Between professions and countries

The migration of highly skilled individuals brings together two important and well-developed institutional systems: on the one hand, the organization of professions and, on the other hand, the state and its migration and integration regime. Therefore, professional migrants move between two levels of regulation. The first one applies to their specific professional group and regulates the acquisition of knowledge as well as the participation in the labor market. The second one controls the access to and settlement in a given country. Taking the examples of medicine and the information technologies (IT) in Germany and Chile, the present research asks how different institutional settings shape the cultural capital negotiation strategies of highly skilled Latin American migrants. Using Bourdieu’s relational theory and especially his concepts of field and capital, this book seeks to understand professions as fields and to follow the trajectories of highly skilled Latin American migrants within two transnational professional fields.

Using a reconstructive praxeological approach, this book presents three typologies, showing how the interaction between (transnational) professional fields and national regulations creates different possibilities for highly skilled migrants to negotiate their capital and the strategies they develop to reach a good position in their host country’s labor market.