Ms Çiçek

Steffen Neumann

Ms Kemal

Karin Schittenhelm

Mr Kasongo

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Ecevit

Regina Soremski

Mr Mehra

Oliver Schmidtke

Mr Pillai

Oliver Schmidtke, Mirko Kovacev

Mr Forester

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Ms Blochin

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Mr Khan

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Mr Liu

Oliver Schmidtke, Mirko Kovacev

Chapter 7 Mr Sak

Barbara Pusch

Mr Lor

Barbara Pusch

Mr Hofmann

Oliver Schmidtke

Mr Duani

Yvonne Henkelmann

Mr Mbé

Yvonne Henkelmann

Mr Uslu

Ulrike Ofner

Ms Mendelson

Ulrike Ofner

Mr Sinha

Beatrice Marry and Mirko Kovacev

Mr Khan

Oliver Schmidtke, Beatrice Marry

Mr Sarin

Oliver Schmidtke, Mirko Kovacev

Notes

1. Highly Skilled Migrants: A Puzzling Socioeconomic Reality and a Challenge to Migration Research 1 Hollifield (2004) speaks of an emerging “migration state”: driven by market forces and labour market needs, Western states find themselves increasingly compelled to engage in the regulation of international migration as an integral part of their social and economic policies, in spite of the considerable political resistance to migrants, in particular in the European context. 2 However, recent studies have pointed to the relative deprivation of individual groups, in particular among visible minorities in Canada: Kazemipur and Halli (2001), Pendakur and Pendakur (2011), Reitz, Zhang, and Hawkins (2011), and Skuterud (2010). 3 “What a Waste: Germany Scandalously Underuses Immigrants and Women,” Economist, 13 March 2010. 4 One element of this development is how employers offer training and qualification schemes (see Barrett et al. 2013). 5 For a critical discussion on the idea of universally applicable market mechanisms, see Phillips (2011). 6 In the same vein, Ottaviano and Peri (2013) point to the critical role of particular urban contexts and the local environment in which firms operate in shaping the socioeconomic outcomes for migrants. 7 For a discussion of the gendering that results from highly skilled women often working in intensely regulated professions, see Kofman (2004b). 8 This idea is central to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power (Bourdieu, Wacquant, and Farage 1994). 9 The international research project was funded by the German Volkswagen Foundation. For more details on the research design and the sample, see Nohl et al. (2006) and the appendix to this book.

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10 In this sense our research focuses on the “practical” rather than the “theoretical consciousness” (Giddens 1984). For more details on our methodological approach, see the appendix. 11 In addition to these interviews, we used existing survey statistics, conducted expert interviews, and also analysed relevant policy documents. 12 For the purposes of this book, we selected main findings on highly qualified “foreigners” in all countries under scrutiny. Further publications discuss cross-national perspectives on the immigrant societies (Nohl and Weiß 2012; Schittenhelm and Schmidtke 2011) and other status groups included in our collaborative research project, thereby focusing on immigrants facing legal barriers (Weiß 2010a) and immigrants with local education (Schittenhelm 2009b, 2011). 13 Structural conditions were also observed through relevant survey statistics, expert interviews, and relevant policy documents. 2. The Relational Character of Cultural Capital in Migration 1 For the rules of the following transcript, and all other transcripts in this book, see page xiii of this volume. Interviews were conducted in the language of the country in which the interview took place, unless indicated otherwise. Foreign-language interviews were translated for this book. Originals can be found at http://udue.de/cucapm. 2 For the sake of anonymity, the proper names of interviewees, companies, and associations have been changed throughout the book. 3 It should be noted, however, that statistical data themselves have also been used to prove the limits of the human capital concept. Using the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey data, Buzdugan and Halli (2009) explore the value attributed to foreign education in relation to the duration of an immigrant’s stay in Canada. Pointing to a statistically relevant correlation between the length of the stay in Canada and the value of foreign education, their data demonstrate the limits of human capital theory. 4 Unfortunately, Friedberg does not focus on highly qualified foreigners., perhaps because the return to education for highly qualified people is less measurable than it is for vocationally educated immigrants. Although one would expect the differential between foreign and domestic education to increase as the level of education increases, “the differential associated with attending postsecondary school abroad rather than in Israel is smaller than that differential at the high school level” (2000, 243).

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5 The low value of foreign labour market experience is confirmed in other studies, too. A long-term study by Statistics Canada (2005) concludes that the reduced success of recent immigrant cohorts is caused mainly by the lack of recognition of their foreign work experience and their lack of Canadian work experience. Similarly, Reitz (2001, 365) states that “the labour market value of foreign work experience in Canada is effectively zero.” On the link between the recognition of educational credentials and immigrants’ income, see also Adamuti-Trache and Sweet (2005) and Kustec, Thompson, and Xue (2007). 6 Beyond these numbers, the frustration of newcomers to Canada in this respect is also spurred by the discrepancy between the admission criteria of the point system (awarding acknowledgment for foreign educational titles and work experiences) and a very different practice in the labour market (see the qualitative study by Somerville and Walsworth 2010). 7 We will take such differences into account in our own empirical analyses, too. See chapters 4, 5, and 7. 8 Similarly, Hall and Sadouzai (2010) call attention to the fact that the impact of foreign experience on migrants’ entry into the labour market in regulated professional fields differs from that in non-regulated professional fields. 9 The German micro-census is a rotating panel carried out by the Federal Statistical Office in Germany, with a sample based on households. A special investigation, based on the micro-census for 2009, the second with a more differentiated categorization of immigrant backgrounds, has been carried out for this project. 10 The German labour market can be characterized as an “insider-outsider labour market” (Blossfeld et al. 2005). That is, it is difficult for newcomers to gain long-term contracts because those who are employed on a long-term basis enjoy a relatively high degree of job security and other privileges. 11 On the basis of micro-census information, it was also possible to identify immigrant backgrounds for those who had obtained German citizenship. Furthermore, it was possible to identify all those who had received their educational title abroad prior to their date of arrival in Germany. For details on the wording of census questions concerning citizenship, year of arrival, and year of naturalization, see Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik (2007, 107). 12 Kogan’s (2011) comparison of persons who immigrated in the 1960s and persons who immigrated after 1990 does not systematically include the place of education.

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13 There is more research on highly qualified foreigners done on the basis of the human capital approach; see, e.g., Creese, Dyck, and McLaren (2008), Hiebert (2002), Zeng and Xie (2004), Colic-Peisker and Walker (2003), and Faist (2008). 14 For further criticism of the human capital approach, from the viewpoint of discrimination research, see chapter 6.1. 15 For an early American review of Bourdieu’s work – which may also serve as an introduction – see DiMaggio (1979). For a recent discussion of the relevance of Bourdieu for American sociology, see Lamont (2012) and Wacquant (2013). 16 Williams and Balaz (2008, 1925), in their study on Slovak doctors returning from the United Kingdom, have made the interesting proposition to differentiate “embrained,” “embodied,” “encultured,” and “embedded” knowledge. 17 Because the actor might not easily be able to access this knowledge upon reflection and to explicate it, we used qualitative methods, which enable us to account for the implicit, habitualized knowledge of the migrants and to reconstruct it (see the introduction and the appendix to this volume). 18 In his more recent State Nobility, Bourdieu did indeed insist on the inseparability of technical skills and the social dignity attributed to them (1998b, 116–23). 19 The term code here refers to both language (see Bernstein 1970) and nonverbal behaviour. Indeed, Bourdieu and Passeron, in the French original of their study, had spoken of “language capital.” Only later, when this piece was translated into English (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), had the term cultural capital come to be used. 20 The German education system is characterized by its early diversion into “lower,” “middle-range,” and “higher” educational pathways, for which pupils are selected after primary school (see Schittenhelm 2009b). 21 Building on Bourdieu’s concepts, Kelly and Lusis (2006) show in their study of Filipinos in Canada how modes of exclusion from labour market opportunities are constitutively connected to the need to see cultural capital recognized, as well as symbolic de-valorization of migrants’ transnational habitus. In an empirical study of Polish migrants to Germany, Nowicka (2013) distinguishes three types of transnational social positioning. In contrast to traditional emigrants moving completely to the other country, migrants in the bi-local type convert diverse forms of capital by transferring them from one country to another, and migrants in the overlapping social positioning type create a web of constant back-and-forth transfers and conversions that can be seen as transnational social positioning.

