Stratification mechanisms in labour market matching of migrants

Abstract

I aim to challenge the standard framework in which systematic exclusion is mistakenly characterised as only a frictional phenomenon that fails to be captured in migrants’ labour market matching mechanisms. Societies organise and rank people in a hierarchical way, not only in terms of individual differences and characteristics but with respect to social groups and categories of people. These macro patterns systematically subject some migrant groups to different forms of exclusion. Social stratification, explained in terms of social identity-based institutional structures, organises labour markets into different destinations like clubs with sharply different sets of opportunities. It functions like a trap for migrants: it reinforces itself by reproducing systems of exclusion and creates dilemmas for migrants. Can migrants organise themselves to avoid such traps? I show that exclusion is endogenous to employment as a type of good in the standard goods typology. Treating different types of employment opportunities as being like clubs, I investigate how migrants join or create alternative employment clubs as a response to real or perceived exclusion from native employment clubs. If these alternative clubs are ‘sticky’ and discourage migrants from trying to join natives’ exclusive employment clubs, the trap becomes inescapable. For migrants to escape the stratification trap, employment should be seen not only as an investment but as a collective action problem structurally targeting exclusion.