Institutional Discrimination and Workplace Racism

For the past ten years, foreign students have provided the largest contingent of skilled migrants in France. Yet both the career paths of these graduates and their subjective experiences have remained largely unexamined. This paper focuses on the difficulties of Chinese graduates in France initially during their period of job seeking and then in their working lives. The paper has a two-fold objective. Firstly, it highlights the discriminatory nature of French immigration policy, one which maintains non-EU foreign graduates in a precarious legal position during the transition from study to work. Their precarious situation generates discrimination in the workplace from employers. Secondly, it shows that in the contemporary business world Chinese employees are subjected to subtle forms of racism, forms that are embedded in the routine functioning of companies. These experiences of discrimination and racism have a strong impact on these Chinese employees’ career paths and their access to rights.