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3. Multidimensional Status Passages: Migration, Labour Market Inclusion, and Private Life Domains 1 In the work of Anselm Strauss (1991, 149–74), the term is used even to describe suffering and disorderly social processes (see Riemann and Schütze 1991). 2 If we take into account Bourdieu’s (1986a) criticism of biographical analysis, our approach is not shaped by “biographical illusions.” 3 It is worth noting that boundary-making approaches that follow Bourdieu’s concepts do not necessarily focus on transition processes. For a discussion of symbolic boundaries, see Lamont (1992, 2000), Lamont and Fournier (1992), and Lamont and Molnár (2002). For boundary-making approaches in migration studies, see Wimmer (2007, 2008). 4 Yet the role of the immigrant household and family in the flexibility of immigrants needs to be considered in a differentiated way. In arguing against the problematization of immigrant families Creese, Dyck, and McLaren (2008) emphasize the supportive role of immigrant households and, in particular, the supportive role of women. Drawing on qualitative interviews, they follow the path of family households recently immigrated to Canada. According to their findings, the immigrant family enables immigrants to adopt responsive strategies to barriers and precarious circumstances in the receiving country. 5 According to Docquier, Lowell, and Marfouk (2009, 317), “The share of women in the highly skilled migrant population increased in almost all OECD destination countries between 1990 and 2000” and has reached considerable levels. It has to be noted, however, that highly skilled immigrants do not necessarily enter the country as labour migrants but in the course of family migration, marriage, or asylum-seeking (Kofman and Raghuram 2009; Riaño and Baghdadi 2007, 165). 4. Aspects of the Multidimensional Status Passage: Phases, Migration Motives, and Cultural Capital among Foreign-Trained Migrants in Germany 1 For the sake of anonymity, the proper names of interviewees, companies, and associations have been changed. 2 All unreferenced quotations in this chapter and those that follow have been taken from our narrative interviews. 3 These findings are the result of the cooperative work of Arnd-Michael Nohl, Ulrike Selma Ofner, and Sarah Thomsen (2007), assisted by Yvonne Henkelmann. Ofner focuses on migration motives in our German

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Notes to pages 71–80 subsample of forty narrative interviews. Thomsen (2009) reconstructs the phases of the status passage. Nohl’s focus is on the utilization of knowledge and skills. He has also developed the final multidimensional typology presented in this chapter. Yvonne Henkelmann (2012) analyses the relevance of language during the status passages. For methodological and practical details of constructing such relational typologies and for the specific concept of case groups applied here, see Nohl (2013) and the appendix to this volume. Mr Blochin is a brain surgeon from Belarus, and Mr Brahmi is a French physicist whose parents had immigrated to France from Morocco. At this point we should emphasize that, from the beginning, our research project sample has been restricted to immigrants who had already undergone the transition into the labour market in the receiving country. As a matter of course, the sample was restricted to people who had stayed in the respective country for a longer period, that is, at least five years until the time of the interview, which excludes from our sample, for instance, expatriates on short-term sojourns. This characteristic was apparent in other cases as well. In part, this downgrading results from the institutional structures in Germany (see chapter 5). The labour office can support only vocational training, and international migrants typically do not fulfil the conditions for student subsidies or loans in academic training. In some ways the migrants discussed in this section are similar to those discussed in the previous section, in that they enter into a phase of establishment due to biographical orientations beyond the labour market. For migrants like Mr Baako, Mr and Ms Shwetz, and Mr Ziegler, however, these biographical orientations compensated for a professional career. For migrants with transnational cultural capital, partnership and family orientations tie their career to a specific place. Since Mr Baako’s experience, pilot projects developed by the labour office and other organizations provide academic trainings for immigrants. For more details, see chapter 8. In Germany only a few professions, particularly in the health-care system, are regularized by law and offer official procedures for the recognition of foreign academic titles. Many other professional fields, including those of the managers, consultants, and natural scientists discussed in other sections of this chapter, are not subject to state regulations (see Englmann and Müller 2007). For example, until the German parliament issued a law against discrimination in 2006, the boards of medical doctors and dentists frequently advertised in professional journals job postings that restricted

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applications to those from individuals with “German mother tongue” or with a “German university degree.” There is some evidence for functionally equivalent niches filled by migrant doctors that do not pertain to specific language skills or cultural competences but can be attributed to a shortage of doctors in certain regions or specializations (Brosius 2008). While “partnership orientation” in this context means primarily the motivation for the immigration process (i.e., to live with the partner in Germany), lifestyle and the orientation between work and private life are shaped by various dimensions and are not fully determined by the partnership (see below). For more details about the typology of motives presented in this section, see Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen (2007, 96–124). This observation is related to strong value orientations regarding partnership, individualization, and gender, as discussed in chapter 5. Mr Bergström is an economist from Sweden; Ms Gonzalez-Montejo is a bacteriologist from Peru. People with such a restricted residence status are not even allowed to study at university.

5. Migration Control and Migrants’ Agency 1 Originally, in German, “die Erfahrung iss für mein Leben” (“the experience is for my life”). 2 In Germany it is compulsory for everyone to register with the city administration of one’s main residence. For Germans, it is a small and common mistake to forget to deregister at the city of their residence prior to moving to another city. For migrants, this mistake can have severe consequences, especially if government officials do not accept other proof that the individual really left the country. 3 For an interesting contrast, see Riaño and Baghdadi’s (2007) analyses of highly skilled women migrating to Switzerland. They show that marriage can be a disadvantage after an immigrant has attained a stable residence permit. Comparing the case of a low-income single mother with that of a married middle-class immigrant, Riaño and Baghdadi show that the latter is disadvantaged because as a married woman she is forced into a dependent gender role (175). 4 For recent data on highly skilled migration to another German-language country, Switzerland, see Aratnam (2012). 5 Generalizations in qualitative research do not depend on random sampling but on theoretical sampling. On the basis of our sample, we cannot know the proportion of migrants whose trajectory is characterized

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Notes to pages 100–7 mainly by balancing career and family, and our typology may have overlooked some biographical orientations. We can, however, be fairly sure that those types that we found and analysed in depth are well grounded in empirical research (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Ulrike Ofner’s comprehensive typology of migrants’ orientations is part of the multidimensional typology presented in chapter 4. It has also been used in other collaborative publications (e.g., Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen 2007; Weiß, Ofner, and Pusch 2010). As we shall see later in this chapter, however, the administration of universal human rights legislation does show a high degree of discretion. BAMF (2006, 49). Drucksache 16/6832 of the German parliament in response to a request by the parliamentarians Ulla Jelpke, Petra Pau, Sevim Dağdelen, Kersten Naumann, Wolfgang Neskovic, and the Fraktion DIE LINKE, published 24 October 2007. Cited from Focus Migration–Deutschland, a country study made available by the Hamburgerisches Weltwirtschaftsinstitut, available at “Deutschland,” Focus Migration, http://focus-migration.hwwi.de/ Deutschland-Update.1509.0.html. See the appendix for more details about the sampling. The figure is lower than that in table 5.1, as it refers only to persons who do not hold German citizenship. For the data on EU foreigners in Germany, see the most recent statistics from the Federal Statistical Office, at https:// www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Bevoelkerung/ MigrationIntegration/Migrationshintergrund2010220097004.pdf?__blob= publicationFile. “Entrepreneurs” was also created as a new category (§21) and today includes those who invest at least €250,000 and create at least five jobs. In 2007, Germany’s Federal Labour Agency’s report on visas added up to 17,163 persons (authors’ calculations, based on the statistics “Arbeitsgenehmigungen und Zustimmungen 2007”) who received or renewed permission to work in a legal category that points at highly skilled professions (§27, nos. 1–3, §28, nos. 1 and 2, and §31, no. 1 BeschV). Since 2007, foreign spouses have had to prove some knowledge of German prior to entering Germany if they do not hold citizenship from a nation that is exempt from this general rule. Our own calculations based on German Academic Exchange Service (2011). As even accepted asylum applicants can be deported, should the situation in their home country change, their tendency to naturalize is high. As naturalization depends on many preconditions, however, such as waiting

