Day 228, Year of #Mygration: A window of opportunity or trap? Refugees’ employment in migrant support organisations

In today's post, Dr Sara de Jong, Visiting Fellow at The Open University and Lecturer in the Politics Department at the University of York, explores the careers of refugees working in organisations supporting other refugees. As many of these actors often change careers and start in positions that are not commensurate with their experiences and qualifications; she wonders if such job opportunities are a window or a trap. She discusses the concept of “refugeeness” and how it often locks the refugees in frontline services rather than have mobility in the organisations employing them. 

I started getting tired of the work in the factory because that is something out of my area. However, you have no option. […] I tried to find an office job, and I tried to be with Refugee Council or somewhere else. However, I found this the problem with this country; they say ‘have you got any experience? Do you have any experience in the UK? Could you show me your CV?' But there is nothing on my CV of work in the UK at all. […] And you need to survive. You have a family, and they are in an awful situation

Hajar, an England-based male refugee with an accountancy degree from Iraq, now works as a caseworker for Refugee Support and an advocacy organisation. I interviewed Hajar in the context of a research project on the position of refugee, migrant, and ethnic minority front-line workers in migrant support and advocacy organisations. The organisations that I visited in the UK, Austria and the Netherlands, were not migrant self-organisations, but somewhat larger "white-normed" NGOs which often received (indirect) government funding to supply services. Many or most of Hajar’s colleagues, including the management of his organisation, were white British people without migration experience.  

What interested me was that refugee support and advocacy organisations became a kind of employment niche for refugees with higher education degrees from their home countries, in disciplines often unrelated to this social profession. As I argue in my recently published article ‘A window of opportunity? Refugee staff's employment in migrant support and advocacy organisations' the migrant support service sector provides a window of opportunity, but also a trap for highly educated refugees against the backdrop of refugees’ general overrepresentation in unskilled sectors and non-recognition of qualifications and work experience. Most scholarship on refugees and employment focusses on refugees un- and underemployment. Instead, in this article, I took refugees’ success in finding employment as a starting point, but critically assessed the gains as well as losses.  

Hajar's route into the migrant support service sector, which included volunteering and interpreting, is an apt illustration of the strategies employed by many refugees facing the non-recognition of their country of origin work experience and qualifications. Next, to his factory job, Hajar volunteered in the mornings as an interpreter for a third sector organisation, utilising his Arabic, Kurdish as well as Farsi language skills. The latter he had learned during his time in a refugee camp in Iran. Much interpreting work is done on a voluntary basis and often begins with supporting friends and acquaintances. Moreover, voluntary work is often seen as a necessary step to acquire ‘host country' work experience, which is often a precondition for labour market access, as Hajar's account illustrates. Hence, seemingly paradoxically, voluntary work ends up becoming compulsory. It is important to recognise that much voluntary work happens when asylum seekers are excluded by law from regular paid employment (Vickers 2014), or under circumstances where paid employment is out of reach and that it can also become exploitative (Bauder and Jayaraman 2014a). At the same time, in a situation where refugees only have access to ‘undesirable […] unfulfilling’ jobs, voluntary work could also positively become a ‘means of reconstructing identity and fostering a sense of belonging’, allowing refugees to reconnect with their past professional identities (Jackson and Bauder 2013, 375). 

The migrant support and advocacy sector provides unique opportunities since access through volunteering and interpreting is facilitated by refugee staff’s former status as ‘clients’. Also, it recognises ‘refugeeness’, by which I mean both the ascribed label as a refugee, as well as the experiential knowledge that comes with the experience of forced migration, as a form of capital. ‘Refugeeness’ as a form of capital could be employed in various forms besides language skills and ‘cultural' competences, including brokerage, credibility as an authentic representative or ‘token' migrant, role model, as well as experiential knowledge. In the interviews, refugee staff members described that some of their ‘clients' considered them ‘one of us', while others considered their role as a service provider as disrupting this shared identity.  

The public and third sector is a site where ‘the social justice case and the business case for diversity’ come together (Tomlinson and Schwabenland 2010, 102). The social justice case and business case for diversity coincide, for instance, when refugee staff explained to me how their ability to address their ‘clients’ in their mother tongue was both an important instrument to make ‘clients’ feel at ease and a significant asset in a context where hiring external interpreters posed a financial burden on organisations.  

Recognising the desirability of employment in the sector in the face of refugees’ limited alternatives should, however, not blind us to the fact that it also entails significant traps, including inadequate horizontal and vertical career mobility and emotional burden for which there is limited support. Refugee staff should not remain locked in front-line client-focussed roles or the migration sector, because that is where their 'refugeeness' as capital 'counts'. Instead, they should get recognition for their broader qualifications, professional experience and competencies, and not overlooked for management and coordination roles.