7.1 Introduction

The first research on the children of immigrants dates back to the 1980s. Researchers started to look at how the children of migrants in Europe or the US were performing in education and how the oldest age group was transitioning to the labour market. At that time, most of these youngsters had migrated, often together with their mother within the framework of family reunification. This group, mostly labelled as the ‘1.5 generation’, especially in US studies, had a particularly hard time in their new environment, having had to leave friends and family, learn a new language and adapt to a new school and neighbourhood environment – environments that were mostly unprepared to help ease the adaptation process. Research on this group showed high levels of school drop-out, especially among girls, strong overrepresentation in vocational tracks and a significant percentage of difficult transitions to the labour market in combination with high unemployment figures and unstable labour market careers. For a long time, these outcomes dominated the rather negative view on the children of immigrants. Slowly, but steadily however, the next generation came of age: those who were born in Europe and the US. At first, most of the research and statistics did not distinguish between this new ‘second generation’ and the previous age cohorts, thereby masking the significant progress and social mobility of large parts of the second generation in comparison to their parents and the 1.5 generation.

But, although they were doing much better than the 1.5 generation, the second generation ─ particularly the children of low-educated migrant parents ─ were still doing worse than the children of non-immigrant parents. Therefore, most of the research conducted throughout the 1990s still focussed heavily on integration problems and disadvantaged outcomes in school and the labour market. Along with the growing demographic relevance of this group of pupils and students, there was also a growing research community across different countries and continents trying to explain the factors underlying their performance. This research included looking at the importance of parental lack of education, assumed cultural differences or school factors like the positive impact of pre-school on learning the national language at an early age or the relevance of selection age for explaining this group’s overrepresentation in vocational tracks. American theories like Segmented Assimilation and New Assimilation were largely built on empirical studies analysing the differences between groups; they showed that social class background, migrant group characteristics and reception context are the most important factors for explaining differences between various ethnic groups and between ethnic groups and the majority group. The authors of these theories, and others who used their frameworks, largely evaluated the social mobility of the second generation in comparison to their parents, the first generation. Even though one of the paths in Segmented Assimilation Theory was coined ‘downward assimilation’, when empirically tested this mostly amounted to children remaining stuck in the same socio-economic layer as their parents or only moving up from unskilled to skilled labour.

Most of the second generation did move upwards in comparison to their parents. For many migrant groups this should not come as a surprise since the first generation of labour migrants arriving in the US and Europe from the 1950s onwards was predominantly low-educated and had often been recruited to perform the lowest level of unskilled work. In terms of social mobility, it was almost impossible to ‘move down’ in relation to one’s parents. Many members of the second generation have acquired a lower middle-class position on the basis of skilled work for which a vocational diploma or a secondary school degree was needed. They have definitely moved up a rung on the social ladder compared to their parents, and their socio-economic position is stable enough to allow them to live well and provide for their families – a big step compared to how their parents had to make a living and struggle to make ends meet as low-paid migrants on the fringes of the labour market in a new country. The term ‘success’, as discussed in this book, is largely reserved for people in highly-skilled professional functions. We should not, however, forget that there is also a much larger group among the second generation whose parents are proud of their children’s careers in skilled professions and (lower) middle-class life situations which justifiably could – and should! – be labelled ‘successful’ with respect to the social starting positions of their families. Nevertheless, this book deploys a more restricted and narrow understanding of ‘successful’, because we wanted to dedicate a book especially to the most successful group among the second generation.

7.2 Pioneers and Agents of Change

Why focus on the successful group? We were motivated to do this for several reasons. First of all, the group that has managed to consolidate a position in the upper ranks of the labour market is a very interesting one because it is exceptional. As researchers who have studied social mobility for almost 30 years, we have got to know some extraordinary people from this subgroup. We first interviewed some of these people in the early 1990s when they were still at school or university and have kept in touch with them over the years. Even back then, we were struck by their energy and determination. Often, they were not only studying, but also setting up mentoring programmes and homework projects in their communities and/or advising their younger siblings and nieces and nephews. Gradually, many of them also became spokespersons for their communities and their generation. We started to discover them in journalism and political parties, we recognized them as young writers and columnists trying to rephrase the often predominantly negative narratives about their communities. With their energy, smartness and flawless language capabilities they were conquering the minds of many of the people in the world around them. More and more, people were not only talking about this group, but this group was talking back and demanding a place in society that corresponded to their level of education and qualifications. This is why we think that the importance of this group, even if it is still relatively small, cannot be overestimated. This subgroup is not only mobile on an individual basis, but it also plays a crucial role in the emancipation of their communities in society at large. Its members have torn down many barriers, an achievement from which the following generations are already reaping great benefits. Without these pioneers and their optimism and persistence, we would never have seen the steep social mobility and society-changing effects that this book describes.

