High Skill Migration and Recession

Gendered Perspectives

Anna Triandafyllidou, Irina Isaakyan, Anna Triandafyllidou, Irina Isaakyan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137467119
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Women migrants are doubly-disadvantaged by their sex and outsider status when moving to a new country. Highly skilled women are no exception to this rule. This book explores the complex relationship between gender and high-skill migration, with a special focus on the impact of the current economic crisis on highly skilled women-migrants in Europe.

Part I

Female High-Skill Migration: Concepts and Dynamics

1

Female High-Skill Migration in the 21st Century: The Challenge of the Recession

Irina Isaakyan and Anna Triandafyllidou

1.1 Introduction

‘When I was packing for Greece, I thought that my MBA from Harvard would allow me to easily find a good job in Athens, something like the chief executive officer or, at least, the project manager in a large firm.’ Georgia, who is now 47, moved from Boston to Greece in the mid-1990s, following her Greek husband. Since then, she has been helping her father-in-law with their family poultry business in a small Greek city, switching between the duties of their family-owned shop assistant and that of the housewife. Her co-national Vicky, who had grown up in Washington DC and received the law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), also moved to Southern Europe as a marriage-migrant to reunite with her Italian husband in Rome in the late 1990s and to discover eventually that she ‘has always been no more than a housewife’ there. Like Georgia, she admits, ‘It was not only the new language that I had to master. It was everything: the children, the in-laws, the local economy and the growing corruption. Many doors were closed for me from the very beginning.’ A former business executive from California, Odette, who arrived in Greece only five years ago and who has been unemployed all this time, concludes, ‘It is both very funny and sad to see that our American degrees have not been really demanded here.’

These testimonies come from a larger study (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2014) on Anglophone women who migrated to Italy and Greece in the last 20 years for personal or professional reasons. They testify to the difficulties that even highly skilled migrant women face in their insertion to the labour market and in maintaining the balance between family and work. Such skilled migration from more affluent to less affluent countries within Europe or from the United States (US) to Europe remains under-researched. However, it casts light on the important dynamics of de-skilling among university-educated women and complements those more acute cases of downward socio-economic and professional mobility that migrant women from less developed countries experience in Europe or the US. Indeed, the de-skilling that Eastern European women experience in both Western and Southern Europe, where they are often employed as cleaners or carers regardless of their educational qualifications or previous work experience, has been extensively researched (Cuban 2013; Nikolova and Maroufof 2010; Vianello 2013; Vouyioukas and Liapi 2013). Several studies actually document (Cuban 2013; Vianello 2013) the desire and hope of these highly skilled professionals from Georgia or Ukraine to find employment in their field of specialization, but the hope has seldom materialized.

According to the Eurostat release from 2011, almost 30% of all tertiary-educated migrants in Europe (which is around ten million) are over-qualified and de-scaled women of active working age. Alongside the structural and cultural factors that explain this disadvantage of high-skilled women migrants, the scholarly literature documents also the negative impact of the global financial crisis and related economic austerity measures on high-skill migration (HSM) (Arslan et al. 2014; Bettio 2012; Cerna 2010; Cerna and Hynes 2009; Ghosh 2013; Kofman 2013; Kuptsch 2012).

Generally speaking, HSM remains an underdeveloped area of research, particularly when applied to women as high-skill migrants (Boyd and Grieco 2003; Kofman 2012; 2013; Mahroum 2001; Morokvasic 1984; Piper 2008; Rubin et al. 2008). In this reference, Kofman (2013), however, notes that similar to the overall HSM scholarship, which has largely ignored the gender dimension, studies of the relationship between the current economic recession and HSM flows have been persistently gender blind. What particular socio-economic needs do highly skilled migrant women have when facing the crisis? What strategies of economic integration and re-skilling can they develop in such conditions? How does their ability to survive through or surrender to the crisis interact with the social structures of the family and community? To what extent is the European policy responsive to their problems while focusing on the post-crisis recovery?

