9.1 Introduction

What is labour market integration and what would be the best way to think about it? The short answer is that integration is a process of establishing yourself as a professional and as a person in a host society. It is a long journey of responding to critical events, undergoing various obstacles, and possibly finding a desired outcome. It is a difficult journey during which the migrant may be lost, depending on how ready they are for it. It is therefore an outcome of migrant agency that follows a scenario, albeit with individualised configurations. It is a process of self-discovery through which the migrant not only finds a better place to live and work but also re-evaluates the symbolic meanings and social relations that they encounter. It is a complex socio-cultural scenario, in which each migrant is both the actor and the director.

In this chapter we reinterpret the findings of the book in the light of the ‘cultural monomyth’ theory, elaborated by Joseph Campbell (2008[1949]). First, we introduce the ‘cultural monomyth’ theory in reference to a recognised socio-cultural script around an epiphanic passage. Then we use its main concepts as heuristic devices to explore in-depth symbolic relations and meanings within the informants’ epiphanic triangles and to finalise the interpretive theory of labour market integration. Based on the individual country case studies highlighted in the previous chapters, we also present novel typologies of turning points (or most critical events), epiphanic passages (or biographic journeys) that have been provoked by them, and biographic boons (or epiphanies of integration). In the concluding section, we argue that both migrant agency and its outcome of the labour market integration are ‘liquid’ (or ‘fluid’) phenomena, which have unfixed, unexpected, and diverse outcomes for migrants.

9.2 Epiphanic Passage: In Search of Identity Boon

Victor, a businessman from Eastern Europe, arrives in New York at the moment when his country of origin is affected by a political coup. With devalued documents and no way back due to his home country because of border closure and geo-political changes, he finds himself trapped in JFK Airport for several months until the international situation stabilises. The airport becomes a microcosm of the United States, a tiny piece of America, in which this protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece The Terminal (2004) mobilises his migrant agency toward labour market integration. An unexpected encounter with a taxi driver results in a friendship that enables Victor to get his first informal job at the airport and eventually progress towards the construction supervisor of the Terminal where he has been detained.

By contrast, the flourishing family restaurant business of Maya (a Pakistani immigrant in New York and the protagonist of Special Victims Unit, Season 19, Episodes 20–21) is ruined as a result of the gang assault on her family and the murder of her husband and eldest daughter. This is compounded by the deportation of her asylum-seeking brother and a long trial for justice. Left eventually without a man’s support in her ethnic entrepreneurship and with deep scars from the experienced violence, she and her youngest daughter are doomed to start from scratch or most likely seek employment somewhere else.

The extra-polar fictional stories of Victor’s integration success and Maya’s integration failure resonate with migrants’ everyday accounts narrated around the world. The 30-year-old Ukrainian police officer Lena arrives in Prague, where she literally bumps into her soon-to-be boyfriend in a bar and he helps her get a bartender job and integrate into local society (as earlier discussed by Gheorghiev and Numerato in this volume). However, the same-age Nigerian artist Nathan is arrested by mistake and sentenced to jail in Switzerland (see Mexi in this volume).

Unbelievable how dramatically one event can change the whole life of a migrant. We shall never know for sure how the ‘broken integration’ projects of Maya and Nathan will end. What we do know is that those traumatising events have transferred both into new spaces of symbolic meanings and power relations. This is what happened to Victor and Lena, who, having experienced their turning points, become involved in the enactment of new socio-cultural scripts. Within those ‘turning point scripts’ (Denzin, 2011), the past of Victor and Lena (with all their pre-emigration memories, habits, and skills) was intersecting with their present at destination, bringing in other challenging events and a multitude of factors that affected how they were dealing with the herein expanding epiphanic passage.

In this connection, scholars note that, in many cases, critical events only initiate the change rather than finalise it (Campbell, 2008[1949]; Mackey-Kallis, 2001; Salla, 2002). They signify the beginning of a new relational and symbolic scenario that the person is to follow, to ‘master a new world’ (ibid.). Campbell (1991, 2008[1949]) conceptualises this process as the ‘hero’s journey toward self-individuation’, or self-discovery. By viewing this biographical journey as ‘monomythical’, Campbell (2008[1949]) recognises the presence of fixed societal norms and traditions that inevitably structure the epiphanic passage. The ‘cultural monomyth’ is associated with something universally present and understood but which the person – the migrant – may not yet know and must find out on their own in order to decide how to adjust to it. Campbell’s (ibid.) socio-anthropological metaphor of ‘cultural monomyth’ becomes synonymous with our concept of epiphanic passage, showing the person’s progression from turning point to epiphany and thus illuminating the triangular relationship between the turning point, the epiphany, and the bridge between them.