Most remarkable and important are probably the pioneering girls who were the first in their family and community to continue studying after secondary school. They went to university and after graduating they were the first in their family to enter the labour market to take fulltime jobs with good salaries. Consequently, in some communities they were also the first to break with the tradition of early marriage and to claim a say in choosing their partners. These ground-breaking paths entailed hard work and, in some cases, a lack of understanding from their home communities. But the social mobility of second-generation women has been particularly stunning in comparison to their mothers: while the mothers had received even less education than their husbands – and frequently not any education at all – the daughters have surpassed even their brothers and other male relatives with regard to their level of education. In non-immigrant working-class communities in European countries in the first half of the 20th century, it usually took two generations to move up to that level, i.e. from mothers with only primary education via daughters who achieved a secondary school diploma and probably some vocational training to granddaughters going to university. One of the purposes of this book is to fill a gap here as the emphasis on examining the, on average, poorer results of children of migrants compared to children of non-migrants tends to blank out this extraordinary mobility.

In the public debate we often see competing discourses that either portray a negative or a positive picture of the second generation. We still find higher drop-out rates and underemployment or unemployment figures which need to be researched and discussed, but we also see a growing number of individuals who have done very well at school and/or on the labour market. We certainly need research into both patterns to give us the full picture, i.e. to address barriers and identify success factors. We believe that by studying individuals who have made it ‘against all odds’, i.e. by studying their individual or family characteristics, the support they received and the institutional arrangements that enabled their success, we can obtain clear indications about the factors that have held the less successful back. It is important to know these barriers, but only by studying the successful group can we understand how to overcome them. This is why we think that research on social mobility and inequality is not complete without studying the successful group.

Identifying success factors is also important for policy making. Policies are often developed to address ‘problems’. With the successful group, however, the focus shifts to what has worked for them in practice. One example is the many alternative pathways they have taken or even created by themselves to sidestep or overcome barriers on their way. This includes taking longer routes through vocational education to finally reach higher education institutions and using internships and student jobs to obtain their first job as well as changing jobs or starting their own firm if they come up against a glass ceiling. The actions and decisions of the several hundred upwardly mobile individuals observed in different European countries and analysed in this book form a kind of alternative ‘strategy handbook’ on how to become successful in education and on the labour market in European countries.

7.3 Theoretical Concepts and Advances in Building a Framework for New Social Mobility

Crul (2000) and Pott (2001) were among the first researchers to study the successful group in the Netherlands and Germany respectively. They identified the following elements as some of the crucial factors that enable people to embark on steep upward mobility pathways: ‘hidden’ resources in the family, understood as resources that educational institutions are generally not aware of (e.g. pre-migration qualifications or the role of elder siblings); support from ‘significant others’ (e.g. individual teachers, neighbours, or members of the wider family or community) and ‘ethnicity’ as a useful resource that social climbers have learnt to mobilize in order to have more options or to cope with mobility-related challenges. Adding to this, international comparative research led by Crul and Schneider accounted for the importance of institutional arrangements in education and on the labour market. By comparing the same ethnic groups with the same starting position (all born in Europe) in seven countries in the international TIES survey, we found significant differences in education and labour market performances in the early to mid-2000s (see Chap. 2 for details). As a result, we developed the Integration Context Theory, which predicts school outcomes on the basis of the availability of pre-school education, the amount of contact hours in school, selection age for and permeability between different tracks in secondary education (especially for moving up from vocational to academic tracks) and whether second chance options for ‘late bloomers’ (Nicholas et al., 2008) had been built into the school system (Crul & Schneider, 2010; Crul et al., 2012). For the transition to the labour market, institutional arrangements, especially regarding internships, traineeships and on-the-job training, proved to be important. With this approach we moved the discussion from individual level factors towards institutional factors, and developed a reading of social mobility as being co-produced by social contexts and different actors, including the upwardly mobile individuals and their families.

The TIES survey revealed that there are enormous differences between countries in terms of the size of the successful group in education and on the labour market. It also revealed important differences regarding the sectors in which people were able to develop a career and the professional level they were able to attain in the labour market. In particular, professions requiring a university diploma – which is the case for the vast majority of highly-skilled and well-paid professions – are difficult to access if obtaining the qualifications required for university entrance is only possible for a few. All this also shapes the experience of the most successful group. Right up until the 1990s, many of our respondents in Germany had been the only Turkish-German student at their Gymnasium and had not come across anyone else with a similar biography until university, which was not at all the case in Sweden and France. While many of our respondents in the Netherlands had found their first job through an apprenticeship, this was almost never the case in France. These and other similar findings were the main starting point for the various projects in the ELITES/Pathways to Success consortium across Europe whose findings are discussed and compared in this book.

