A Qualitative Investigation on the Labor Market Integration of Highly Skilled Women Immigrants in the United States: Barriers and Strategies
Open AccessThe United States is the country where the majority of highly skilled immigrants are hosted. About half of immigrant people who entered the U.S. since 2010 have a bachelor’s or a professional degree. However, many college-educated immigrants cannot smoothly transfer their educational credentials or professional work experiences into careers in the United States that are equivalent to their skills. Rather, they are mostly unemployed or underemployed, working in jobs below their skill and education levels with low wages. A gender lens reveals that skilled immigration is an area where women’s career experiences remain largely hidden and ignored in migration literature. Generated by the aim of filling this gap in the literature, the motivation of this research is to understand highly skilled Turkish women immigrants’ integration into the U.S. labor market. The research focuses on the personal and structural barriers that internationally trained Turkish women face in their adjustment process to a new labor market, and the coping strategies they develop to rebuild their careers after relocation. Through in-depth interviews with 20 highly skilled Turkish women residing in the U.S., the study reveals that the majority of participants in this research have experienced many difficulties when trying to transfer their context-specific cultural capital (e.g educational credentials, work experiences, and skills) across international borders. They cannot reach the upper segments of the labor market in the host country, contributing to what the literature on migration calls “brain waste.” In this research, the labor market integration process of these potential workers is analyzed in the light of Bourdieu’s theory of capital and feminist intersectional approach to strategies and resistance in order to better understand the positions of college-educated women immigrants in the host country. Therefore, this research is of critical importance for women immigrants globally and those living in the United States because it raises their voices by conveying their narratives to broad readers. Further, this work is a concrete manifestation of how systematic inequality is reproduced in the labor market for migrant women and how the U.S. loses its valuable human resources, skills and knowledge by not recognizing immigrants’ cultural capital.
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