To begin with, when the turning point takes place, it is often associated with an accident or mistake and remains ignored by the person if they are ‘not prepared for transformation’ (Campbell, 1991). The challenging nature of the turning point manifests itself not only in a novel form of agency but also in the person’s inability to grasp the importance of an impending change. As noted by Glaser and Strauss (1971: 95), ‘the meeting of a challenge may lead to more complex preparation until the test is definitely failed or passed’. That is why turning points often take place in clusters, which consist of what Campbell (1991) views as multiple ‘calls of adventure’. First Luciana (whose story was analysed in the Introduction to this book) wanted to escape from the casino. She realised that something must be going wrong in the gambling room when she had suddenly heard a scream. Anticipating a trap, she tried to flee from the back door. However, the doorman with a gun immediately made her recall all consequences for disobeying a criminal network. Having understood him without words because of her prior experience of victimisation, she eventually decided to go with the flow and concentrate to the maximum on her habitual art of survival. She thus found herself ready for the oncoming challenge.

In fact, responding to such a ‘call’ becomes a challenging task that is associated with risks, uncertainty, and hardships. It resembles an ‘ordeal’ (Campbell, 2008[1949]). Campbell (ibid., 1991) explains that one who wants to confront challenges imposed by turning points must enter an entirely new relational space to exit as a ‘reborn’ person. He symbolically compares this ‘sphere of rebirth’ with the ‘world-wide womb image of the belly of the whale’ or ‘the belly of the beast’.

However, this space of rebirth is not always structured by democratic relations, as Luciana’s story eventually shows. For migrants, it may be structured by excellence criteria that determine membership in elite Western universities (Smetherham, 2010) or in transnational corporations (Weinar & Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020) as well as by smuggling networks and underground norms of the black market (Achilli, 2019). Emerging through such a relational and psychological hardship, the person has to reaffirm their moral values or something that they truly love. Scholars of cultural studies call this part of the rebirth ‘sacred marriage’ (Mackey-Kallis, 2001; Salla, 2002); the other part of being reborn is associated with ‘regaining the lost kingdom’ or resolving economic or material issues (ibid.). The ‘golden fleece’ to be found at the end of the hardship is associated with being rich or happy or both and receives its endorsement in the epiphany.

Scholars argue that ‘personal change does not happen in a vacuum but it is situated within and impacted upon by a larger social context’ (Teruya & Hser, 2010). Progressing through the epiphanic passage is affected by social relations and networks of support or patronage (Coleman, 1988; Merrill & Altheit, 2004; Teruya & Hser, 2010). In this connection, migrant networks have a diversity of resources (ranging from cultural attraction and soft persuasion to coercive power) that may structure such crisis passages (Fernandez Kelly & Portes, 2015; Krissman, 2005; Portes, 1995). Denzin (2011) notes the presence of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in all biographic meanings.

Fighting for the kingdom or moral values, the person is always supported by ‘mentors’ and ‘kindred spirits’ (Campbell, 2008[1949]; Salla, 2002) such as migrant solidarity networks (Fernandez Kelly & Portes, 2015; Portes, 1995) as they ‘slaughter dragons’ and negotiate with various ‘nemeses’ and ‘thresholds’ (ibid.), including various immigration officials and biased employers (Marchetti, 2014a, b). Moreover, racial/ethnic and gender factors also ‘trigger turning points and redirect life pathways’ for people in general (Teruya & Hser, 2010) and migrants in particular (Marchetti, 2014a, b; Merrill, 2019; Merrill & Altheit, 2004).