The chapters in this volume apply the Integration Context Theory to reconstruct mobility trajectories by looking at different institutional arrangements in different sectors of the labour market. Despite all differences, one striking similarity across countries and sectors is that children of immigrants still only constitute a minority share of the personnel. This has several implications: (a) always being the first or one of the first ones – the first person with a migrant background, the first ‘Turk’ etc. in the company, the first academic in the family – can be stressful, but it is also an element of a self-triggering dynamic that gives self-esteem and self-efficacy, and thus continuously recharges energy and motivation; (b) this results in a habitus of simply ‘moving on’, despite the continuous experience of being observed as an exception and as ‘different’ (including discrimination) – which is interpreted as the price for success. Beyond this shared experience, the authors confirm the relevance of country differences, but also find major differences between different labour market sectors. The chapters thus assess the role of specific institutional arrangements with regard to accessing and developing a career within each sector: Keskiner, Lang, Konyali and Rezai, for instance, look at the business and law sectors in France and Germany and demonstrate huge differences in sector-specific opportunities and what is needed to become successful in the fields of business and law. While in the law sector it is mainly educational credentials that open doors, the business sector also offers alternative pathways that rely less on symbolic educational capital and more on practical achievements, such as hard work and contributing to the company’s success. In their chapter, Fibbi and Aparicio-Gómez compare the educational sector across five countries and find very different institutional arrangements as a result of historical country differences regarding the symbolic role and place of school education in society. This corresponds with variations in how the teaching profession is valued and how promotion in the respective sector works. Also, the fact that it is possible to set up a new public-funded school on a private initiative in the Netherlands, while this is totally unthinkable in France, has major consequences for teachers’ opportunities to become a school director or manager.

As Integration Context Theory generally emphasizes the importance of institutional arrangements, the chosen sector approach made us zoom in on the practicalities of becoming successful in a profession or a specific sector. In addition to individuals and their actions and decisions, the structures and rules of professional sectors strongly co-produce what we observe as social mobility careers. This has proven to be a very fruitful approach as it has yielded much more detailed insights into the barriers and opportunities for attaining professional success and the ways in which individuals respond to and make use of these contextual conditions in relation to their own resources. It also explains why some of our respondents hit a ceiling in a certain sector at a certain level and had to radically readjust their pathway either by starting their own business, for instance, or by opting for the teaching profession as a second-best choice.

7.4 A Strategy for Success: Building-Up Capital ‘On the Way’

In addition to the differences between countries and sectors we also identified commonalities that propelled upward mobility across countries and sectors.Footnote 1 One of the most central commonalities is what we have coined the multiplier effect: almost all our respondents came from families that according to Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction did not have the levels of cultural or social capital which would generally be recognized as conducive to upward social mobility and to the positions they finally achieved. However, we discovered that the requisite cultural and social capital had been accrued ‘along the way’. An important factor, as Keskiner and colleagues also observe in their contribution, is the contextual transfer of one type of capital to another type that is more useful for a specific moment, context or next step: for example, a young person may acquire cultural (and symbolic) capital in the form of a high school diploma that gives access to university or a prestigious higher education institution. These diplomas can be a means by which to gain access to (upper) middle-class peers with a non-immigrant family background who possess relevant social capital. We can see how each consecutive step in their trajectories produces contacts with new people and access to the types of social (and cultural) capital they need to take the next step in their career. This ability of our respondents to tap into and absorb these new forms of capital goes a long way to explaining why they have made it ‘against the odds’.

As Schneider, Konyali, Waldring and Pulinx explain in Chap. 3, these ‘soft skills’ derive from being ‘second generation’: these individuals have had to fend for themselves at school and elsewhere from a very early age; often their parents were unable to help them beyond providing a supportive emotional environment, simply because of language problems, a lack of information on the educational system or long working hours in shifts or in their own small businesses. Developing these special self-help competences as part of their childhood and youth socialization has made them resilient, creative and prepared for dealing with new environments and uncertainties, in fact all this has become second nature to them. In this respect our respondents resemble social climbers from non-immigrant families. Yet, being a child of immigrants has made a specific difference in nearly in all of the cases we examined. Most of our respondents emphasised that the starting point of their success trajectories were their loving, but often also strict parents who took care of them materially and emotionally, and had high ambitions for them. To some extent, these ambitions were related to migration: as Louie explains, the children took on and carried their parents’ ‘migration project’ to a successful end. This is called the ‘immigrant bargain’ or ‘immigrant optimism’ (see e.g. Louie, 2012): even though the parents did not usually have the practical means or skills to actively provide what their children needed to become successful, the children felt an obligation to do anything they could to fulfil their parents’ dream and not disappoint them – which can be both a strong motivation and a heavy burden to carry.

