Migrants with insecure legal status and access to work: the role of ethnic solidarity networks

This article explores the complexities of ethnic solidarity and ethnic capital in enabling participation on labour markets for migrants with insecure legal status in the UK. By drawing together research insights and data from a questionnaire survey of 178 Iraqi-Kurdish migrants with insecure legal status, four focus groups and ten expert interviews, this paper examines how ‘unauthorised’ migrants get access to the segmented labour market at a time of increased in-border controls in the UK. It argues that conflict-generated diasporas such as the Kurds display a distinct solidarity with their community members with insecure legal status and provide access to the labour markets against the tangible threat of in-border migration enforcement. We term this form of solidarity as stretched solidarity which emerges during risky, difficult and destitute times and it is a reluctant act of empathy and socio-political position. This paper identifies the social phenomenon of stretched solidarity and sets out a model for understanding its embeddedness within conflict-generated diasporic networks

Migrants at work: perspectives, perceptions and new connections. Work, Employment and Society, 34 (5) . pp. 745-748. ISSN 0950-0170

Migration – and the experiences of migrants – continue to occupy an important and controversial place in the scholarly and political debates on contemporary labour markets and societies. As new scenarios emerge at local, national and global levels, new insights and perspectives become necessary. The articles in this themed issue reflect the interest Work, Employment and Society has had in the topic of labour migrations and migrants at work for well over a decade and which led, for example, to the themed issue Migration at Work: Spaces, Borders and Boundaries in 32(5), 2018. Migration has of course been a prominent issue across the social sciences, and in recent years particularly in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 and to intra-European migration ahead of and in light of Brexit. The experiences of migrants from Eastern and Central Europe in the workplace, their overqualification and devaluing of their cultural capital, and their positioning within segmented labour markets have produced a number of articles in past issues (e.g. Ciupijus, 2011; Samaluk, 2016; Sirkeci et al., 2018) to which those in the current issue (Leschke and Weiss; Rydzik and Anitha) make an important addition. [...

Populism as new wine in old bottles in the context of Germany: 'symbolic violence' as collective habitus that devalues the human capital of Turks

Populism in Germany is not a new phenomenon. For a long time, the alleged integration problems of Turkish workers in Germany have been at the center of the dominant discourse and academic studies. This paper demonstrates how ‘symbolic violence’ as collective habitus frames the human capital of Turks as deficient, a phenomenon which has prevailed even prior to the recent populist movements. Drawing on a company case study, interviews, and observations, our empirical investigation operationalises and expands the Bourdieusian conceptual trinity of habitus, capital, and symbolic violence through the lens of ethnicity and how it relates to populism

Return mobilities of highly skilled young people to a post-conflict region: the case of Kurdish-British to Kurdistan – Iraq

Building upon insights from recent studies on the ‘return mobilities’ of children of migrants to their parents’ country of origin, this paper focuses on the motives of highly skilled young people from the UK who migrate to their parental post-conflict region (Kurdistan-Iraq), an area that has experienced long-term conflict and profound economic and political instability. The existing studies on children of migrants’ return mobilities place more emphasis on cultural and economic considerations while paying little attention to the associated ideological and political elements. Based on interviews concerning 32 highly skilled young British-Kurdish people’s migration to Kurdistan-Iraq, this paper argues that the transnational mobilities of the 1.5 generation and second generation of refugee-diasporas are more driven by the collective trauma of their parents’ displacement, their feeling of expulsion and intergenerational articulation with an imagined homeland, than they are by economic considerations and/or nostalgia. The Kurdish political aspiration to develop Kurdish institutions and a national economy for a potential statehood in Northern Iraq has also created hope among young Kurdish people and influenced their motivations to ‘return’. In this context, this paper focuses on the political, ideological and emotional dimensions of return mobilities and draws attention to return mobilities among a new generation of refugees to their parental post-conflict homeland