Unemployed Female Skilled Migrants from India in the Netherlands: The Entrepreneurial Self Under Structural Dependency

Abstract

Most Indian ‘high-skilled’ migrants in the Netherlands are male and single. If married, they generally bring their wives as ‘dependents’ and any skills these ‘trailing spouses’ may have remain unregistered. Although their legal status includes a work-visa, no special policies exist that integrate these women into the Dutch economy/society. Consequently, these women are marginalised in (national) development debates and generally remain unemployed. This chapter concerns these women’s ‘entrepreneurial selves’, non-unitary subjectivity and mental well-being. Ethnographic research was carried out among (mostly) unemployed Indian female spouses in the Netherlands. Part of this research encompassed post-arrival memories of individual women, which the authors here present as a ‘collective biography’. These narratives are analysed by placing them in a (feminist-) discourse that positions the female (paid-) worker as the new ‘poster-girl’ for neo-liberal dreams of upward mobility. The same discourse also views unemployed women as passive subjects of family reunification or, as only involved in reproduction of ethnic boundaries and (unequal) gender roles. Educated migrant women who have not found jobs commensurate with their qualification are generally considered ‘failures’ and believed to be prone to processes of ‘de-skilling’ and depression with high levels of anxiety. Using the psychological concept of ‘comfort zone’, our collective biography illustrates how these women are actively working on their ‘selves’ while coping with gendered disadvantages in the labour market. We present three manifestations of non-unitary subjectivity and conclude structural barriers motivate these migrants to step out of their comfort zones and engage in ‘re-skilling’, alternative identity formation and new (non-work related) life trajectories.