The ‘multiplier effect’ explains why some individuals were able to achieve this: in order to tap into the social and cultural capital offered by people outside their families, our respondents needed to be very sociable, adaptive and resilient. As Chap. 2 shows, the upward mobility pathway of much of our target group was not a straight success story from primary school to the labour market. Most of them had to overcome failures and barriers along the way, which is typical of social mobility in general. Some were not successful at secondary school and many had to start their secondary education in the lowest qualifying tracks which forced them to take long detours towards higher education. But even after obtaining a higher education diploma, many found it extremely difficult to find a job that matched their capabilities, and often reported that obtaining a permanent contract or promotion had not been a smooth process. Because we selected on the dependent variable of ‘success’, we only got to speak to people who had been persistent and resilient enough to overcome failures and barriers. Actively building up relevant social networks and looking for support and mentors to guide them through various stages was an important factor across countries and occupational sectors.

The initial empirical evidence which made us define the ‘multiplier effect’ largely came from looking at the statistical data on educational careers and transitions to the labour market. The qualitative findings in this book have now allowed us to assess the importance of social and cultural capital in building a professional life in different sectors more accurately and in much more detail. Some sectors rely heavily on social networks and connections, while others put more emphasis on educational credits and specific qualifications. But cultural capital is not only about education, it can also take the form of ‘ethnic capital’ in terms of language skills and familiarity with everyday cultural aspects of ‘ethnic communities’. This again can be closely related to specific forms of social capital that facilitate access to certain markets or particular clienteles. These kinds of differences become manifest through the comparative focus on different sectors and differences within the same sectors across countries. In some countries, for example, teachers are supposed to be strictly neutral and play down their ‘ethnic’ background and cultural skills, while in other country contexts these forms of ‘ethnic referencing’ are valued and seen as an asset which should be actively made use of in how they teach and reach out to pupils and parents with a migrant background.

7.5 The Paradoxes of New Social Mobility

The empirical chapters in this book uncover a number of ambiguities, tensions and paradoxes that appear to be inherent to the studied New Social Mobility. One of them is the so-called integration paradox that has been described repeatedly in recent years (e.g. van Doorn et al., 2013; Lee & Zhou, 2015; Verkuyten, 2016; Steinmann, 2019; Tran et al., 2020; El-Mafaalani, 2020; Lajevardi et al., 2020): The ‘better integrated’ individuals from an immigrant background are, i.e. the higher their educational achievements and the more successful they are on the labour market, the more likely they will be in direct competition for jobs and leading positions with peers from a middle-class non-immigrant background – which once again raises the likelihood of being confronted with different kinds of conflicts involving discrimination and stereotypes.Footnote 2 On the one hand, their presence in these workplaces is proof of their ability to become just as successful as people without a migration background. They have ticked all the right boxes for what people usually mean when they talk about being ‘well-integrated into society’: they speak the national language fluently, they are aware of and able to perform in the mainstream environment, they have been successful at school, and now they are working in a prestigious profession. Thus, based on these efforts and accomplishments, they could rightly expect to be treated as an equal and for the topic of ‘integration’ to no longer be relevant. This, however, is frequently not the case. ‘Ethnic’ stereotypes are not less common in the upper strata of European societies, and being confronted with jokes and stereotypes about their ‘ethnicity’ is even more likely when working in an organization with hardly any other staff members of diverse backgrounds.

Another aspect of this can be called the meritocratic paradox: As research into elite reproduction has shown, for some positions − especially top positions in business − family and social relations tend to be more important than measurable merits such as management and team-leading skills (e.g. Hartmann & Kopp, 2001). And even in fields with a strong meritocratic discourse, where formal educational credentials play an important role – such as professions in the upper strata of the law sector – the meritocratic principle shows shortcomings that put especially the offspring of less affluent and less educated families in a disadvantaged position (cf. Lang et al., 2022). Our selected respondents could serve as excellent illustrations for the meritocratic principle as their achievements were certainly not aided by parental social capital. At the same time, they can observe on an almost daily basis that quite frequently it is not only their achievements and professional performance that are the deciding factor when new opportunities arise in a firm. Yet, many respondents reproduce meritocratic discourses themselves by referring to their own hard work, persistence and resilience to explain their individual successes – in our view not least because this is an inherently effective argument to counter attempts by colleagues or superiors to make their ‘ethnic’ and social background relevant within the work context. Also, given the exceptionality of their successes and that it is necessary to have a strong personality and determination to pursue these types of pathways in the face of all kinds of adversities, their use of a meritocratic rhetoric is perfectly understandable. But, in doing so they reproduce a discourse that is also widely used to justify the lack of targeted measures to overcome biases and promote the access of youth of immigrant origin to fields in which they are clearly underrepresented: if they did not get the job or promotion, they have apparently not worked hard enough and are therefore to blame for their lack of success. Chin also emphasizes that the playbook for Asian Americans to become successful relies heavily on the belief in the meritocratic principles of hard work and outperforming competitors (Chin, 2020). Many of her respondents originally believed that they could overcome discrimination and stereotyping with hard work and by adjusting to the mainstream organizational culture. But many of them went on to discover that this only works up to a certain level before getting stuck or coming up against the ‘glass ceiling’. The paradox of the belief in meritocracy is that this strong emphasis on individual achievements automatically downplays the importance of structural mechanisms that prevent equal opportunities. The fact that issues like discrimination and exclusion are hardly discussed or are even dismissed contributes to their perpetuation.

