A window of opportunity? Refugee staff’s employment in migrant support and advocacy organizations

ABSTRACT

This article presents an analysis of employment trajectories of refugee staff in migrant support and advocacy organisations in the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. In contrast to existing scholarship, it takes refugees’ success in finding employment as a starting point. Moreover, it makes an important contribution to extant literature by identifying the unique features of a niche employment sector for refugees: migrant support organisations. I demonstrate that the mainstream explanatory concepts of ‘labour market segmentation’ and ‘ethnic niche’ fail to capture refugees’ pathway from client to service provider and neglect the sector’s status as a mid- to high-skilled but feminised employment sector. I propose instead to understand ‘refugeeness’ as a form of capital and argue that this capital provides access to employment in migrant support and advocacy organisations, while simultaneously trapping refugees in front-line work with high degrees of hidden, devalued labour and inadequate career mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• employment
• NGOs
• third sector
• ethnic niche
• labour market

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge support from the EU Marie Curie Actions, IEF (Grant number 624577), the Catherine van Tussenbroekfonds and the OeAD. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the panel ‘Refugees’ Everyday Life Worlds’, ESA Conference, August 2015. I am grateful to the special issue editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘migrant support service sector’ as an adaptation of the term ‘immigrant service sector’ (Jayaraman and Bauder 2014) to highlight that many organisations understand themselves as support organisations in addition to service deliverers. Adding ‘support’ also helps to avoid confusion with the general ‘service sector’.

2. This was a subset of a larger sample that also included research participants who had a migration but not refugee history, research participants from ethnic minorities, and managers in the migrant support service sector.

3. The interviews in Austria were conducted before the so-called refugee crisis significantly increased the number of asylum applications (from 28,100 in 2014 to 88,300 in 2015), adding to pressure on the migrant support service sector (Statistik Austria 2016, 8).

4. For instance, Austria and the Netherlands have in common a strong welfare state, while the UK and the Netherlands share a history of multicultural politics later denounced as ‘failed’. The geographic location and colonial or imperial history of each country has influenced the refugee populations they host.

5. For reasons of confidentiality, the research participants are not identified by their real names.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the OeAD-GmbH; Catharine van Tussenbroekfonds; FP7 EU Marie Curie Actions [624577].