Seeking the answers, this book explores the complex relationship between gender and HSM in general and focuses specifically on the impact of the current economic crisis on highly skilled female migrants. The purpose of the book is to produce new inter-disciplinary knowledge bringing together these three areas of research – gender studies, recession scholarship and studies of high-skill migration – that have so far developed in isolation. This book focuses specifically on the impact of the global financial crisis on the high-skill migration of women – an impact that is difficult to measure. It looks not only at typically gendered labour market sectors (such as nurses) but also at engineers, entrepreneurs or academics, with a special focus on the crisis-afflicted eurozone (which consists of Ireland and the four Southern European countries of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal). Our findings lead to the development of a relevant research agenda on female HSM.

This chapter starts with a critical discussion about who is considered a highly skilled migrant and what kind of gender bias there can be behind such definitions and related policy measures targeting the ‘best and brightest’ of the world. We actually discuss in some more detail the gendered aspects of HSM policies before turning to the special challenge of gender, migration and the economic crisis that has affected during the last seven years both the more affluent and the less affluent countries across the world. Although we are focusing on Europe in relation to case studies and empirical data, non-EU countries such as Canada and the US are also discussed as part of the overall policy context. The chapter concludes by tying these threads together and outlining the specific research questions that this book poses and how these are addressed in the different chapters.

1.2 Beyond the HSM definition: Who and how many?

While the term ‘highly skilled migrant’ appears unambiguous at the first instance, there are several competing and complementary definitions of who the highly skilled migrants are or what is recognized as ‘high skills’ within a migration policy context. Indeed, high-skill migrants are broadly categorized as people with tertiary (college or university) education and beyond. However, it remains unclear whether this refers to the actual human capital (the education and professional skills) of the person or to the channel through which a migrant entered (or is applying to enter) a country or actually to the job that the highly skilled migrant does at the destination country. As already discussed briefly in the previous section, there is often a gap, particularly for women migrants, between their actual education or skills and their migration status.

Even among OECD countries where an effort for data standardization and comparative analysis is made, highly skilled migration categorizations often differ and thus related data on stocks and flows of highly skilled migrants may be missing. Indeed, some countries define the highly skilled by the level of education (Borjas 2003), while others by the occupation (Bouvier and Simcox 1994), while still others by the level of salary included in a job offer (see also Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2014). Indeed, a mere definition of highly skilled migrants by the level of education is likely to include students, researchers, spouses and intra-company transferees, a highly heterogeneous group of people who are highly qualified. Thus, an education-focused definition of HSM tends to obscure the misrecognition of educational qualifications and professional experience that often highly skilled migrants are faced with. For example, immigrants may have completed their college education abroad but because of non-transferability of their credentials may be under-employed or ‘brain-wasted’ (Lowell 2006). Thus the question is not only who the high-skill migrant is but mostly how this status can be proven and what to do with this status after it is proven.

Combining the three criteria – educational level, sector of occupation and salary threshold – is often the strategy adopted by destination countries to ensure that migrants’ actual qualifications will match their migration status (Batalova and Lowell 2007; Cerna 2010; Iredale 1994). As Lowell (2006) notes, ‘the term “skilled workers” does not have the same meaning in different socioeconomic contexts’ (e.g., the economic boom vs the current economic crisis).

The way in which a certain country’s migration policy defines the eligibility criteria for entrance as ‘highly skilled’ has important implications for prospective migrants (IOM 2008; OECD 2012; Wiesbrock and Hercog 2010). Destination countries employ two basic strategies through which all HS immigration policies are designed: (a) the ‘employer-driven’ strategy and (b) the open or ‘points-based’ system.¹ Chaloff and Lemaitre (2009) note that most HSM in OECD countries (including Japan and the entire European Union (EU)) is employer-driven. An employer secures a job for a high-skilled immigrant before he/she is allowed to enter the country. This is an effort to specify the HSM definition and policy through the strategy of job placement: migrants are recognized as ‘highly skilled’ only after they find adequate jobs (in addition to professional qualifications and/or educational credentials). This employer-driven strategy reduces overall the number of HSM entries.

