Highly-Skilled Immigrant Women's Labor Market Access: A Comparison of Indians in the United States and North Africans in France

Using the concept of cumulative dis/advantage, this paper examines how early dis/advantage in immigration generates barriers to and/or pathways by which highly-skilled North African and Tamil (an Indian regional group) immigrant women access professional labor markets in France and the U.S. respectively. It draws on ethnographic projects with North Africans in France and with Tamils in Atlanta, Georgia.

 It finds that despite their more advantageous position upon immigration – student migrants, single women, and French-styled North African educational qualifications– North African women experience barriers in accessing skilled work – difficulties with French work-authorizations, temporary work contracts, lack of professional networks and of local work experience. They therefore strategize by working in skilled-technical, low-wage capacities or in the ethnic economy. In contrast, Tamil women’s immigration is marked by early disadvantages – their legal status as “dependent” wives, the non-transfer of Indian credentials and responsibility for care work – that contribute to their de-skilling. In response, they strategize through the pathway of gradual ascent – moving from low-wage to high-wage work; (re)education and direct entry; and skilled entrepreneurial work to successfully access highly-skilled work.

 Four mechanisms explain these divergent outcomes - education-work experience nexus, interactive effects of local labor markets and immigration policy, social capital in classed social networks, and racialization. For Tamil women, the cumulative effects of these converts their early disadvantages to “contingent advantage” resulting in them becoming highly-paid professionals in America. For North African women, these contribute to the erosion of their early advantages leading to their “categorical disadvantage” - long-term confinement to low-wage work with few ladders into the primary labor market in France. Therefore the downward mobility associated with skilled immigrant women is not universal, as is often theorized, but relational across national contexts such that some groups are more successful than others in accessing skilled work.