Present but not counted: highly skilled migrant women in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Family reunification is one of the main channels for migration to the EU, yet little is known about the skills and labour market trajectories of family migrants. Family migration continues to be seen within a gendered and binary paradigm of the male economic migrant and female dependent. Related policies disadvantage migrant women and limit their participation on the labour market in material and structural ways. While EU’s Single Permit Directive gives family migrants immediate and unlimited access to the labour market, its efficacy is limited as highly skilled migrant women are a blind spot in existing infrastructure and integration policies. This paper studies how migrant women push back against being categorised as dependents and circumvent the penalty of family migration policies. Migration categories become key sites of negotiation as women opt to move as students, labour migrants, by acquiring citizenship or as temporary workers to gain better access to the labour market while accomodating familial roles. Findings highlight the need for disaggregated data on family migrants in terms of skill and education, and for data collection that can capture the dynamism of lived experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Family migration
• highly skilled migration
• labour market access
• Single Permit
• highly skilled migrant women

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their extensive feedback through the iterations of this paper. Our heartfelt thanks to our participants for the taking time out during the pandemic to share their stories with us.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The Single Permit Directive 2011/98/EU was introduced in the European Parliament and Council on 13 December 2011. For more: eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0098

2 The Family Reunification Directive also details other protections, for instance family migrants should be eligible for permanent residence after five years if conditions are met. For more: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=celex%3A32003L0086

3 Cases of unknown citizenship are classified as ‘unknown’ by Eurostat. For more: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/metadata/Annexes/migr_asyapp_esms_an7.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon2020 European Comission project: HumMingBird – Enhanced migration measures from a multidimensional perspective [grant number 870661].