Migrants brésiliens hautement qualifiés : parcours migratoires, incorporations socioprofessionnelles et familles transnationales

This thesis aims to understand the migratory experience of Brazilian engineers and information and communications technology (ICT) professionals who migrated to Montreal between 2004 and 2013. It focuses on the dynamics of their socio-professional incorporation and transnational family changes. There were three reasons for choosing this research topic: (1) the importance of highly skilled workers’ (HSW) migration in the flow of international migration, which is insufficiently studied; (2) the arrival of a new migratory wave of skilled Brazilians in Montreal in the mid-2000s; and (3) a willingness to take a different look at HSW migration, in order to understand migrants’ experience and journey from their point of view and the one of their family members. I decided to compare engineers’ and ICT professionals’ migration paths because engineers face supplementary socio-professional barriers (related to the requirements of the engineers’ regulatory body (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec) and the more difficult recognition of credentials and experience gained abroad faced by these migrants as compared to ICT professionals, whose expertise is more easily recognized internationally and locally. This research aims to answer to questions concerning “how,” rather than “why:” How does one become an emigrant before leaving the sending society? How, having migrated, does one adapt to the receiving society? How does one insert oneself professionally? How is the familyhood maintained despite the “tyranny of distance”? What is the role of the migrant’s agency, which are the constraints and the opportunities, and the resources mobilized in the migratory dynamics and changes concerning both migratory, professional and family changes? I chose the life course approach because it proved to be analytically and methodologically useful. It offers certain concepts, such as transition and pathways, which lead to the analysis of migration as a process affecting different spheres of migrants’ lives. Methodologically, the life history approach allows us to grasp the experience of the participants in a diachronic manner. Life stories help to reconstruct "from below" the dynamics of actions, constraints and opportunities in the lives of migrants in certain key contexts of their existence. This biographical approach allowed me to identify four significant life transitions in the migration pathways: emigration from the country of origin, immigration to the country of arrival, socio-occupational incorporation and family reconfiguration, resulting in changes of position, status or role in social, professional and family spaces. Each of these transitions involves hardships that lead to commitments into new roles and changes in social positions. Their outcome depends as much on migrants' strategic abilities as on their integration into social ties and on assets that they manage to convert to face the hardships encountered. In this context, I was led to identify a plurality of migratory profiles and professional incorporation paths and a variety of modes of management of the tyranny of distance, to continue to make family. The thesis is divided into three main parts, corresponding to each of the themes of this research, namely (1) emigration (chapter 2) and immigration (chapter 3), (2) socio-occupational incorporation (chapters 4 and 5) and (3) the transnational family (chapter 6). In the general conclusion, I recall the main results in relation to the initial research questions and identify some of the limits of the research.

Keyphrases: Anthropology, Ethnology, Migratory experience, Migratory path, Socio-professional incorporation, Transnational family, Migration anthropology, Resources, Highly-skilled migrants