Yet another angle or perspective to this is what could be called a discrimination paradox. As observed above, while moving up the ladder our respondents were more likely to be exposed to experiences of everyday stereotyping and racism, but they also developed an increasing awareness of discrimination and stereotypes. Yet, interpreting certain types of experiences as discrimination or even racism apparently carries a number of ‘risks’. It is often difficult to clearly identify a remark or an action as discriminatory or stereotyping and thus as a behaviour to be contested. It also makes a difference to our respondents whether they perceive a remark as being badly intended or as a naïve comment prompted by a lack of experience with people like them. It is quite likely that they were not only the first persons with a migration or Muslim background to attain a prestigious position in their professional field, but also the first such person whom many of their colleagues had met at such close quarters. This is also why they felt uncomfortable about interpreting the many peculiar questions they received as stereotyping. In many of the mobility pathways we reconstructed, these questions stopped at some point and the respondents were able to feel like they were just ‘normal colleagues’ (see Chap. 3 for examples and details). However, in some cases the questions and remarks did not stop and some colleagues or superiors continued to emphasize their ‘ethnic’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘migrant’ identity aspects over other parts of their identity. It was only at that point that our respondents began to understand these questions as an issue for which they needed to find adequate answers and coping mechanisms. They often felt that it is their responsibility to counter stereotyping or outright racist remarks and to defend ‘their’ ethnic group or religious convictions. At the same time, making stereotyping and discrimination an issue every time they occur is generally not a good strategy if you want to pursue a career in an organization in which you are in a clear minority position. The paradox lies in the fact that they cannot change the organization if they do not make people aware of discriminatory and offensive practices, but doing so entails the risk that they will come up against certain limits and boundaries. Moreover, countering this kind of stereotyping may mean having to make an effort on an everyday basis and all of the respondents were aware that they may be exposed to experiences that place them in a difficult position at any moment. The fact that they have come this far in their careers and that they have received a great deal of support from people without a migration background on their long path to success has shown them that not everyone excludes or discriminates against people of migrant descent. Some had had negative experiences with teachers, but many of them had also had teachers who had made extra efforts to help them progress.

The social and cultural capital paradox refers to the fact that, familywise, our respondents are not well-equipped for educational and labour market success, while – as all chapters in this book emphasize – both cultural and social capital are of crucial importance for making a career in the more prestigious professional fields. Social capital is crucial for accessing and making use of relevant professional networks. In most professional fields, networking is important for entering the labour market and gaining promotion. However, in many professional fields, diplomas and marks serve as ‘objective measurements’ for talent and qualification: obtaining good educational credentials is thus an important way in which to bypass or minimize disadvantages based on one’s background or presumed ‘ethnicity’. The mechanism to compensate for the lack of social and cultural capital in one’s family is described above as the ‘multiplier effect’: what started at quite a young age, i.e. reaching out to teachers and other adults or peers without a migration background, continued in the labour market by building relationships with mentors and sponsors in leading positions who could offer advice and help with obtaining relevant information and network contacts. This is not to say that our respondents entered this world of business relations without any help from their families. As described above, many of our respondents describe their parental and family environment as being highly supportive in emotional and social terms. Their parents were both an example of what hard work can achieve and the limits in place when one lacks the symbolic capital of school diplomas and academic titles. Their parents worked even harder so that their children could focus on their educational careers, and they helped them to develop self-efficacy skills as much as they could. The paradoxical situation arises from the fact that moving up educational and professional ladders and developing new social and cultural capital on the way also affects the social and cultural life and preferences of ‘climbers’: the more that parents help their children to climb and become successful, the more likely their children are to develop socio-cultural preferences – e.g. as regards language use, religious practice, cultural references – that are different or even ‘alien’ to their parents. Being upwardly mobile and successful opens up new social networks, but it also often leads to a feeling of growing distance to childhood friends and even to one’s own family.

Schneider and Lang (2014) describe the strategies that many of our respondents have developed to ‘bridge’ this potential distance by putting a strong emphasis on maintaining intensive relationships with their parents and siblings. An interesting way to connect both their social lives and their professional relationships resides in what can be called the ethnic capital paradox. The picture that arises from zooming in on the development and details of individual careers in a comparative, country- and sector-related perspective is quite complex: Being perceived as ‘Turkish’ is a disadvantage mentioned by many respondents, but in combination with speaking Turkish it can also help one to make a career in a prestigious law firm (e.g. by becoming responsible for a ‘Turkish desk’ in the company) or to serve a very specific – and therefore also limited – niche (e.g. doing legal services for the local Turkish consulate). A subgroup of respondents in several sectors makes use of ‘ethnic resources’, such as their knowledge of Turkish, their special position as a teacher with a migration background (especially towards children and parents of similar backgrounds), access to different clienteles with a migrant background, or the mobilization of ethnic network contacts that allow access to a certain market. In this regard, ‘ethnic capital’ can be an asset when it serves as a selling-point in the competition with those with other ‘backgrounds’. In several cases, however, it mainly served as a jump start or helped someone to take the next step in their career, becoming less and less relevant in the later stages of their careers. In other cases, ethnicity became relevant only at a later stage or was a crucial element for establishing oneself as a professional. More than a few of our respondents had resorted to the social networks developed by their families in their local home communities (cf. Lang et al., 2022).