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periods of at least five years and the ability to fund oneself, many are unable to become naturalized. This means that the cumulative number of accepted asylum seekers would be significantly higher if naturalized refugees were included. A non-representative study found that 10 per cent had a university degree (Isoplan 2004). A representative study of parents of children who entered Germany in the 1990s shows 36.2 per cent with a college-track secondary education coming from non-European countries sending mostly refugees, and 16.5 per cent coming from the former Yugoslavia (Söhn 2011, 205). At the time of our study, even highly skilled refugees could not apply for other permits once they had declared themselves to be asylum seekers. In August 2007, migrants who had stayed for eight (or, if they were living with children, six) years in Germany and who met some other conditions were allowed full labour market access and given a more stable residence permit if they found employment. In an attempt to open up its borders to highly skilled migrants, the government granted full labour market access to refugees with an academic education and/or vocational experience in their home country after four years’ stay on German soil (see Lukas 2011, 39–46). As employment is a precondition for gaining a more stable residence status, the incentive to take up employment is very high. Therefore the low employment rate must be interpreted as indirect evidence of the insurmountability of numerous barriers to labour market access in this group. A recent estimate gives a range of 196,000 to 457,000 for 2008, but in contrast to the other estimates, this estimate comes from a government report (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge 2011, 183). The estimate of 10 per cent is indirectly confirmed by our field work: though it proved difficult to find undocumented migrants who were willing to be interviewed, it was not difficult to find migrants with an academic education. All German cases subjected to legal exclusion were therefore discussed in detail by a legal expert, Angela Pohlmann, in order to enable the study group’s team to understand the specifics of their legal situation. Legally, it is not the status but the existence of bilateral treaties that is relevant. As Mau et al. (2012, 70) show for the United States, visa waiver programs can be explained by economic and political factors – that is, the United States is more likely to waive visas for wealthy and democratic countries. Expert interviews point toward a relevance of symbolic status, too (62).

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25 Our legal specialist, Angela Pohlmann, concluded that at least some of the administrative decisions portrayed by our interviewees could not have been lawful at the time. Given limited evidence, it is of course not possible to confirm Pohlmann’s conclusions, but they do contribute to our assessment that substantial administrative issues are at the root of the migrants’ perceptions. 26 Kahanec and Tosun (2009) come to a similar conclusion in their study on the role of citizenship on the political economy of immigration: the active labour market participation of non-Germans is discouraged by the protracted uncertainty about the legal status of living in Germany. 27 For the dramatic shift in immigrants’ country of origin for the period from 1971 to 2006, see the data provided in “Region of Birth of Recent Immigrants to Canada, 1971 to 2006,”, Statistics Canada, http://www12 .statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-557/figures/c2-eng.cfm. 28 For an overview of permanent residents by category coming to Canada between 1987 to 2011, see the data provided in “Facts and Figures 2011 – Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents,” Citizenship and Immigration Canada, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/ resources/statistics/facts2011/permanent/01.asp. 29 For recent figures, see “The Canadian Population in 2011: Population Counts and Growth,” Statistics Canada’s latest, http://www12.statcan .gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-310-x/98-310-x2011001-eng.cfm. 30 For the first time in Canada’s modern immigration history, in 2008 the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada (251,235) exceeded the total number of permanent residents admitted in the same year (247,243) (official numbers in “Facts and Figures 2009 – Immigration Overview: Permanent and Temporary Residents,” Citizenship and Immigration Canada, 2009, http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/resources/statistics/ facts2009/temporary/02.asp). 31 Canadian Council of Professional Engineers. “Engineering InternationalEducation Assessment Program – Overview.” http://www.engineerscanada .ca/accreditation. 32 Boyd and Cao (2009) demonstrate the positive association between proficiency in the English or French language and immigrant earnings in Canada and discuss policy responses such as government initiatives for language training. Girard and Bauder (2007) show the extent to which recognition is based on symbolic in- and exclusion. 33 Accreditation is defined in the literature as “the process by which an agency or association grants public recognition to a training institution, program of study or service which meets certain predetermined standards” (Mata 1999).

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34 Recognizing the inefficiencies and lack of transparency in the current system, the federal government launched a plan to establish the Pan-Canadian Framework for the Assessment and Recognition of Foreign Qualifications. This system, which came into effect in 2011, is meant to standardize procedures across provinces, to provide more comprehensive and transparent information to migrants, and to guarantee foreign-trained workers a decision within one year of their arrival in Canada regarding whether or not their qualifications will be recognized. 35 It is worth noting that gender is still important among these factors, affecting not only transitions to skilled employment but also permanent employment (see Fang and McPhail 2008). Among the sectors in which immigrant women are concentrated is the service economy, characterized by insecure and low-waged employment (Boyd and Pikkov 2008, 37). 36 We would like to thank our collaborator Barbara Pusch for contributing significantly to the analysis presented in this chapter (also see Pusch 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011). 37 Immigration was a means to change the cultural and religious composition of the population. For instance, in 1914, close to 14 per cent of the population was Greek Orthodox and about 10 per cent was Armenian. By the 1930s, these two groups had become extremely small minorities. 38 The geographical limitation has been a key feature of Turkey’s asylum policy and practice, as Turkey used to grant asylum only to persons from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the context of the Cold War, Turkey assumed that only persons fleeing from communist regimes would seek asylum. In addition, Turkey thought that it would mainly serve as a transit country for these refugees. 39 Since 1 February 2012, the previously predominant practice of leaving the country for one day after the expiration of a ninety-day tourist visa in order to re-enter on another ninety-day tourist visa has been interdicted for all foreigners. 40 In the 2000s, Turkey joined forces with the United Nations to combat human trafficking; it became a member of the Organization for Migration in 2004 and engages in international cooperation to address this issue. 41 The reform of migration legislation in Turkey reflects pressure from the European Union (Erder 2011). One factor is the EU’s desire to protect its southern border from unwanted immigration. In 2005, the EU and Turkey established an “Action Plan for Asylum and Migration,” which aims to align Turkey’s asylum and migration system with EU legislation. In addition, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Social Rights, which examines violations against the European Social Charter, recently criticized

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Notes to pages 122–30 Turkey for failing to create equal opportunities for foreigners (and singled out Turkey’s residence permits as being too restrictive). For a recent study on border control with respect to all kinds of mobility, see Mau et al. (2012). The findings presented here are the result of the cooperative work of Anja Weiß, Barbara Pusch, Niki von Hausen, Ulrike Ofner, Anja Brosius, Flore Biehl, and Angela Pohlmann, as well as a team of students assisting with field work and interpretation. Barbara Pusch conducted the Turkish interviews and analysed them in several typologies. The results given for Turkey are based on her work (Pusch 2008a, 2008c, 2010b, 2010c; Weiß, Ofner, and Pusch 2010). For more details on our research strategies in comparative analysis, see the appendix. In this context it would have been interesting to look at the legal difficulties of transnational migrants. In countries such as Germany, transnational migrants cannot consolidate their status because their stay in Germany is interrupted by moves to other countries. Since we focus on persons who have stayed in the country for at least five years, transnational migrants are generally excluded from our sample. Cases of positive discrimination are also excluded from this discussion of legal exclusion. Mostly this concerns ethnic Germans and EU citizens, whose educational degrees are recognized more easily than those of other migrants, even when they hold exactly the same degree from the same institution. We did not analyse the experiences of those migrants in Turkey who had no legal concerns. The fact that Forester considers applying from the United Kingdom to be advantageous does not reflect any formal legal privileges for migrants from the United Kingdom but, as we assume, far more expedient application procedures in England as compared to South Africa. Mr Young was interviewed in English, a second language to him and the interviewer. Technically Mr Young does not fit the parameters of our core sample, as he was not able to formally complete his degree, but we deviated from this criterion in the case of undocumented migrants, who were generally difficult to find and reluctant to grant interviews (see appendix). Most likely a (misunderstood) label for “final thesis.” These cases are those of Mr Ashot, Ms Kotek, and the foreign student Mr Sottomayor, all undocumented migrants who were picked up by the police at least once.

