Highly Skilled Immigrant Women’s Labor Market Access

Abstract

Applying an intersectionality framework to nuance the concepts of cumulative dis/advantage, this article examines the barriers to and/or pathways by which highly skilled North African and Tamil-Indian immigrant women access professional labor markets in France and the United States, respectively. We find that the cumulative, interactive effects of four mediating mechanisms—interaction of local labor markets and immigration regimes, the education-work experience nexus, social capital in social networks, and racialization—result in divergent labor market outcomes for North African and Tamil women. While for Tamil women, early disadvantage in immigration is converted to contingent advantage enabling them to access highly paid, professional work in the United States, for their North African counterparts, comparative early advantages are eroded to categorical disadvantage and their confinement to feminized, low-wage work in France. We argue that the downward economic mobility associated with skilled immigrant women’s labor market transitions is not as universal as is often theorized.