But, as the chapter of Midtbøen and Nadim shows, ‘ethnic capital’ can also become a ‘trap’ that blocks opportunities for promotion. It can lead to social climbers ending up in a niche or constantly having to take on extra tasks related to their background and cultural skills (e.g. serving as an interpreter for other doctors in their hospital). Even if they do not have to represent a niche, these extra tasks can be a burden on their career as they often require an additional time investment and go unrewarded. Social climbers must be careful not to limit themselves and obstruct their future careers by playing the ethnic card or by ethnically framing their professional specialization too easily. They originally took up certain tasks, such as dealing with certain clienteles or partners because they saw that the organization they work for was unable to do so adequately. These are fine opportunities to demonstrate the added value of more diverse competences and skills in the organization. However, in some contexts, rather than the organization changing to become more inclusive, the ‘problem’ was delegated to the professional of migrant descent who thus risked becoming responsible for helping and supporting these clients. Thus, social climbers have to develop an awareness of the double-edged character of ‘ethnicity’ as a resource in professional environments.

7.6 Overlooked Potentials

All of the interviews are full of these nuances, ambiguities and paradoxes. Rather than trying to make a coherent and straightforward story, we have tried to work with these nuances and self-reflections to paint a rich and complex picture of what we call New Social Mobility. Yet, despite these complexities and the considerable differences produced by the different institutional arrangements across countries and occupational sectors, it was also surprising to find so many similarities in the abilities our respondents had developed to ‘navigate’ the specific challenges and opportunities of a given institutional setting. There were also similarities regarding their strong sense of belonging and being part of both the professional field and workplace organization and their respective city and country. As Chap. 3 develops, our respondents show that they are very well able to bridge or reconcile possible differences and different expectations between the ‘cultures’ and requirements of their professional fields, their family, ‘ethnic’ or religious background and their widely mixed circles of friends and acquaintances. They have developed the capacity to integrate and balance these different spheres and sometimes contradictory expectations in successful ways.

Studying the mobility pathways of professionally highly-successful children of immigrants in Europe allowed us to detect the immense potential of this group. We can see these ‘second-generation pioneers’ in an increasing number of relevant positions, including more visible ones in politics, television and organizations. This is mainly because they have worked their ways into these roles, hardly ever because they were actively invited to take them on. Many central societal and political debates look different once successful ‘second- generation pioneers’ raise their voice. These people have the potential to change debates and push forward overdue developments in various contexts. To name just a few examples: how can we equip our schools to deal with the increasing super-diversity of their pupils and students (not only in terms of ‘ethnic’ backgrounds, but also with regard to legal status, linguistic competences, and many other aspects)? How to raise awareness for the toxic and destructive effects of racist ideologies? How to push forward ‘progressive ideas’ on gender equality both in mainstream society and migrant communities? What is needed in the debate about the position of Islam as a major religious belief in many European countries? How can ‘late colonial’ relationships between Europe and countries in the Middle East and Africa be overcome?

It should be understood as a great failure on the part of Europe to have overlooked this potential for so long. It is a failure that has operated at different levels. As repeatedly stated above, the mobility pioneers have made their way up against the odds, odds that have been imposed on them by society at large and its institutions: educational systems fail in their task and raison d’être when many young people are not given the opportunities and support that would enable them to deploy their talents and interests to the full; companies, organizations and public institutions miss out on talent and potential – and betray the principle of meritocracy – when they are more concerned with a new candidate’s name and background than with their actual qualifications and professional potential. But this failure is also a discursive and symbolic one: despite the fact that, for example, football players from diverse backgrounds in national teams have become a normal sight since the early 1990s (at least in countries such as France, the Netherlands, England, and, with a certain delay, Germany and other European teams), diversity is still not an unquestioned part of symbolic and discursive representations of nationhood and belonging. This contradicts the demographic development which has made diversity in a growing number of European cities ‘normal’, especially among the younger age cohorts (Crul et al., 2013; Schneider, 2018). In contrast, the notion of ‘migration background’ has evolved from an advanced new category in demographic statistics and social science research to a new ‘discursive prison’ (cf. Mannitz & Schneider, 2014; Will, 2019). It has the potential to confine future generations of native-born youth into a collective category for all kinds of ‘Others’, juxtaposing them against a ‘National Self’ and reproducing the myth of ethno-racial homogeneity. Listening to socially mobile second-generation pioneers could make an important difference here.