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52 Mr Ashot had completed a degree in political science and dramaturgy in his home country of Armenia. As his degree is in the liberal arts, he technically does not fit into our sample, but we deviated from that criterion in the case of undocumented migrants, who were generally difficult to find and reluctant to grant interviews (see appendix). 53 Undocumented migrants were not part of our Canadian sample. 54 For a recent ethnography of sub-Saharan Africans in Turkey, including a discussion of race, see Suter (2012, 119–26). 55 Most likely “consuming.” 56 Mr Iduma, an African refugee in Turkey holding a degree in economics. 57 Ulrike Ofner (2010) has developed a typology of symbolic exclusion for migrants to Germany with a foreign educational degree. For the case group of migrants who experience a high degree of general exclusion, the impact of symbolic exclusion is felt most strongly. 58 This could be because our sampling of undocumented migrants in Germany was ultimately incomplete for various reasons (see appendix). It could also be the result of institutional differences, as Germany controls and deports undocumented migrants more systematically than does Turkey. 59 One interviewee admitted doing informal work, and we must assume that others remained quiet, perhaps because they did not trust us. That said, several interviewees clearly expressed the opinion that they were not looking for (informal) work under the given conditions. On the basis of these findings, we would not dispute that some of the refugees in Germany work informally, but we can say that this type of legal exclusion is characterized by a reluctance to accept informal labour. 60 We also pointed out that some biographical orientations are seen to be legitimate by migration regulation and are therefore institutionalized in residence permits, offering a stable biographical perspective. 61 See Düvell (2006) for comparable findings in a similar case group. 62 This case group also comprises a medical doctor, Ms Damerc, whose experience of legal exclusion will be discussed later in this chapter, and an engineer from Pakistan, Mr Ahmad. 63 Another informant was told by the migration administration that she should marry, finally, just so she could stop being a hassle. This interviewee also told us that fellow students treated her as a potential prostitute in everyday interactions, with reference to her migratory background. 64 This group is most similar to the Russian women in Turkey discussed by Bloch (2010).

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65 Two additional interviews with migrants who were legally excluded in Germany were not included in Biehl’s study but also showed a pragmatic orientation toward strategic marriage. 66 Mr Mendez had achieved equal status at the time of the interview, but he had been an undocumented migrant for a short time after entering the country. 67 The cases of Mr Nazar and Mr Zadeh, discussed in chapter 4.3, are similar in some aspects as well. 68 According to the Ärztestatistik, “Tabelle 10: Ausländische Ärzte in Deutschland am 31.12.2010” (http://www.bundesaerztekammer. de/specialdownloads/Stat10Tab10.pdf), 25,316 doctors with foreign citizenship were practising in Germany in 2010, which amounted to 7.9 per cent of all doctors in Germany at the time. Doctors holding EU citizenship usually receive an approbation (if they fulfil other conditions). On the basis of dotors’ countries of origin, we estimate that fewer than half the foreign doctors hold a minor professional licence. 69 Foreign students in Germany have to balance the intricacies of the educational system, the labour market for (foreign) students, and migration law. Our analyses show that these three institutions are interconnected in a complex manner that shows some similarity in labour impact to legal exclusion based on professional law (Weiß 2010a). 70 A legislative change has improved the situation of non-EU nationals since 2012. 71 This includes non-Germans who have graduated from German universities. 72 A fourth institution, the professional association of doctors, Ärztekammer, is responsible for recognizing specialties. As it rarely does so for foreigneducated doctors, we have excluded it from the analysis here. 73 One of our interviewees had studied law in Italy but believes that she is not able to practise in Germany. Nevertheless, she has gained full recognition and currently works de facto for Italians residing in Germany. 74 This means neither a German nor an EU citizen, nor another migrant with legally unrestricted labour market access. 75 See “Berufserlaubnis,” http://www.berlin.de/lageso/gesundheit/ akademische-berufe/arzt/berufserlaubnis.html, translated by the authors. 76 A lot of leeway in administrative decision making can also enable inclusive decisions, as we shall see later in this chapter. In both cases, the decision-making system is difficult to understand and to control. 77 This finding is also based on instructive narrations by Mr Ashot, whose experience as a foreign student prior to his becoming undocumented is characterized by similar interactive effects of legal complexity and symbolic exclusion.

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78 This finding is based on work by our collaborator Niki von Hausen (2010b, 141–2). 79 Some of the findings mentioned here are based on unpublished results from Anja Weiß’s earlier research project. These are in line with the descriptions developed here. For more information about the earlier project, see Weiß (2005, 2006b). A recent study on ICT specialists in Germany is Sunata (2011). 80 In the case of Ms Mazali, this is due not only to her training in IT, which was asked for at the time, but also to an exception in §9 Arbeitsaufenthaltsverordnung (AAV), which relieves Israeli citizens from some of the preconditions for gaining a job-related visa. 81 Migration research has contributed to the conflation of biographical orientation and legal status by replicating categories created by states rather than considering the perspective of migrants. By using categories that reflect the often heated discussion about the (il-)legitimacy of migration, migration research is drawn into normative debates and often legitimates migration control. 82 As it is difficult to determine their numbers, estimates and the empirical basis for these estimates are discussed earlier in this chapter. Our analyses based on the micro-census, presented in chapter 2, point in the same direction. 83 An analysis of more or less successful types of trajectories into the labour market based on representative data for Canada can be found in Fuller (2011) and for Denmark in Liversage (2009). 6. Symbolic Struggles over Cultural Capital: Racial Discrimination and Symbolic Exclusion 1 “Discrimination” in this text denotes the unequal treatment of a person based on his or her group membership. Relying on a concept widely used in the Anglo-Saxon context, “race” is primarily a social construct, a concept that is used in everyday language to denote visible differences between people (see Miles and Brown 2003; Anthias 1990). These constructed images are based on the (false) “assumption that physical difference such as skin colour, facial features, and hair colour are related to intellectual, moral, or cultural superiority” (Henry and Tator 2002, 11). 2 This is partly why scholarship has moved away from studying intentions or motives of those alleged to use racism. In this regard we agree with Wellman’s definition of racism as culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have

