Kaveri Qureshi, V.J. Varghese and Filippo Osella
The purpose of this paper is to examine the careers of skilled migrants from Indian Punjab. This study complicates the normalization of skilled migration as a “win‐win” situation…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the careers of skilled migrants from Indian Punjab. This study complicates the normalization of skilled migration as a “win‐win” situation by examining the career trajectories of skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab who are trying to establish themselves in Britain.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines 20 life history interviews undertaken with skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab to Britain, in IT, media, law and hospitality industries, health and welfare professionals, and student migrants.
Findings
Skilled migrants were able to migrate on their own auspices through migration economies in Punjab. Once in Britain, however, they were directed to universities and labour markets in which they were not able to use their skills. They experienced under‐employment, devaluation of their qualifications and downward mobility, which forced them into ethnic and gendered markets within their home networks and created ambivalence about migrant success and issues of return.
Research limitations/implications
The study emphasizes the need to take a transnational lens when looking at skilled migration, address how migrants’ career trajectories are limited by racism, anti‐immigration sentiment and gender inequality, and consider temporality and uncertainty.
Originality/value
The paper raises questions concerning the ways in which rapidly changing “managed migration” policies in Britain have burdened individual migrants.
Details
Keywords
Purpose – This chapter asks what we should make of the gift exchanges that take place between workers and their managers on the floor of a massive offshore manufacturing unit in…
Abstract
Purpose – This chapter asks what we should make of the gift exchanges that take place between workers and their managers on the floor of a massive offshore manufacturing unit in South India. Such exchanges appear anomalous in the ethnography of global manufacturing yet here they underpinned the organisation of hyper-intensive production processes.
Findings – Following diverse acts of giving, this chapter shows how these transactions constituted the performative and relational grounds on which workers came to know themselves and sought to shape the world around them. In doing so it extends the anthropology of work and labour by showing that acts of giving are integral to global commodity production.