Rethinking (un)skilled migrants

This chapter argues that skills and the migrants they are used to characterize as unskilled, low-skilled, or highly skilled should be analyzed as discursive categories embedded in a web of institutional practices and multilayered ideological formations. It examines the ways in which labor-skills classifications have been produced and used to divide and “objectivize” transnational migrants. The chapter explains the category “(un)skilled migrants” by showing how it has become a key component of nation-states’ strategies for regulating population movements across transnational boundaries. It shows that the migration discourse – including that produced by scholars – has adopted uncritically the labor force segmentation, which, among other things, rationalizes the hierarchy between classes of workers and therefore of migrants. The chapter also explains the straightforward way in which governments have correlated language competence with the socioeconomic integration of migrants. It highlights the extent to which language skills have been commodified in corporate globalization.