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Notes to pages 159–67 because of the subordinated position of racial minorities (see Anisef, Sweet, and Frempong 2003, Wellman 1977, 35–40). Bourdieu (2005) has discussed the unification of a global economic field. See Akbari (1999), McBride (2000), and Salamon (1991). For a critical interpretation of the human capital approach, see Frenette and Morissette (2003), Li (2003a), Aydemir and Skuterud (2005), and chapter 2 of this volume. There may be exceptions to the rule in the case of widely respected educational certificates. Holders of a Harvard MBA will probably be able to transport their institutionalized cultural capital anywhere. It may even gain in value in areas where such a degree is rare. For an attempt to use Bourdieu’s habitus concept with respect to migrants’ labour market inclusion, see Bauder (2005). For a discussion of cultural capital and migration, see Weiß (2005) and Erel (2010). According to the Canadian Employment Equity Act, visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are nonCaucasian in race or non-white in colour.” This term is rarely used in a German social context, where the use of “race” as a concept is seen with some scepticism, as this seems to imply acceptance of the idea. Also, the empirical content of “race” is disputed because some cultural markers, such as the Muslim headscarf, have attained a high importance for constructions of superiority. In this book we use the terms “ethnicity” and “visible minorities,” in an understanding which can comprise “racial minorities” but can also refer to groups “visible” through cultural markers. Hersch (2008, 2011) has demonstrated the persistence of discrimination based on skin colour for immigrants in the American context. From a political economy perspective, George Borjas (1993, 1999) and Barry Chiswick (1978) have critically shaped this line of research. For a recent study on intergenerational inequalities linked to migration, see Meurs, Pailhe and Simon (2006). For similar arguments, see studies about institutional discrimination (Alvarez 1979; Feagin and Feagin 1986). Criteria for productivity often show who has been dominant in the past, and it is difficult to assess, for example, whether a police officer has to be of average Caucasian male height or if that criterion is arbitrary. For a good review of the literature in the field, see Carbado et al. (2003). Some statistical studies on individual and group behaviour, from the perspective of social psychology, address discriminatory attitudes, intentions, and behaviour, based on survey data (see, for instance, the

Notes to pages 168–72

13

14

15

16

17

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studies of Zick, Pettigrew, and Wagner 2008; and Wagner, Helmke, and Schrader 2009 on Germany). With the focus on the experience of the second generation, we decided not to include interviews from Turkey in this chapter. The lack of a comparable cohort of migrants and strong intersection of a social exclusion reproduced through precarious legal status made this comparative perspective less fruitful for the research question of this chapter. For findings on Turkey with a view to the experience of symbolic exclusion, see the studies by project collaborators Ofner (2010) and Pusch (2008a). Comparing media and public discourse in Canada and Germany, Bauder’s study (Bauder 2011) underlines how, from a comparative transatlantic perspective, issues of migrants are perceived and politicized very differently in both countries. He argues that distinct legacies of national identity shape immigration policies and the sociocultural environment of integration. The 1988 Multiculturalism Act officially acknowledged this commitment to equality, identity, and justice and gave it a more solid legal base. The most important provision in the Multiculturalism Act reads, “All federal institutions should promote policies, programs and practices that Canadians of all origins have an equal opportunity to obtain employment and advancement in those institutions.” It is worth noting that, according to Boyd’s analysis of the 2001 Canadian census data, the percentages of visible minority youth achieving high school or university degrees are either similar to or exceed the percentages of second-generation non-visible minority youth. However, there are two exceptions: black and Latin American youth, who are less likely to achieve university degrees or be employed in high-skill occupations (Boyd 2008, 22). Further analysis shows that social origins (including family backgrounds such as parental education and occupation) are among the factors underlying the educational and occupational achievement of the 1.5 generation (i.e., those who immigrated as children) and the second generation; however, it also reveals that some immigrant offspring groups still have higher educational attainments after adjusting for differences in social origins (Boyd 2009). While he finds evidence of substantial progress in migrants’ labour market inclusion from one generation to the next, Skuterud’s (2010) analysis of Canadian census data shows that there is still a notable earning gap for Canada’s visible minorities, even in the third generation. Similar evidence was also provided by a recent study in Toronto (Oreopoulos and Dechief 2011), in which applications sent out to potential employers were identical

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19

20

21 22

23

24

25 26

27

Notes to pages 172–84 except for the name of the applicant. Résumés with non-Western names received far fewer calls for interviews than applications with English or French names. Henry (2006) refers to this phenomenon as “racial profiling.” In Selling Diversity, Abu-Laban and Gabriel (2002) outline the ways in which immigration, multiculturalism, employment equity, and globalization, touted as part of the cosmopolitan life of the twentyfirst century, actually reinforce marginalization, while at the same time marketing Canada’s achievements. Feagin and Feagin (1986) developed the institutional racism theory to draw attention to the indirect mechanisms through which discrimination is reproduced (e.g., social institutions such as housing, employment, and education); see also Knowles, Lacey, and Prewitt 1996; Law, Phillips, and Turney 2004; and O’Grady et al. 2005. Shortly before the publication of this book, this changed somewhat, in the debate about a book containing racist arguments published by a former head banker, Thilo Sarrazin, and also in a debate about whether reprints of classic children’s books should refrain from reusing words like Negro. On dominant discourses on migrants in Germany, see Schmidtke (2008). It is not the focus of our research to investigate how such narratives are generated and reproduced in public discourse. See, for instance, Eder et al. (2002), who develop an analytical account for the processes by which collective identities are constructed, changed, or contested. Islam as a powerful religious identity marker similarly shapes the perception (and fear) of important migrant groups, in both cases reflecting a political trend across Europe (Betz and Meret 2009). In line with Bourdieu’s reasoning, one could hypothesize that it is exactly the hidden, taken-for-granted form of racial discrimination that is the most effective and pertinent in reproducing differential access to opportunities in the labour market. For an analysis of this case, see also Neumann (2010). The three-tier educational system in Germany consists of the lowest school track, which allows access only to vocational training, an intermediate track, and a high-school track, which generally leads to a university degree (Abitur). Students of medicine must have completed Abitur and even more; they must have achieved a very good grade-point average. As often discussed in scholarly debates and in public discourses, the second generation in Germany is concentrated mainly in the lowest educational track. For more details of this case and of selective processes in institutional and social settings in the German education system, see Schittenhelm (2009b).

Notes to pages 185–206

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28 Ms Çiçek later obtained a medical degree from a German university. 29 As discussed in the introduction of this chapter, “visibility” in the German context refers not only to phenotypical but also culturally stigmatized markers, such as the Muslim headscarf. Our empirical study did not focus on differences between different kinds of symbolic exclusion. It is plausible, however, that Mr Kasongo is more outspoken about his experiences, as he has less chance of “passing” than, for example, Dr Nazar. 30 Mr Kasongo holds various degrees from universities in Congo. 31 See also the discussion in chapter 7 of language-related obstacles that Mr Forester encounters while promoting his professional career. 32 Ms Blochin holds a chemistry degree from Russia. 33 On the basis of a study conducted in the United States, Nawyn et al. (2012) demonstrate how language can be theorized as a constitutive feature of the social capital that migrants have at their disposal in pursuing professional opportunities. For an empirical account of how the intersection between self- and others’ assessments of English proficiency has an impact on migrants’ labour market outcome, see Akresh and Frank (2011). 34 For a similar interpretation, see Dustmann and Fabbri (2003) and Dustmann et al. (2003). 35 Dr Liu holds a medical degree from China. 36 For more details about this aspect in the second generation’s trajectory, see also Schittenhelm (2011). 37 See also the study by Fong and Shen (2011), which seeks to explain the concentration of particular ethnic minority groups in specific industrial and professional fields in Canada. 38 Guest worker schemes were introduced as circular migration – that is, guest workers received a one-year visa and were expected to leave after their visa expired. As a result of demand by employers, this restriction was lifted after some years, but during its first decades the program as a whole did not encourage long-term stays, family reunification, or efforts at integration. 39 For the discussion of this strategy and the case of Mr Ecevit in more detail, see Schittenhelm (2011). 40 For other similar cases, see Ofner (2003). 7. Up- and Downgrading Cultural Credit: A Cross-Country Comparison 1 As Erel (2010) rightly argues, knowledge and skills are not stable entities transported from one country to another in one’s rucksack.

