Privilege and youth migration: polarised employment patterns of youth mobility workers in London

ABSTRACT

This article provides an analysis of privilege in the context of temporary youth migration in the United Kingdom. In this paper, I focus on the employment patterns of young migrants on the bilateral Youth Mobility Scheme (YMS) to the UK, who base themselves in London for a two-year period of ‘work’ and ‘play’. Young migrants on similar working holidaymaker schemes are mostly understood as ‘sojourners’ in the scholarship, with a ‘taken for granted’ approach on their privileged positionality. This article focusses on YMS migrants’ employment patterns and the disparate access to mobilities, asking how privilege is drawn from both state's structuring of the scheme, and through localised interactions in London. My findings point to polarising of employment patterns among YMS participants based on first language, ‘race’, gender, nationality and historic-colonial links to Britain. The paper contributes to our knowledge of privilege in understanding temporary migration, which is increasingly charted through bilateral and quota-based schemes.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporary migration
• United Kingdom
• privilege
• youth mobility
• working holiday

Acknowledgements

The limitations of the paper remain my sole responsibility. I am grateful to the participants in my study, for sharing with me stories from their mobile lives in London. I thank my doctoral advisors - Dr Carol Wolkowitz and Dr Caroline Wright, for intellectual discussions, that guided me in my doctoral project. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions for the manuscript. I thank Rintu Alex for comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes on contributor

Elsa T. Oommen is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her current project applies a rights framework, to understand the lives of long-term Caribbean migrants in the UK. Her doctoral thesis conducted the first empirical study of the Tier-5 Youth Mobility Scheme, within the current points-based system of the UK immigration regime.

Notes

1 See Robertson (2016, 2018) for an analysis of the experiences of East Asian temporary graduate workers and tourist workers in Australia.

2 The first use of ‘New Commonwealth’ can be traced to the 1966 Sample Census of the UK to denote immigrants from ‘India, Pakistan, the West Indies, Africa (excluding the republic of South Africa), Malta and Cyprus’ (Cheetham, 1972: 451). Further, the division of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Commonwealth was used ‘to give some indication of the numbers of Commonwealth citizens resident in the U.K. who might reasonably be expected to be white and those who might be coloured’ (Cheetham, 1972: 453). Here, I use ‘Old (white) Commonwealth’ to emphasise that the racial majority in these countries is white.

3 As per the recent statistics (Home Office 2017), the largest route of temporary migration on Tier-5 is through ‘Temporary work: Creative and sporting’.

Additional information

Funding

This paper draws from the findings of my doctoral thesis. My doctoral study was funded by Warwick Chancellor’s International Scholarship (2013–2017).