Studies show that legal provisions, labour market integration policies and discourses, as well as civil society organisations and social partners, provide migrants with a range of different opportunities that differ across countries and migrant categories. For example, so-called economic migrants are provided with opportunities that asylum seekers or irregular migrants do not have (Sandoz, 2019; Weinar & Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020). Employment challenges are compounded by disability. Thus, not only more educated but also more physically fit migrants de facto have better employment opportunities at destination, while newcomers with medical conditions may have unrecognised healthcare needs that impede their successful employment (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019). Gender differences also create different structures of opportunity and, consequently, different ‘tissues’ that line the ‘belly of the whale’: women thus continue to lag behind men in their benefits from recruitment policies and become adversely affected by persistent cultural stereotypes about gender roles both in the family and in the economic system. As a result, childcare duties and educational disadvantages may become unsurmountable barriers for women (Christou & Kofman, 2022).

Having different resources at their disposal, experiences of migrants thus differ substantially in terms of their dealing with ‘spaces of rebirth’. Triandafyllidou (2018) shows that, in order to survive (‘recuperate’), some migrants can simply pass through hardship without changing its texture. At the same time, other migrants become more ‘resilient’ and find new opportunities while seeking their place at the destination country. There are also those who, ‘resisting’ the conditions that they face, seek to ‘subvert and disrupt’ them.

The hardship, or crisis passage, in which the migrant enrols resembles a mythical journey. It ‘captures and illuminates the transformation of consciousness’ (Campbell, 1991: 155) and ‘embodies the awakening to the new world’ in which the reborn person finds their identity ‘boon’ (ibid.: 167). The boon that the reborn person obtains is their epiphany – the story about the meaning of their own biographic experience, the story about the meaning of being alive, the story about the meaning of being integrated, and so on (Salla, 2002). An epiphany is thus ‘a spiritual manifestation’ (Joyce, 1944: 213), which the person develops during the state of crisis and which ‘alters the fundamental meaning structures in his/her life’ (Denzin, 1989: 70).

9.3 Structure Versus Significant Others: One ‘Call’, Different Journeys

The stories of Maya, Victor, Magda, and Lena in different chapters of this volume show that migrants’ labour market integration is actually part of a wider social system and invariably intersects with such established relational structures as xenophobia, street crime, geo-political order, or simply a local neighbourhood embodied in a bar. While interacting with these structures, labour market integration becomes affected by their in-group relations into which the migrant may be suddenly drawn through a specific crucial event.

In this connection, it is important to understand that such events differ in terms of their source, visibility, composition, and epiphanic effect. In fact, such critical encounters take place because they are provoked by different people, social groups, and institutions. They are generated by social forces (societal rules) or specific people – the latter often acting on behalf of the former and delivering the message from the former to the migrant. Some critical points are rather explicit for the migrant while others may be hidden and not immediately perceived. For example, Lena admits having felt confused for a long time about what was going on in her life before her employment situation stabilised and she started to recognise the impact of certain events upon her career trajectory and specifically the role of that crucial bar encounter. The migrant can experience one turning point that can change their life as well as a few critical events in their interdependence. In other words, turning points take place within relationally and symbolically rich, interactive environments that structure migrants’ journeys.

Migrants’ actions and thoughts invariably come into dialogue with diverse social relations and their symbolic meanings that architecture the host society context, and such relational/symbolic interaction may work differently for each migrant. Therefore, turning points open different identity passages and create different epiphanic effects for different migrants. Thus, different people interviewed by us have experienced different turning points.

Table 9.1 presents the ‘turning point’ typology that we have developed on the basis of these observed differences.

We have found the following categories of ‘integration turning points’. These overlapping typologies can be summarized in Table 9.1 below.

Table 9.1 Typology of turning points
Full size table

First of all, the turning points that have affected the lives of our informants can be divided into personified, institutionalised (instrumental), and institutionally-personified (instrumentally-personified).

These ‘turning point’ categories differ by their nature: the critical events that our informants experienced had, in fact, different sources. When we think about who had engineered those turning points, we see these three divisions, with the first category comprised of ‘personified’ turning points – or inter-personal, micro-level events that are bound to specific people in banal, everyday situations. As Ellis and Triandafyllidou argue in the chapter about Canada (in this volume), personified turning points are illuminated by divorce, domestic violence, loss of a significant other, interference of friend or relative, and an incidental – yet ground-breaking – meeting with a stranger. Sponsored by specific people and various bonds of intimacy, such events are perceived by our informants as highly emotional.

