Finding a Path: Investigating the Labour Market Trajectories of High-Skilled Immigrants in Denmark

Abstract

The labour market incorporation of high-skilled immigrants is of key concern to receiving societies and migrating individuals alike. This paper draws on life-story interviews with 19 high-skilled Eastern Europeans in Denmark to develop a time-geographical trajectory notation for analysing immigrants’ individual movements in social space across time. I propose a typology of five paths, each partly shaped by variations in the intersections of individual and historical temporalities. Three of these paths—‘re-entry’, ‘ascent’ and ‘re-education’—lead into the higher parts of the host country labour market, while the two paths of ‘re-migration’ and ‘marginalisation’ remain outside.

Keywords:

• High-Skilled Migration
• Labour Market
• Time-Geography
• Biographical Method
• Denmark

Notes

1. I use ‘Eastern Europe’ for the countries east of Western Europe, and west of the former USSR—from Poland to the former Yugoslavia, and from the Czech Republic to Romania. These countries could also be termed ‘Eastern and Central Europe’, but for simplicity I opted for ‘Eastern Europe’. The research was carried out for my PhD at the Copenhagen Business School (Liversage 2005).

2. This survey by Statistics Denmark is the best data available. Two issues should be noted, however. Firstly, the level of education is based on self-reporting and not on documentation. Secondly, the response rate for the survey was rather low—49.7 per cent. Both factors affect the reliability of the data.

3. The unemployment rate is 9 per cent for Eastern Europeans—between the Danish average of 4 per cent and the 14 per cent rate for immigrants from lesser developed countries (Danmarks Statistik 2003).

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. The labour market incorporation of engineers through expanding needs for IT-skilled personnel was also found in a longitudinal study of Russians immigrating to Israel in the 1990s: of 500 engineers interviewed, one, four, and eight years after immigration, about 40 per cent were able to re-enter high-level work. Of these, half did so through re-training, mostly within IT (Remennick 2003). Internationally, the IT sector has been relatively free of market controls and thus less exclusionary towards foreign professionals (Iredale 2005). Not surprisingly, high percentages of immigrants work in this market sector in the United States (Saxenian 2001).

6. Four entered unskilled work in schools or kindergartens with many immigrant children, where non-natives may have a competitive advantage. Two others found unskilled work in travel agencies, another place where their linguistic skills and intercultural competencies were an advantage. The last two entered work with adult refugees.

7. Such occurrences have led Chiswick et al. (2005) to caution against the use of cross-sectional data on immigrant labour market incorporation over time. If some of the people who fail to find work instead leave the country, while the more successful immigrants remain, this skew of the numbers inaccurately makes immigrant labour market incorporation appear to improve over time.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anika Liversage

Anika Liversage is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Danish National Centre for Social Research in Copenhagen