292

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6

7

Notes to pages 206–9 Rather, migrants “create new forms of cultural capital in the countries of residence” and “engage in creating mechanisms of validation for their cultural capital” (649). We here define institutions as the “reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors” (Berger and Luckmann 1980, 51). One of the earliest differentiations of three kinds of education – informal, non-formal, and formal education – was proposed by Coombs and Ahmet in 1974. In their words, informal education is “the lifelong process by which every person acquires and accumulates knowledge, skills, attitudes, and insights from daily experiences and exposure to the environment,” while non-formal education is “any organized, systematic, educational activity carried on outside the framework of the formal system to provide selected types of learning to particular subgroups in the population, adults as well as children.” Formal education takes place in the “institutionalized, chronologically graded and hierarchically structured educational system, spanning lower primary school and the upper reaches of the university” (cited in La Belle 1982, 161–2). For the German context, these three case groups were discussed in chapter 4, where we inquired into the various ways of using one’s knowledge and skills in the labour market and related them to migration motives and the phases of the status passage. Hence, these case groups are, as concerns the German context, situated in a multidimensional typology: The successful managers and consultants who try to gain cultural credit on the free market (case group 1) have immigrated on the basis of migration motives that could easily be turned into residence and work permits, while the successful medical doctors and dentists, mostly spouses of natives or accepted asylum seekers, were able to access the legally restricted pathway of the medical profession (case group 2). Even those migrants who could not improve their cultural credit, in spite of considerable endeavours in non-formal further education, had been provided with residence and work permits based on migration motives perceived as legitimate by the state (case group 3). For a critique, see Embong (2000) and Hartmann (2009). Nowicka’s (2006) study on the cosmopolitan situatedness of economists working for a UN organization is also informative for this debate. For Germany, see Englmann and Müller (2007); for Canada, see the instructive comparative study by Hawthorne (2007). In Turkey there aren’t any restrictions for foreign managers (see Aksu 2006). Pohlmann and Bär (2009, 31) even assert that “national and organizational career systems decisively shape international mobility of highly qualified staff and give international market and career mechanisms their structure.”

Notes to pages 210–17

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8 Although Ms Morales-Aznar had been educated as a lawyer, she was later employed as a counsellor in a bank and thus became part of our sample (see chapter 4). 9 Thomas (2009a, 2009b) shows the importance of language use for labour market inclusion and asserts that “earnings decrease as non-official languages are used more frequently on the job” (2009b, 14). He adds that use of one official language is important to bring “other skills fully to bear” (ibid.). Thus, in Canada the use of English or French in the workplace is exceedingly important for the earnings of highly qualified migrants. 10 As Creese and Wiebe (2012, 64) convincingly show, “employers’ perceptions of language fluency mediated through accents” pose a “barrier for those seeking white collar jobs.” Those women in their study who spoke with “‘African-English’ accents” reported “being treated as if they lacked English fluency … despite the fact that the vast majority of women, three-quarters of participants, came from Commonwealth countries in Africa where, given their middle-class backgrounds, they had been formally educated in English” (65). 11 Poutine is a dish of French fries and fresh cheese curds, covered with gravy. “Kitty corner” refers to the corner located diagonally across from a given location. 12 On the basis of Bourdieu’s concept of “linguistic capital,” Henkelmann (2012) presents a conclusive analysis of highly qualified migrants’ experiences with official languages in Canada and Germany (see also Henkelmann 2010). 13 Although they share the same fate as our research participants in Germany and Canada as foreign-educated migrants, our interviewees in Turkey are underprivileged insofar as they have subordinate legal access to the labour market. However, as we discussed in chapter 5, law enforcement as regards highly qualified migrants is rather lax in Turkey, so our interviewees were able to secure employment informally, even in the highly skilled sector. In contrast, the case groups in Canada and Germany enjoy legal access to the labour market equal to that of the country’s citizens. Although the (lack of unrestricted) legal access surely plays a role in labour market inclusion in Turkey, too, it is evident from our research that the legal status of migrants does not affect the meaning of language acquisition in that context. 14 For these employers, the new knowledge and skills are clearly cultural capital; their value for other possible employers remains unclear (see Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975, 98). Here again we are confronted with the relational character of cultural capital, in this instance not as a

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19 20

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Notes to pages 219–26 relation between the employee and the labour market as a whole but in the employee’s relation to specific employers. As is characteristic of all knowledge and skills acquired in or outside the education system, their value has yet to be accredited by the employers in the labour market. We used this transcript previously in chapter 6 to show a specific type of discrimination. In this chapter, this transcript illustrates a typical way one might adapt knowledge and skills to labour market expectations. In their study on African immigrants in Canada, Creese and Wiebe (2012, 64), however, show that not all kinds of labour can be transferred into “Canadian work experience” (and presumably not by all immigrants): “Unfortunately, experience gained in manual labour never translated into ‘Canadian experience’ that might eventually help them gain entry into their professional fields, so most African men found themselves trapped in a series of unstable, short-term, blue collar jobs with frequent bouts of unemployment, for the long term.” See also Xue (2006). Mills and Blossfeld (2005) contrast open and closed employment systems. Canada serves as an example of an open employment system, “where lower-level jobs have comparatively less of a ‘scarring’ effect on their [youths’] long-term careers” (Mills et al. 2005, 426; see also Myles et al. 1993, 174). Canada is contrasted with Italy and Spain, where “highly educated youth need to get a high-quality job match when entering the labor market. If they obtain a job below their qualification level, it is much more difficult to get back on track” (Mills et al. 2005, 426). Turkey was not part of this study, and unemployment of skilled youth in Germany generally is low. As Germany clearly is a closed employment system and Turkey is likely to share some characteristics with Italy and Spain, these results based on quantitative data add plausibility to our findings. For a discussion on the Marxian terms “use value” and “exchange value” in the frame of Bourdieu’s work, see Beasley-Murray 2000. All Canadian interviews analysed in this section have been conducted and interpreted by Yvonne Henkelmann, a research assistant of Arnd-Michael Nohl. Henkelmann has published a comparative analysis of practitioners in Germany and Canada (see Henkelmann 2007). The MCCEE is a test with three steps, the first two of which are based on the web and include multiple choice questions while the last takes into account the doctor’s decisions about his patients (see Boyd and Schellenberg 2008, 8). For a critical analysis of discrimination mechanisms used in the assessment of foreign doctors in the Canadian health system, see Foster (2008).

Notes to pages 226–31

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23 See also our discussion in chapter 4 of state and private-sector recognition for knowledge and skills. 24 The latter restriction was lifted 1 April 2012. 25 The exam of equivalence had not been introduced in the 1990s; instead, applicants were interviewed by an expert commission. 26 In a comparative study (Germany and the Netherlands), Euwals et al. (2010) find a positive relationship between citizenship status and migrants’ labour market positions. 27 While those doctors who obtained a minor professional licence in Germany and didn’t have to pass an exam required only a medium-level proficiency in the German language, the exams of equivalence impose a significant language barrier to the utilization of knowledge and skills because the applicants must have a very good command of the language (see Henkelmann 2012, 169-82). 28 These figures are based on our own analysis of the statistics provided by the federal states’ health administrations. 29 Ofner (2011a, 15) has documented the case of a medical doctor who changed his surname when he wanted to start a practice catering to privately insured patients. He chose a name that is perceived as distinctly American in the German context, thereby giving his “strange” given name a distinctly non-Turkish flavour. 30 In Dentists’ News (Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen), the official journal of the Federal Chamber of Dentists, an advertisement published on July 7, 2008, indicated that “Dr. Werner Münkle” was seeking a “first year resident with German degree.” This particular instance of symbolic discrediting pertained only to the place where the academic title was obtained, but in the same issue of this journal, a “dentist (German)” was sought as a “first year resident” in the city of Krefeld. 31 Such opportunities were important for doctors with a subordinate legal access to the labour market, who share other homologies with their more privileged peers as well, as their specific language skills were useful in helping to overcome legal restrictions. For example, one doctor who knew Kurdish, Turkish, and Arabic was allowed to work in a practice that sought these language skills but couldn’t find any other, legally privileged, applicant. 32 As Henkelmann (2007) has convincingly argued based on her empirical inquiries, in Germany there are doctors who are able to “sell” their medical knowledge and skills with a low proficiency in German because they know the languages used by their patients. As statistics for medical personnel distinguish only between Germans and foreign citizens, and