The importance of such personal encounters is illuminated by the stories of Victor and Lena. As shown above, they have followed the integration scenario of meeting a significant other who becomes a close friend or partner. The taxi driver befriended by Victor and Lena’s Czech boyfriend are the integration mentors who enable these migrants’ job entrance while also providing them with tips not only on how to survive in a new culture but also on how to progress toward a higher level of labour market integration. This is especially common among our female informants, who used their sexuality as an effective tool for integration. For example, in the Czech chapter, Gheorghiev and Numerato narrate the story of the Russian migrant Sofia who met a Slovak man in Moscow, married him, and moved to Prague. It was a personified turning point for her because that meeting had changed her life and helped her reconsider her identity toward a person who had eventually learnt to enjoy living and working in a small city. The beginning of a new life toward labour market integration for many women was also associated with a divorce as ‘the end of an unhappy marriage’ and the beginning of a skilled career. Such events facilitated the informants’ entrance to new institutional contexts and to new loci of power.

The persistence of institutional power as a factor of labour market integration further leads us to see the turning points that are steered by wider social institutions. A biographically critical event, in fact, can be created through an institutional force such as the institutionally administered process of job application, citizenship acquisition, recognition of credentials, asylum application, or law enforcement (for example, refugee detention, imprisonment, or forced repatriation). We call such turning points ‘institutional’ to stress their omnipresent nature and the power of an institution in the restructuring of the migrant’s life if they become responsive to such a turning point.

Institutional turning points create crisis passages that may be unavoidable due to certain circumstances such as the situations of job search or status legalisation. Such situations and the institutional forces they bring in will unavoidably affect migrants who aim at labour market integration. In fact, if labour market integration is one of the migrant’s aspirations, they will not bypass such institutionally established hallmarks: they will be emotionally affected by them. The institutional turning point of asylum application decision or recognition of credentials means that the migrant becomes part of, and a symbolic player in, an established and well-structured relational scenario such as negotiation of a job contract, legal status appeal, or planning for a more challenging career step. Our findings show that an institutional context that had immediately swallowed our unprepared informants acted like a devouring beast: the herein expanding crisis passage was extremely difficult to manage without network support.

Institutional turning points can also be viewed as ‘instrumental’ turning points because they act as instruments of some centralised power that descends upon the migrant. The centralised power that descended upon our informants through such instrumental turning points structured their struggle for the ‘lost kingdom’ or for the economic benefits of integration that were safeguarded by institutional forces.

The sponsor of this category of turning point could be a firm, an accreditation agency, a police department, or immigration bureaucracy, which, in many cases, is supported by the state itself. Such turning points coincide with what Glaser and Strauss (1971) define as institutionally normalised events to open new but rather standardised status passages. Yet unlike an abstract harbinger of an official status passage, a macro- or meso- level encounter that became an instrumental turning point was always emotionally coloured. It was always perceived by our informants as a very intense emotional event that had initiated more than a new status passage. For them, it had opened a crisis passage or a new identity journey with a new monomyth and new symbolic meanings. The event of a failed job application became a turning point for our informants only when that experience was perceived as painful and challenging. (At the same time, Glaser and Strauss (ibid.) note that such institutional events may pass unnoticed emotionally, without becoming the turning points for people who experience them.) It is the high degree of perceived emotionality and life change that can transform a particular event into a turning point.

It is through these turning points that the informants were introduced to the power embodied in such institutions. It is not that they had been previously unaware of the institutional domains of citizenship, asylum application, or labour market that are in place across national contexts. However, the effect and benefits of EU citizenship, qualified employment, or legal residence was understood by the informants specifically through such turning points and solely because those specific events had changed their lives. Such symbolic interaction and cultural learning (the learning of the local life) are vividly illuminated by Ellis and Triandafyllidou in the Canadian chapter: ‘The first thing I encountered when looking for official jobs was that employers were looking for someone who was a citizen’. The informant admits having experienced the institutional turning point of the job interview, after which he immediately and unmistakably grasped the symbolic meaning of Canadian citizenship (or permanent residence) for labour market integration. He notes that citizenship was associated with permanence and stability for the employer, while the informant himself was appealing as a figure contradictory to the idea of permanence.

