Abstract
This article examines the strategies and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilized to engineer commodifiable migrant workers. Drawing on an ethnographic account of counselling practices in a state-run Italian job guidance centre for newly arrived migrants, I examine the calculations, tactics, and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilised by job counsellors. Here, I illustrate how these tactics regulate, or “police”, migrants’ communicational conduct and promote their socialisation into a desirable professional self that can be commodified on the Italian job market. In doing so, I demonstrate that the state’s investment in the policing of migrants and the commodifiability of their labour is an investment in a larger project of societal consent for both the arriving migrants and for the forms of precarity they are believed to embody in Italy. At the same time, I argue this state agenda should not make us blind to the fact that the individuals and actors, including professional counsellors, working in these job guidance centres seem ready to invest a great deal into these spaces in the interest of pursuing another, more emancipated agenda. Indeed, in my paper I aim to demonstrate that job guidance centres are also spaces of hope where people work to support migrants who are preparing themselves for a viable future and attempting to create the practical framework for their life projects.
Highlights
Migration and employment have often been conceptualised by institutions and actors governing labour as deeply interconnected processes, with migration being used a means to regulate the supply of labour and solve problems of labour shortage (Duchene et al 2013)
I argue that language and communication are key resources, yet not necessarily because they act as objects of commodification (Heller and Duchene 2016; Heller 2010)
I have demonstrated that, together with other highly scripted modes of behavioural conduct, specific modes of speaking, listening, writing, and reading are seen by the professional counsellors as powerful tools that potentially enable individuals to package the ‘‘bundle of skills’’ that migrants should sell on the labour market
Summary
Migration and employment have often been conceptualised by institutions and actors governing labour as deeply interconnected processes, with migration being used a means to regulate the supply of labour and solve problems of labour shortage (Duchene et al 2013). Along with their ‘‘national origin,’’ the status of migrants (in terms of residency, citizenship, access to welfare, or family reunification) has been made dependent on the (imagined) productivity of their human capital (Vigouroux 2017). Categories such as ‘‘unskilled’’, ‘‘semi-skilled’’, ‘‘skilled’’, and ‘‘highly skilled’’, which assign workers to unequally valued positions in the larger structure of labour, have often served the transnational governmentality of migration (Allan and McElhinny 2017). In times of economic stagnation and large-scale unemployment, receiving poorly qualified, often illiterate, and sometimes traumatized individuals represents a burden for already strained national welfare systems and poses a challenge to social cohesion and peace (OECD 2015)
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