Who Receives More Help? The Role of Employer Support in Migration Processes

Research on migration usually focusses on the role of states in defining the “wanted” migrants who receive facilitated access to specific national territories. However, many countries apply a demand-driven admission policy in which employers play a central role in selecting candidates for migration. This article investigates the role of employers in the Migration-Mobility Nexus by analysing the relocation support they provide to different groups of migrants. We use a mixed-method approach based on a qualitative analysis of ethnographic data and a quantitative analysis of the Migration-Mobility Survey to observe who has more power to negotiate advantageous relocation conditions and in this sense represents a more “wanted” migrant for profit-oriented actors. Via a logistic regression model, we show that, all other variables being equal, employers tend to favour highly qualified men from Anglo-Saxon countries, whereas non-single women and people of West African and Portuguese origins have a much lower probability of receiving support from their employer. This article adds to the literature on the construction of migrant categories by showing that highly qualified men from rich Anglo-Saxon countries are actively given the possibility to become “expats”, whereas people with similar levels of qualification and experience but with a different gender, nationality or background have fewer opportunities to access employers’ support and migrate. In this sense, the very notion of “expat” is a construction that reflects power relations at a global level.