Dealing with such turning points, he and other informants realised that they had to master those instruments of ‘regaining the kingdom’: they came to understand that they had to learn how to appropriately use such political instruments as particulars of accreditation, job specificity, details of the citizenship application process, and job market entrance rules. For example, Lisa (interviewed by the Canadian team) notes that she had to learn ‘how she should be presenting herself to employers’ to appeal on the same level with Canadian citizens. Navigating through the belly of such a beast was not an easy or explicit process, and it turned out to be rather difficult work of migrant agency. The informants needed to learn how to deal with those who were feeding that beast of integration. They needed to understand how to negotiate their turning points with thresholds – that is, with people who represented those institutions of power. Their encounter with those people often became the turning point on its own.

Located at the crossroads of institutions of power and their everyday contexts of communication, such critical events – or ‘institutionally-personified’ turning points - are life-changing encounters with people who represent institutional forces. It is for them that Lisa was mastering her ways of self-representation. Through that appeal, she hoped to manage a wider social structure around the intersecting landscapes of the Canadian job market and immigration law while articulating instrumental decisions on hiring, firing, or status acquisition. Those institutional representatives – e.g., immigration officials, employers, social workers – had immediately engaged in an intense emotional communication with the informants. The reason for such additional emotionalisation of instrumental turning points could be the official’s personal bias of racism, xenophobia, or sexism that deeply touched the informants’ emotions. During a job interview in her home country, Lena had a difficult communication with the ‘all-male group of examiners’ (Gheorghiev and Numerato, in this volume). That traumatic experience – a ‘violent interrogation with deeply misogynistic questions’ – confirmed her decision to leave Ukraine forever (ibid.). The informants further admit that such institutionally-personified encounters simultaneously with the structure and the people had opened very dynamic and controversial crisis passages for them.

This classification does not only point to the tie between the turning point and identity passage but illuminates the uniqueness of turning points’ impacts upon people.

9.4 War and Pandemic: The Individuation of Agency

The individuation of epiphanic passages and identity boons is seen in how different people may react to one and the same historical event. In fact, a grand historical event such as war does not become a turning point and a start of a new crisis passage for everyone who experiences it.

In this connection, the Russian mini-series Hunting for the Gauleiter (2012–2013), which is based on real events around the execution of the high command German officer in Nazi-occupied Belorus, shows how differently grand historical events such as the second world war can be experienced by different ordinary people. This is illuminated by the encounter between three women: Galina, Maria, and Vera. Their images were taken from the World War II national heroes Yelena Mazanik, Mariya Osipova, and Nadezhda Troyan who organised and executed the assassination of gauleiter Wilhelm Kube in 1943.

For Maria, a former district attorney, the war had become the institutional turning point, while for aspiring Soviet lawyer Vera it was the institutionally-personified turning point having opened a negative identity passage – or a crisis passage – for both of them. Before the war, they had been elite nomenklatura workers while during the war they had to live clandestinely in the miserable conditions of constant starvation and fear for their lives. In addition, Vera’s father was executed as a hostage by the Nazis. This led both women to immediately hate the Nazi regime and join the local resistance.

On the contrary, the social status of the former waitress Galina was very much raised during the occupation when, in 1941, she was selected by the gauleiter as the governess for his children and his own secret mistress. For her, the war thus became a positive institutionally-personified turning point, opening the door to gainful employment and a more comfortable lifestyle.

Two years later, the occupation became a negatively bifurcating turning point for her because she was forced by the resistance to assassinate the gauleiter against her volition. Blackmailed by the Soviet partisans, she finally agreed out of the fear for her sister and nephew. The other two women (Vera and Maria) eagerly participated in this act of execution and in all other activities of the resistance movement.

In line with this, the accounts of the interviewed Ukrainian and Syrian migrant-women show that the war back home was perceived differently by them and mostly with very specific and individualised critical moments such as job dismissal or a sudden splash of interpersonal violence rather than as a big geo-political change per se. In fact, our informants who come from war-affected areas reveal different degrees of emotionality in their accounts about the military conflict as such.