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36

37 38

39

Notes to pages 232–52 as until 2012 all doctors with a full licence needed to be German or EU citizens, it is impossible to statistically analyse in full the labour market situation of doctors of foreign origin. In Germany, the employment offices’ performance is measured by unemployment statistics – that is, low unemployment rates indicate successful performance. Systems for vocational and university training are institutionally distinct in Germany, and the labour agency supports only vocational training on a regular basis. As is evident in Ms Shwetz’s life story (and as can be assumed for her husband, too), the welfare state–regulated retraining course provides only some of the knowledge and skills that have been decisive for these migrants’ success in the labour market. Practical experience on the job as well as social networks also played important roles during their status passage into the labour market. According to Creese and Wiebe (2009, 62), such jobs are often referred to as “survival employment” by new immigrants. This term was also “often a shorthand way of referring to the experiences of downward mobility and class dislocation when contrasting present circumstances with occupations and status prior to migration, and with expectations participants had for their new lives in Canada.” As we have elaborated in Chapter 5, the basis of this institutionalized symbolic capital is full legal inclusion (citizenship). In his longitudinal study, Lancee (2012) finds that for the advancement of immigrants in the labour market, the “bridging” of social capital (between one’s ethnic group and mainstream society) is of critical importance. As mentioned above, this fact changed after the introduction of exams of equivalence.

8. Conclusions 1 Bourdieu’s (1986b) differentiation between institutionalized and embodied cultural capital is somewhat ambiguous in this respect, as embodied cultural capital can be functional without formal recognition and, at the same time, Bourdieu implies that only those embodied aspects of habitus which are informally recognized should be seen as cultural capital. 2 We did not sample legally excluded migrants in Canada, but, for example, the institutional maze found for some German cases can be found in Canada, too (Kovacev 2010).

Notes to pages 254–60

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3 Bauder (2003, 2005) shows how particular migrant groups whose cultural capital is not recognized and whose habitus is deemed inferior can be subject to a perpetual marginalization in the labour market. Appendix 1 1 This includes people who were born in the receiving country and those who grew up there after immigrating as children. 2 For instance, often highly qualified, educated foreigners come to Germany for a family reunion or under the categories of Aussiedler (ethnically German resettlers) or quota refugees. 3 In order to analyse the impact of symbolic exclusion, a small group of interviewees with local educational degrees was included in Canada as well. 4 For findings that focus on one of the compared status groups, see Nohl, Ofner, and Thomsen (2007), Weiß (2010a), and Von Hausen (2010b); on methodological or theoretical considerations in the projects associated with the international study group, see Nohl (2009, 2012, 2013), Weiß and Nohl (2012), Schittenhelm (2009a, 2012), Schittenhelm and Schmidtke (2011), and Schmidtke (2011, 2013). 5 For a more detailed discussion, see Nohl et al. (2006). 6 In this regard, it might also be important to consider cases or case groups that cannot be compared with other contexts and cover specific features of one context only (see Pepin 2005; Schittenhelm 2009a). 7 The overall sample of the international study group comprises more interviewees. Yet, for the purpose of this book, we focus on the highly skilled interviewees with foreign educational titles in Germany, Canada, and Turkey (for an overview of the cases we refer to in the book see Appendix 2). 8 Including ethnic German resettlers, EU migrants, people who immigrated on the basis of a variety of expert visas, and family migrants (for a detailed discussion, see chapter 5;). The German subsample covers a range of variations considered relevant in Germany. The Canadian subsample mainly covers immigrants who came to Canada under the business category (Immigration Scheme determined by qualifications) or as family members. 9 For medical doctors, access to the labour market is determined both by professional regulations and by general labour market access. Marriage to a German citizen is one frequently found reason for non-restricted access to the labour market. For more details, see chapters 4.3 and 5.

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Notes to pages 261–6

10 First, Germany is among the top locations attracting foreign students (Mau 2010, 72). This includes students who have already completed a degree abroad. Second, highly skilled migrants who want to earn money in Germany soon realize that a student visa is more advantageous than being undocumented. Third, many immigrants with a foreign degree have to redo their degrees in Germany and are at a legal disadvantage during that time. 11 In sum, seven of twenty-five interviewees did not hold an educational degree in the targeted fields of health, natural sciences, and technology, or management and consulting. 12 The methodology of type formation with the documentary method was developed by Bohnsack (2010b). See also Nohl (2013, 43–63). 13 For a discussion, see Mahoney (2003), Tilly (1997), and Weiß and Nohl (2012). 14 For strategies of comparative analysis, see Glaser and Strauss (1967), who suggest selecting cases or comparison groups – that is, groups of cases in the course of the data evaluation (47–8). In this sense, choosing case groups according to theoretical interests is already part of the very beginning of comparative analysis.

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Index

action strategies, 7, 12, 97–8, 123, 135–7, 147, 152, 154, 168, 174, 195–8; marriage, 63–5, 78, 82–3, 96–7, 135–9, 148, 154 administration of migration, 108–9. See also institutional maze biographical approach, 10, 12, 53–4, 57–8, 62, 97–8, 123–4, 152–6, 263 borders, 6, 14, 20, 99–100, 108, 121–2, 152, 159, 244, 255 boundaries, social, 11, 51, 161, 172 Canada, 27–30, 97, 110–15, 122–3, 211–13, 219–26, 234–41 Canadian work experience, 112, 219–22 capital, cultural (concept), 7–10, 41–9, 56, 59–60, 69, 80–1, 84, 88–91, 159–60, 162, 165, 204–6, 218–19, 236–41 capital, human (concept), 7–10, 37–42, 159–64; social, 60, 162, 194, 197, 221, 238–9; symbolic, 161–2, 226–7, 229, 238 career trajectories, 10–11, 50–3, 58–9, 64–5, 86, 89, 250, 264

circular migration, 132 citizenship, 12–13, 36, 75, 79–81, 97, 99–104, 108, 111, 116, 119, 125, 136, 149, 176, 201, 223–31 codes of local labour, 215–23, 238–9 comparative analysis, 16, 18–20, 54–5, 98–9, 123–4, 168–70, 209, 219, 250, 257–9, 265–7; case groups, 71–2, 260, 266; status groups, 18–20, 257–8, 266. See also typology (concept): typologically situated case groups coping strategies. See action strategies country comparison: methodology of, 18–20, 98–100, 206–8; Germany–Canada, 124–7, 204–41; Germany–Turkey, 116, 123, 127–35, 208–23; Germany–Turkey–Canada, 140, 142, 152, 154, 236–41 credentials, educational, 9–10, 14–15, 23–37, 67–91, 108–10, 113–14, 190–2, 204, 275. See also recognition: of educational titles/skills credit, symbolic, 230–1, 240