7.7 Why Do We Speak of New Social Mobility?

We have put ‘New’ before ‘Social Mobility’ in the title of this book, because the mobility we describe differs in several ways to the social mobility of people from working-class non-migrant backgrounds: the social mobility trajectories are different, as are the identified social mobility mechanisms. Furthermore, the barriers that the ‘new social climbers’ have to overcome are also different due to their visibility and the fact that they are more likely to have experienced exclusion or discrimination on ethnic, racial or religious grounds. These three main differences in mobility processes can be characterized as follows:

The research designs of the underlying ‘Pathways to Success’ projects in this book all focus on the respondents’ pathways from primary school up to their present professional position. This approach enabled us to retrospectively reconstruct all the different steps they had taken in their careers. We found that many had not been very successful at the start of their school careers. A large proportion, for instance, had entered secondary education in lower vocational tracks and had only reached higher education through long step-by-step mobility pathways or persistent struggles to obtain recognition of their true potential and ambitions. In principle, this also applies to socially mobile children of working-class parents without a migration background, but the scale is much larger for the second generation and the pathways have also often been much longer. A case in point here is provided by the Netherlands: twice as many second-generation Turkish and Moroccan youths used the long route from lower vocational education to gain access to higher education than their peers without a migration background (Crul, 2018). The latter could frequently use stepping stones within secondary education to advance to a pre-academic track which only takes 1 year extra. In contrast, their second-generation peers often had to take the longer route from lower to middle to higher vocational education – which takes at least 3 years longer.

We also find these alternative routes and pathways in the labour market, usually as a reaction to and strategy to deal with blocked opportunities. Respondents would, for instance, make use of a job opportunity in Turkey to advance their careers if they felt that they had hit a glass ceiling in Europe. Coming back with the managerial experience and prestige gained in Turkey, they were then able to advance further in their chosen career. Some even switched to another professional field or started their own business when they saw few opportunities along the normal mobility pathways in their companies.

The social mechanism that produces the studied upward mobility patterns entails what we described earlier as the ‘multiplier effect’. This effect seems to be specific to the combination of coming from an extremely low educational and class background and having a migrant background. Being illiterate or having very little school experience – moreover in another country – has all kinds of severe consequences for the ability of parents to help their children. It constitutes quite a different challenge in comparison to the situation of a child from a non-immigrant family whose working-class parents had left the educational system after 10 years of schooling. At the same time, by contrast, the climbers’ low-educated parents usually had high ambitions for their children and many of them, despite having few economic resources, made sacrifices to help their children take the long route towards high-prestige professions via higher education, even though this meant that these families had to forgo the extra income that this young person would otherwise have contributed to the family for several years.

Many migrant parents of our interviewees had never had the opportunity to pursue an education that would have corresponded to their intelligence and motivation. This means that there is a lot of hidden talent among this group of parents, talent which is now being used to support their children in various ways. Often our successful respondents emphasized that their low-educated parents were actually very bright people, and the fact that they had been unable to attend school had motivated them to give their children the unconditional support they required to take advantage of every available educational opportunity (see Chap. 3). Another aspect of this is that immigrant parents – because of the ‘migration project’ and the motivations behind it – usually aim higher than many working-class parents without a migration background. The professions that are often perceived as being ‘prestigious enough’ to fulfil migrant parents’ expectations or preferences are in line with the professions that generally and most typically represent ‘success’, in particular law and medicine (see Chaps. 4 and 6).

Social mobility mechanisms are also different with regard to the additional ethnic barriers which add or aggravate class barriers and impede the acquisition of required social and cultural capital. Our second-generation respondents were, so to speak, ‘double outsiders’, who also had to cross the boundaries of perceived ‘ethnic’ differences. As the mobility stories in this book tell, they had to pro-actively acquire a place in a middle and upper-class environment that was not only overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, ‘white’, but which was also not eager to include them. Often, they found individual sponsors and mentors who helped them to access and learn how to navigate these ‘unknown waters’. The fact that they managed to find these sponsors and mentors shows another characteristic that is typical of our respondents: their extraordinary social skills. Once again, these skills can be traced back to a specific part of many second-generation life stories. From a very young age, many of our respondents had had to translate for their parents, talk to authorities and advocate for their parents and families. This trained them to ‘read’ and to deal with people without a migration background; this dual socialization has become second nature to them, making them well-equipped to successfully navigate unfamiliar professional contexts.

Navigating unfamiliar professional contexts is an aspect they share with working-class peers from non-immigrant families as learning to understand upper-middle-class values and codes of conduct is a cultural challenge for anyone from a working-class background. They will often make the same ‘mistakes’ and need to learn similar habits in order to belong. However, when they succeed, non-immigrant working-class respondents are able to become ‘invisible’ in middle-class environments over time. This is a major difference to the second generation: their physical appearances or names remain visible and still continue to be associated with being ‘odd’ in the mainstream culture of their professional fields. In the case of our respondents, gaining acceptance in a typically upper or upper-middle-class professional environment required a constant and proactive bridging of class and ‘ethnic’ boundaries.

