Neither Here Nor There: Status Incongruence in Migration and Mobility in Emerging Markets

Abstract

This paper explores the impact of race, ethnicity, origin, and status incongruence in understanding the experiences of highly skilled migrants in international labor markets. This paper highlights the impact of migrant bias and migrant hierarchy on highly skilled migrant labor force participation in the Arabian Gulf region. We discover that the experiences of Gulf professional-level organizational migrants run counter to the popularized migration stories and trajectories. In instances of South-to-South or West-to-East movement into the Gulf region, highly skilled, high human capital migrants have endured a status incongruence. The migration duration from emerging to emerging (South-to-South) or from emerged into emerging (West-to-East) (S2S or W2E) markets was also ephemeral in contrast to migration into Western or developed markets. Highly skilled, professional-level migrants have relatively high educational credentials and income but paradoxically lower status relative to the local citizens. Further, we unpack a migrant hierarchy that is strongly tied to migrants’ nationality, religion, race or skin tone, language, and gender that delineates which migrants are more acceptable. The social order dictates that migrants from the Global North—whether affiliation with the Global North is through citizenship, ethnicity, or both—have more social mobility than those from the Global South. This status incongruence and dissonance calls for an array of coping responses not fully explained by current organizational, economic or sociological theory on migration. We extend existing theoretical boundaries on status-incongruence within the context of migrant hierarchy. The highly skilled migrant status-incongruence phenomenon has implications for policy and equity issues in the six interconnected countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and around the world