Writing code, decoding culture: digital skills and the promise of a fast lane to decent work among refugees and migrants in Berlin

ABSTRACT

The digitisation of work poses global challenges but also offers new employment opportunities. This article explores the experiences of refugees and migrants who study at coding schools in Berlin to pursue digital careers. Attracted by the promise of coding as a fast lane to decent work, these newcomers hope to circumvent barriers of the local labour market, such as the need for local language skills and accredited qualifications. But many coding students realise that the fast lane they have entered is not so fast after all, and that it is scattered with obstacles and uncertainties. The ostensibly inclusive tech sector emerges as highly competitive and demands total commitment, passion, and a ‘culture fit’: alongside learning to code, they must learn to decode the behavioural and cultural specifics of an international tech sector. Coding thereby becomes a digital extension of the demands and expectations of national integration. As migrants and refugees hope that digital skills will lead to decent work, respectability, and middle-class status, they experience a contradiction between aspirations that are said to be universal, because anyone can in theory succeed as a coder, and recurring experiences of discrimination and precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital skills
• digital labour
• coding
• refugees
• migrants
• integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term ‘newcomers’ for both migrants and refugees to mirror its preference by digital skills training providers who use it to reflect the diversity of statuses among coding students. ‘Newcomer’ captures both being ‘new’ to Germany and to the IT sector.

2 We use the term ‘integration’ in the sense of inclusion in the (digital) labour market while also reflecting demands for cultural and social adaptations in the immigration regime and in the tech sector. We acknowledge the problematic nature of the term as an imaginary of the nation-state that imposes hierarchies of dominance and seeks to maintain societal status quos (Easton-Calabria and Wood 2020).

3 We use pseudonyms for all coding school students and graduates.

4 See ReDI Yearbook 2016–17, p. 10: https://www.slideshare.net/ReDIschool/redi-shool-yearbook-201617, accessed 30.06.2020.

5 The Integration Bill of 2016 governs which nationalities of asylum seekers are fast-tracked through the integration system and which are not, while providing access to training and work for refugees and asylum seekers. So-called refugee integration measures also included low-paid jobs as a ‘meaningful occupation’ that should make asylum-seekers fit for the German labour market (Hinger 2020, 26–27).

6 ‘Hacking the Refugee Crisis’. Tedx Talks, YouTube. 06.05.2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz0mlDELSo0.

7 Data from The State of European Tech 2018: https://2018.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapter/diversity-inclusion/article/weve-got-problem/, accessed 10.05.2020.

8 Data from State of European Tech 2018: https://2018.stateofeuropeantech.com/chapter/diversity-inclusion/article/were-all-part-problem/, accessed 10.05.2020.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [Grant Number ES/S005757/1].