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Valuing diversity: guidance for labour market integration of migrants

migrant admission and in assuring migrant compliance with immigration
requirements. The United Kingdom Border Agency also provides information on
hiring foreign workers. The system favours employers which sponsor integration
processes, providing tailored assistance to them. This strategy essentially
benefits large employers, rather than SME’s; further guidance and information
should be provided to employers, especially SME’s, on procedures for hiring
immigrants, along with simplification of administrative procedures.
Difficulties in access to relevant information migrant individuals also affect
the supply side, the more traditional intervention area of guidance. The
fundamental problem is that individuals have a distinct and unequal set of CMS:
knowledge of foreign languages, systems, laws, ICT literacy and access to
social/professional networks. Immediate and medium-term career outcomes are
likely to be very different for individuals with very different levels of CMS. The
fundamental way in which national administrations try to compensate for these
needs is to establish introduction programmes, as discussed in Section 4.3.
Introductory courses usually do not account for the difficulty immigrants have
in accessing local professional networks. Highly skilled people will tend to more
autonomous exploration of the job market, given their ease of navigation with
web browsers in other languages than their own, finding information on
recognition processes, training courses, job advertisements and accessing
employment services. Those with lower qualifications will tend to have greater
difficulty in finding these resources.
When accessing local networks, lower-qualified immigrants usually find work
via informal channels near the native country emigrant community. Ties are
established with workers with similar qualification levels and grant access to a
certain type of jobs. This type of social dynamic reinforces the tendency for
ethnicity-based labour market segmentation, reducing the odds of desirable
upskilling for immigrants. It also lowers the odds of a correct match to their skills,
since many may take jobs below their qualification levels, found through the
expatriate network.
One possible solution is to raise the profile of guidance services provided to
immigrants by engaging and training prominent members of the community to act
as role models, providing insight into successful career paths and access to
wider social networks. We have found examples of this type of practice in our
case studies. This approach requires a positive public administration attitude to
engagement with the established migrant community (employers, public figures),
to adapt practices to needs and cultural traits. Supporting and promoting the
activities of NGO’s may prove a successful engagement strategy (Germany, Italy,
the Netherlands and Austria provide evidence of number of similar projects).

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