Occupational Status Attainment

Over 50 years ago, large-scale Turkish migration to Western Europe started as institutionalised labour migration or the ‘guest worker’ system. At that time, factories, with the help of Turkish government agencies, started contracting Turkish workers to work in those industries suffering from a shortage of domestic employees. Turkish migrant workers took up jobs that were hitherto unknown to them and thus became occupationally mobile, almost by default. But little is, in fact, known about the distribution of the occupational and family backgrounds of these workers. The prevailing view is that recruitment was targeted at unskilled workers, predominantly with rural, if not agricultural backgrounds, whose occupational mobility after migration was, on average, upward (Castles and Miller 2009). However, in line with theories of migrant occupational mobility, the guest-worker system may have also attracted skilled and even professional workers, who gave up their initial calling in favour of better wages (but worse jobs) (Akresh 2008; Chiswick, Lee and Miller 2005). Using the 2000 Families study data, we can investigate how far Turkish migrants were positively selected by comparison with non-migrants from the same region, and even other members of the same families. This, in turn, will help us identify the implications for occupational mobility across generations (Ichou 2014).