Agency, Power and Global Inequality
How Migrant Women from the Global South Navigate European Labour Migration Law in the Technology Sector
This PhD project, funded by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, explores the agency of female migrants from the Global South as they engage with European labour migration laws in their daily lives working in the technology sector in Europe. Part of the larger “JUST MIGRATION” project led by Prof. Dr. Anuscheh Farahat, this project focuses on recent EU initiatives designed to attract skilled migrant workers to address labour shortages in Europe, including the revised EU Blue Card.
“Talent”, “skills”, “easier integration”, and “larger contributions to sustain the welfare state” are some of the words and phrases that feature in current policy documents that support allowing highly skilled migrants to enter Europe. This study, in contrast, investigates migration from the point of view of the migrants choosing to come to work in the EU: What are their objectives, aspirations, and capabilities? The overarching research question is: How do female migrants from the Global South use EU and domestic labour migration laws, along with non-legal strategies, to exert their agency in mobility decisions and power relations vis-à-vis employers and recipient states? The working hypothesis of the PhD is that highly skilled female migrants strategically use diverse legal frameworks, such as the Single Permit Directive, the EU Blue Card, and domestic laws (e.g., labour and social security laws), to fulfil their aspirations in Europe.
The PhD project engages with the agency/structure scholarship in migration studies, stressing the need to examine the agency of migrant women from the Global South within a context of global inequality and labour mobility. Studying migrants’ agency allows us to have a better understanding of migration laws, delving into the ways in which laws constrain or provide opportunities for migrants to exercise agency. Similarly, zooming in on migrants’ aspirations, goals, choices, and future plans allows us to provide new empirical understandings of migrant workers’ agency. Building on decolonial feminism, a body of scholarship that challenges stereotypical depictions of “third-world women” as predominantly passive, the resulting dissertation aims to counter narratives in mainstream legal scholarship which depict female migrants from the Global South mostly in terms of exploitation.
The project relies on semi-structured interviews to look deeper into migrants’ narratives about their migration journeys. The PhD research also critically analyses the concept of “skill”, asking migrants if they consider themselves to be “highly skilled migrants” or not, and contrasting this social definition with the legal definition of skill. While migration regimes are often portrayed as cohesive and logical in mainstream legal scholarship, through this research I aim to emphasize gaps and contradictions in current EU labour migration legislation. Most of the interviews are being conducted in Germany and France, as these are two of the most active countries when it comes to attracting highly skilled migrants with the objective of becoming “tech hubs” in Europe.