Difference and Distinction?

Abstract

In recent years the role of social networks and of social capital in shaping migrants’ lived experiences and, particularly, their employment opportunity has increasingly come to be recognized. However, very little of this research has adopted a relational understanding of the migrant experience, taking the influence of nonmigrants’ own networks on migrants as an important factor in influencing their labour market outcomes. This article critiques the alterity and marginality automatically ascribed to migrants that is implicit in existing ways of thinking about migrant networks. The article draws on oral history interviews with geriatricians who played an important role in the establishment of the discipline during the second half of the 20th century to explore the importance and power of non-migrant networks in influencing migrant labour market opportunities in the UK medical labour market.