Suočene s preprekama u društvenoj mobilnosti migrantice traže rješenje u samozapošljavanju i poduzetništvu
Authors:   CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris-Nanterre, Pariz, Morokvasic Müller Mirjana 
Published: February 2025

Expectations and hope for improvement and upward social mobility are the underlying incentives for spatial mobility. Yet a number of obstacles related to gender, origin, colour and education jeopardise the prospects for upward mobility. The author revisits her research of the 1980s and the 1990s reassessing the question how immigrants and migrants from the Global south or from the former Eastern bloc countries seek to avoid the assignment to the bottom of the social ladder by turning to self-employment and entrepreneurship.
In the 1980s, the questioning of social mobility and the exit from the wage economy was part of a trend that broke with the dominant approach to immigrants as constituting mainly the bottom of an industrial proletariat, leaving little room for (im) migrants as social actors. This issue was central to the work of the International Research Group on Migration, Ethnicity and Ethnic Business, in which the author took part, and, in France, to work on the commercial activities of immigrants within the Migrinter group, among others. Building on this research, and on her earlier work on immigrant employment in the clothing sector as well as on female migration, the author pursued her own research on upward mobility strategies of women themselves, often reduced to a simple helper and resource function in studies on ethnic family businesses. The first part of the article is based on her comparative study of access to self-employment of minority and immigrant women in France, Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Portugal carried out in 1987/1988.
A decade later, the question of social mobility linked to migration was raised in a broader, transnational framework: What are the strategies of those who seek, above all, to maintain their middle-class standard of living at home while avoiding, conversely, the cost of emigration and long-term settlement elsewhere?
The end of the bi-polar world order and the fall of communist regimes in Europe in 1989/1990 triggered an unprecedented mobility of people and heralded a new phase in European migrations. Eastern Europeans were not only “free to leave” to the West but more exactly they were “free to leave and to comeback”. The vast majority of people “liberated” by and in the process of post-communist transition were marginalised by the socio-economic upheavals in their countries.
In the second part of the text the author focuses on gendered, transnational crossborder practices of Central and Eastern Europeans on the move who use their spatial mobility to adapt to the new context of post-communist transition. Women, who had won rights and been economically active under socialism, found themselves at a particular disadvantage in the hasty transition to a market economy. They opted for migration and mobility, outnumbering men in the migratory movements unleashed.
Revisiting research in these two different contexts, the article focuses on two different populations who both transgress social and state boundaries in order to get by, to avoid hardship, in the hope of promotion and upward social mobility.
This look back at the strategies of two populations – ethnic entrepreneurs (or those from immigrant or minority backgrounds, the names vary according to national contexts) and post-communist migrants – commuters who have “settled in mobility”, contributes to the reflection on two perspectives for conceiving social mobility linked to spatial mobility in migrants’ trajectories. On the one hand, the perspective that focuses on the country of destination and sees migration as the continuum from immigration, settlement to integration therein, and, on the other, one that places these trajectories in the transnational space constructed by migrants themselves over the years, taking thus into account all their trajectories and the reality of their oftenfragmented lives. Moreover, this return in time is also a reminder that the populations observed are differently positioned at the crossroads of several relations of domination. The strategies they adopt, their orientation towards a particular professional sector, their ability to mobilise family or community resources, or to access other forms of support, will be largely influenced by this positioning.
Focusing on the women’s experience mainly, the author highlights the relationships of domination at the crossroads of which they find themselves, including gender relations. By the very act of migrating, women are likely to upset the established order, and even there where they are leaving in large numbers, or represent the majority, it is they who will bear the social cost of migration, mobility and separation, especially if they leave alone. As the economic providers for their families, they find themselves in a paradoxical situation, both indispensable and guilty of having left, of being far away, of having work when the man doesn’t, of looking after their loved ones from a distance. Stressing their role as nurturers enables them to prevent or circumvent reproach, to legitimise their role, by treating it as self-evident and as a norm.
These women for whom emigration was in itself a break with the past and, as they put it, “a first entrepreneurial venture”, who, endowed with a high level of social capital, experience acquired as a salaried employee, or a desire for promotion through innovation, respond to unemployment or leave the unsatisfactory paid employment and venture into self-employment or business creation. Although self-employment often masks a lack of real choices, it enables them to overcome many obstacles specific to their profile, saving them and their families from marginalisation and assignment to the bottom rung of the social ladder.
As for those whom the socio-economic upheavals of their society, following the collapse of the communist world, have “liberated” by transforming them into “ready to leave”, they embark on a “travel economy”, accepting deskilling and an intermittent life between their place of origin and the place where they are gainfully employed. These mobile women (and men) find their social elevation in movement, without wanting or being able to settle down permanently elsewhere. They migrate so as not to leave home, and settle in mobility if only for a time, in order to preserve the quality of life and middle-class status in their country of origin. Their anchorage remains in the country of departure, while paradoxically implying a fragmented life and itinerancy in a transnational space, their own created field of circulation.