342

Index

discourse, public, 14–15, 101–2, 108, 123, 133, 158, 168, 174–82, 209, 289–90 discrediting, symbolic, 8–9, 14–15, 42, 56, 157–203, 227, 230–1, 238, 240, 287. See also struggles: symbolic discrimination, 4, 8–9, 14, 21–2, 39, 48, 56, 80, 145–6, 157–202, 205, 212, 230–1, 245–6, 253, 276, 278, 284, 287–8, 290, 294 diversity, cultural/ethnic, 12, 52, 169, 170–2, 274 doctors, 9, 13–14, 33, 77–81, 84–5, 90, 114–15, 138–49, 154, 173, 181, 188, 193–4, 196–9, 207–10, 223–31, 236, 239–40, 245, 249, 260, 262, 266, 278–9, 285–6, 292, 294–7 documentary method, 17–18, 22, 167, 200, 263–5, 267, 298 education: educational system/ school, 12, 47, 159; at school and university, 37–9, 42–9, 61, 67–8, 177; return on, 26–37; further, 75–81, 84–6, 203–41; informal (see learning, informal) employer(s), 6, 8–9, 25, 27, 36, 38–9, 46, 69, 75, 88, 112–14, 122, 131, 134, 142–3, 160, 164–6, 171, 189–92, 202, 204–41 ethnicity, 8, 16, 44, 54, 110, 145, 158, 162–7, 184, 231, 245, 288 European Union, 13, 20, 52–3, 100, 122–3, 229, 283 exclusion/inclusion, 13–16, 48–9; legal, 14, 86–9, 92, 95–156, 160, 162, 168–74, 180–1, 223–31; experience of legal exclusion, 86–9, 98, 122–56; social, 4, 45, 190,

194, 199, 202; symbolic, 8, 14, 21–2, 28, 31, 56, 87, 115, 123, 133, 145–6, 154–5, 157, 161–2, 173–6, 180–202, 205, 230–1. See also struggles: symbolic family reunification, 100 France, 44, 47, 94, 159–60, 174, 224–5, 278 gender, 8, 11, 16, 39, 40, 44, 53–6, 62–3, 83, 87–9, 91, 96, 115, 131, 138, 140, 145, 154, 157, 164, 177–9, 190, 261–2, 273, 279; and intersectionality, 59, 63, 87–9, 140; care work, 96 generation, first, 168–9, 174, 180, 183, 189, 206, 250, 254; second, 4, 157, 166–73, 178–89, 194, 196–9, 201–2, 205, 289 Geneva Refugee Convention, 100, 102, 107, 111, 116, 141 Germany, 31–7, 67–91, 94, 97, 99–109, 139–51, 162, 209–11, 216–18, 226–34 guest workers, 101, 162, 178, 181–3, 186, 198, 202, 291 habitus, 41–4 identity(ies), collective, 40, 132–3, 158, 178–81, 196–8, 200, 290 inequality, social, 11, 13, 16, 21, 28, 58, 165–8, 171, 187, 254 informal work, 14, 95–6, 119, 126, 129–36, 147–8, 223, 249, 263, 285 institutional maze, 114, 139–49, 150–1, 154 International Labour Organization, 164

Index 343 labour market: ethnic (niches), 15, 77–81, 168, 194–9, 230–1; global, international, 3, 6, 66, 72–4, 104, 111, 209, 255, 288; regulation of, 4–5, 48, 75–7, 180, 232–4. See also informal work language (skills), 6, 9, 27, 36, 44, 47, 58–60, 72–4, 84–5, 95, 113, 145, 160–3, 166, 171, 175, 184–6, 192–3, 197, 201, 209, 211–15, 231, 240, 244, 250, 263, 279 learning, informal, 84–5, 209–17, 219–23 life course/histories, 10–13, 50–66, 89, 164, 168, 187, 193–5 macro-social/structural context, 11, 14–17, 19, 21, 51, 54, 98–9, 132–4, 172, 204–1, 258 managers, 33, 57, 67–8, 72–4, 81–6, 207–23, 226, 231, 236–40, 244–7, 255, 260, 278, 292 meso-social context, 15–16, 19, 168, 176, 200, 204–41, 245, 254, 258 methodological nationalism, 16, 19, 158, 162 migration control, 97–9, 121–2; liberal paradox, 5, 100, 122–3 migration policy, 62, 83, 97–100, 104–5, 108, 110, 116, 123, 139, 153–4, 205, 252, 257; paradoxical effects of, 97, 100, 115, 139, 146, 154–5; international regimes, 100, 122 minority(ies), 4, 46, 53, 88, 122, 125, 157, 162–6, 170, 172–5, 178, 183, 193, 202, 231, 288; visible, 21, 110, 129, 133–4, 179, 261–2, 273, 289 mobility, social, 64–5, 92, 194, 251 motivation for migration. See

orientation, biographical: migration orientation multicultural(ism), 159, 169, 171–2, 184, 198, 202, 222, 289–90 multilevel analysis, 16, 54, 89, 265–7 Muslims, 158, 178–9 narrative interview, 17–18, 263 nation state, 12–14, 18, 99–101, 122–3, 152–6, 159–60, 169, 176 naturalization, 79–81, 104, 111 networks, social, 9, 13, 161, 176, 195 orientation, biographical, 12, 18, 43, 67–91, 123, 126–7, 135–7, 204–1; migration orientation, 92, 94, 118, 134, 67–71; institutionalization of migration orientation, 96, 135–7; normative, 96, 135–9 power, symbolic, 179, 273. See also violence, symbolic prejudice. See stereotypes professional law, 71, 77–83, 113, 139–49, 155, 207–8, 223, 226, 239, 245, 248, 252, 286 racism, 15, 102, 110, 133, 155, 158–63, 166–203, 287, 290; internalized, 133, 179, 191, 202. See also minority(ies): visible (re-)accreditation, 82, 113–15, 223–31, 247 recognition: legal, 12, 109; of educational titles/skills, 16, 67–91, 108–9, 113–15, 140, 144, 160, 175, 190, 204–41; symbolic, 12, 254 refugee(s), 15, 29, 34–6, 79, 87–90, 90, 102, 107, 111, 115–18, 121, 126–35,

344

Index

143, 149, 151, 155–6, 169, 180–1, 249, 252, 255, 261–2, 281, 285 religion, 171, 177, 200 research methodology, 16–20, 163–8, 207–8, 257–67 return migration, 97 sampling, 34, 98, 257, 259–63; core criteria, 257, 259; strategies, 141, 259–62 segregation, ethnic, 188–9 socialization, 9, 17, 41–3, 160, 184, 205 status group, 17–21, 257–63, 266–7, 274, 297; local education and full access, 181–3, 188–9, 196–9; educated abroad and full access, 67–91, 124–7, 204–41; education abroad and legally restricted access, 92–9, 127–56, 215–19. See also comparative analysis status passage (concept), 11–13, 49, 50–66, 67–71, 84, 86, 88–91, 204–6; multidimensionality of, 61–6, 67–70, 89–91, 204, 246–51; temporality of, 57–60, 69–71, 89–91, 246–51. See also time, loss of biographical stereotypes, 4, 25–6, 133, 175–9, 183–4, 188, 190, 202, 206, 241 struggles: classificatory, 158, 162, 177–8, 200, 243, 246; symbolic, 8–9,

14–15, 42, 56, 157–203, 227, 230–1, 238, 240, 287 time, loss of biographical, 124, 131, 134, 144, 150–1, 155 trajectory, 50–1, 58–60, 65, 77, 79–80, 86, 88, 95–6, 114, 195, 199, 236, 241, 246–8, 250, 264, 279, 291 transitional(ism), 6–7, 11, 22, 46–7, 51–2, 55, 57–8, 61–6, 72–5, 99, 161, 176, 207–9, 217, 223, 236, 244, 247, 259, 265, 267, 276, 278, 284 transit migration, 116–17 Turkey, 99, 115–21, 128–34, 183, 202, 213–16, 236–41, 249, 261–2, 270, 283–5, 289, 291, 293 typology (concept), 18–20, 70–1, 265–7; typologically situated case groups, 124, 132, 206–8, 266–7 undocumented migration, 107, 117–19, 121, 129–35, 154 unemployment, 95 violence, symbolic, 175, 202. See also power, symbolic visa categories: Canadian, 110–12; German, 102, 105–7, 125, 134, 136, 150; Turkish, 116–21, 132 work-life balance, 93