Migrating to Learn: Occupational Mobility and Skills Development Amongst ‘Lower-Skilled’ European Migrants in the London Region

This paper examines narratives of occupational mobility and skills development amongst ‘lower-skilled’ European migrants in the London region, based on forty in-depth interviews with medium-educated young movers from six countries: Greece, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain. Whilst much research on occupational mobility focuses on ‘high-skilled’ migrants, we explore the less-known trajectories of ‘lower-skilled’ migrant workers. In contrast to the common view that depicts the latter as ‘trapped’ in precarious jobs or victims of exploitation (cf. Hagan et al. 2011; Alberti 2014), with few opportunities for upward mobility, we show how our participants often acquire and use a variety of valuable yet ‘harder-to-measure’ abilities (Hagan et al. 2015), which may help them advance occupationally. Furthermore, we examine how these lower-educated migrants make sense of their occupational success, by highlighting two main discourses: one centred on migrants’ work ethic and readiness to acquire new skills, and another one that additionally stresses the role of imagination, courage, and ability to steer away from ‘dead-end’ jobs and identify occupations which promise better conditions and routes for upward mobility. Our findings contribute to recent efforts to problematise rigid distinctions between ‘high-’ and ‘low-skilled’ migrants, and calls for a broader understanding of human capital, beyond formal qualifications and technical knowledge. This enables us to uncover the often-neglected trajectories of those who ‘get ahead’ within occupational sectors that don't normally require tertiary qualifications, as well as migrants’ own assessment of their ‘success’, providing a more nuanced and differentiated picture of intra-EU youth mobility.