And this leads us to the final major difference: the impact of discrimination and racism. Although class snobbism can be a strong source of discrimination, ethnic, religious and racial discrimination is much more widespread and can have more serious consequences. Many of our respondents mentioned exclusion from networks, discrimination when applying for jobs or a promotion, and everyday racism in the form of ‘othering’ jokes and questions about religious and cultural habits. The work and effort needed to remain unharmed and sane despite everyday discrimination should not be underestimated, especially when someone is bypassed yet again for a promotion at work, or is not being offered equal opportunities for professional development. That familiar feeling from school of having to work twice as hard as their peers without a migration background just to draw even, is perpetuated in their professional careers, at least up to a certain level. This also takes a heavy toll on people’s private and family lives.

Because of these differences we argue that it is justifiable to talk about new social mobility in Europe. We acknowledge that there are a number of commonalities with lower-class people without a migration background. But the differences are important enough to emphasize them – not least, because they teach us more about the habitus and perceived boundaries of various middle-class domains. They will help us to direct further comparative research into (a) specific forms of social mobility of this group and the key factors which explain their social mobility; and into (b) the changes needed in these crucial professional fields to become better equipped to deal with the wider demographic changes in society. Here, we also see three major lacunae in much of social mobility research: firstly, we need more (statistical) data that would allow a more systematic comparison between social climbers of immigrant and non-immigrant backgrounds, including the frequencies of occurrences of discrimination and racist and/or classist exclusion. Secondly, more research is needed into the differences in social mobility processes between the second and third generation: Do patterns become more similar to social mobility in non-immigrant families, or does visibility based on names and physical appearance continue to make a relevant difference? Comparative studies on countries with more established immigration processes, such as the USA or Canada, could give important clues regarding similarities with and differences to these processes in Europe. Thirdly, how do working environments change and develop when they become more diverse and the presence of colleagues of diverse visible backgrounds has become a kind of normality? And what does this mean for future social climbers with an immigrant and non-immigrant background?

7.8 The COVID-19 Pandemic and New Social Mobility

We conducted the fieldwork for this study just a few years before the Covid-19 pandemic. Considering the different factors that have produced New Social Mobility and enabled children of immigrants to successfully pursue far-reaching mobility pathways, we now ask the following questions: What could be the impact of the pandemic? How do and will pandemic-related restrictions and economic consequences affect current and future mobility careers of children of immigrants? We would certainly argue that the pandemic has impacted opportunities for accruing network contacts and for gaining access to and the trust of mentors and sponsors. As shown, our respondents have been extremely dependent on informal personal contacts to gain access to relevant upper middle class contexts in their professional fields and to obtain the knowledge and information required to navigate a specific corporate or institutional setting. This dependency is a disadvantage if a large part of everyday work is conducted online and there is scant opportunity to meet people physically. Also, it will be more difficult to counter stereotypes that colleagues might have when they refer to visible ‘markers of difference’, like a headscarf, an Arab name or black skin. On the other hand, one could argue that online working environments make the playing field more equal, because people are more likely to be judged on their accomplishments rather than on how they ‘fit’ into a team on the basis of presumed similarities and differences. This could actually show others that the second generation is in fact used to working harder than many of their peers from a non-immigrant background. An online environment also lends itself less to the typical ‘old boys’ networks’ deals that take place in corridors, the canteen, corporate drinks events or after-work meet-ups in the pub.

Moreover, the pandemic has made it even more apparent that there are huge labour force shortages in Western Europe. After the emergency stop to many economic activities in order to fight and control the pandemic, immense labour shortages have become visible in many professional sectors,Footnote 3 especially in the health sector. We started this book with the story of the Turkish-German vaccine developers, but this sector houses a much larger contingent of medical specialists, doctors, nurses and other health workers of migrant descent. The need for more health and care workers is on the agenda of every European government. Similar to the vocational sector in recent years, many highly-skilled professions will no longer be able to ‘afford’ an anti-diversity attitude in their recruitment strategies. This might open up new opportunities for the second and third generation offspring of immigrant families who have long been an overlooked and neglected ‘reserve’ in the labour force.

Overall, we would expect that the members of the second and third generation who are now entering professional occupations are likely to find more opportunities, including leadership positions, than many of the pioneers who had to struggle to gain a first foothold in the professional sector. This new generation may also benefit from the experiences, examples and networks that the pioneers have built in various fields of society. In fact, many pioneers are already acting as sponsors and mentors for the next generation. When looking at the long-term impact, the greatest accomplishment of the pioneer generation is that they have broken a ‘spell’. It is time that this accomplishment is recognized by both the public debate and social mobility research.