In addition to this strategy, some OECD countries (e.g., the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Denmark) implement points-based systems of entry where the human capital of the migrant is ‘measured’. Naturally, in this case the entry is based on an assessment of the level of skills that the migrant worker brings but does not secure nor guarantee that the highly skilled migrant will find employment at his/her level of skills. One problematic aspect of the points-based system is that it does not take into account that younger people, for instance young professionals, may not have the necessary work experience to score high but may have a high innovation potential; or, for instance, that migrant women may have had limited professional experience because of childrearing but may still have higher education degrees and actually more versatility than employees.

Overall, one important puzzle both for HSM policy design and for analysing the dynamics of HSM is that of the matching of migrants’ skills with an assigned policy category. The definitional problems outlined above are reflected in problems of measurement and analysis of HSM. While earnings can be precisely measured in concrete – although constantly state-modified – numbers, professional experience is usually the hardest to evaluate, especially when it comes to the assessment of soft skills (like team work, creativity, innovation and ability to learn). In this regard, it is important to remember that salaries and skills are gender-constructed in most cases. Women are often paid less than men and more often become the bearers of soft skills related to the feminized sectors of public services (Andall 2003; Kofman 2012; 2013). This means that they are, from the very beginning, epistemologically excluded from the economically privileged category of high-skill migrants as they intrinsically have fewer chances to be appropriately evaluated on the qualification-and-income scale of entry, especially in times of economic austerity.

Depending on their economic and political prerogatives, different countries may place different emphasis on each of the above-mentioned criteria (see Chapter 2 by Cerna and Czaika, this book). While there is a delicate balance between education and qualifications, the majority of OECD countries base their HSM definitions on the criterion of education, and high-skill migrants are usually associated with tertiary-educated people (Batalova and Lowell 2007; Lowell 2001; Wiesbrock and Hercog 2010). Taking into account this rather broad definition, Arslan et al. (2014) note the overall improvement of the educational level of OECD immigrants: there are 35 million tertiary-educated foreign nationals in the EU, which is an unprecedented increase of 70% over the last ten years. Thirty per cent of these people are comprised of university-educated women of active working age. Moreover, their number grows rapidly and now shows an 80% increase over the last ten years, which is 17% higher than the increase of tertiary-educated male immigrants.

1.3 High-skill migration policy dynamics

Thinking about global migrations of highly skilled people, an interesting observation can be made about the dynamics of immigration law and the vulnerability of their status, especially during times of crisis. Whenever a crises expands, migrants feel the most unprotected as they are subjected to downsizing and also to public xenophobia, which often act in tandem. On the one hand, immigrants are discursively constructed as scapegoats responsible for the economic downfall and unemployment in the host country (Ghosh 2013; Kofman 2012). On the other hand, they are often employed in the ‘boom-and-bust’ sectors of construction and therefore often become the first to be fired or placed in other types of discriminatory conditions, such as reduced payment or increased work hours (Khitarishvili 2013; UN 2014). In response to the deteriorating economy and the rise in migrant phobia, governments often impose bans on immigration and make restricted immigration part of their overall public policy (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou 2013; Johnson 2012; Soames and Field 2013). Immigration in general and high-skill immigration in particular have been historically impaired by economic crises, which can be illuminated by the immigration policy dynamics during the main three crises of the modern history: (1) the 1929 Great Depression, (2) the 1973 oil crisis and (3) the current global financial crisis.

In the aftermath of the huge post-First World War immigration wave to America and Europe, the Great Depression in 1929 immediately led to the restriction of entry to such countries as the US and Germany (Kofman 2013; Wennersten 2008). Following the no-less global immigration wave within the post-Second World War context, the 1973 oil crisis then drastically changed the world economy and caused a new series of immigration law restrictions (Kubat 1993). Thus, in 1974, the formerly immigrant-friendly France enacted an immigration stop due to rising unemployment in the country, while Germany introduced a ban on the recruitment of skilled workers around the same time (Hammar 1985; Hollifield 1992).

In the 1990s, leading world economies were competing for international leadership and prestige and made HS...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Female High-Skill Migration: Concepts and Dynamics
• Part II: Female High-Skill Migration: A Sector-Specific Approach
• Part III: Problems and Solutions: Towards a New Understanding of the Female High-Skill Migrant in Europe
• Index