Holding the same stance, the global effect of the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the interviewed informants differently. For some it has become a new starting point while for others it has acted as a dumping ground. The research of Ellis and Triandafyllidou (Canadian chapter) and Calo and Baglioni (UK chapter) shows that in Canada and the UK migrants who work in the healthcare sector have suddenly found new career opportunities: ‘I work in the mental health field. Right now, the Covid is helping me. It is opening more opportunities for me. It’s weird. But I am grateful’ (Lisa from Canada). At the same time, there are informants who complain of increased vulnerability and ‘new layers of uncertainty’ that have been added by the pandemic to their employment situation: they express frustration with the rapidly increasing instability of their employment (ibid.).

This leads us to see a new feature of turning points – their directionality, or epiphanic effect. In fact, turning points, as further supported by our data, can be sub-divided into the following categories: negative turning points of withdrawal; positive (or generative) turning points; and bifurcating turning points.

9.5 Epiphanic Bifurcation

The negative turning points are events related to exclusion and rejection. They give way to crisis passages and negatively-coloured epiphanies of withdrawal associated with survival through chronic hardships, often with an uncertain end of being trapped. The informants have developed a sense of withdrawal after having experienced such events as job loss, unsuccessful job application, and sexual bias, especially within the contexts of the pandemic or military conflict. One of the most traumatising experiences for our informants was the institutionally-personified turning point of their failed first job application. As Ellis and Triandafyllidou show in this volume, an emerging epiphany of withdrawal in this case can be the informant’s ‘broader sense of life in Canada as based on waiting, struggle, and restricted opportunity’. Our informants from the UK and Denmark also confess on the herein developed feelings of ‘living with constant uncertainty – as if in a jail’ (Bruun Bennetzen and Pace, in this volume). Such negative turning points had led our informants to the epiphanies of ‘endless insecurity and struggle’, which were further compared with emotional ‘entrapment’ and ‘imprisonment’ (Caló and Baglioni, in this volume).

Conversely, the experienced positive turning points terminated those hardships and opened new identity passages of the generative and optimistic nature for our informants. In particular, positive turning points facilitated informants’ inclusion and enabled their access to the job market at destination. The generative turning points of a sudden job offer, citizenship acquisition, or a breakthrough from a violent matrimony led to epiphanies that steered various spaces of resilience and resistance. The informants who experienced such turning points suddenly started to use a variety of resources to achieve their labour market integration. They felt like ‘the whole world was opening up in front of them’, bringing in new freedoms for self-realisation in business and education or in family-building. If for some informants a particular event such as failed first job application was a negative and emotionally-incarcerating turning point, for others the same event could be quite positive and create new opportunities for career change or devotion to the family.

As we can see, the value of experienced turning points is inseparable from the nature of the epiphanies they provoke. However, the observed relationship between our informants’ turning points and epiphanies was far from unilateral: it was rather complex. Thus, we have found that there is no direct correlation between a positive turning point and a generative epiphany – or between a negative turning point and an epiphany of withdrawal. A negative turning point may not only cause an attitude of withdrawal but also trigger a generation of positive thinking, creating the effect of epiphanic bifurcation.

By ‘epiphanic bifurcation’ we mean an attitudinal/epiphanic combination of withdrawal from a negative experience with a concurrent or rapidly sequential generation of a positive epiphany. In this reference, Bruun Bennetzen and Pace (in this volume) think about a Syrian refugee-woman who underwent the pre-emigration divorce from a violent marriage:

When I finished my divorce papers in 2010, I could finally relax a bit. I was looking forward to the future when I arrived in Denmark. I was really happy. It was like I was flying. I thought that now, after all the problems and anxiety that I had had, everything was getting better. I had a lot of hope. (Habiba, a Syrian refugee-woman in Denmark)

Bruun Bennetzen and Pace (ibid.) further explain that such experiences of women’s liberation from long-term abuse often led to the intersection between the withdrawing epiphany of ‘falling behind’ (or ‘not being good enough’) as a ‘wife’ in the traditional sense and the concurrent generative epiphany of ‘being free’ as a human being who is entering the new global world. The latter epiphanic element has been a very strong factor of the women’s labour market integration. The epiphanic bifurcation is thus about the consolidation by the migrant of such seemingly conflicting experiences enduring the abuse and still managing to obtain a high level of social control over one’s life. The latter experience becomes operationalised through a very strong turning point such as divorce.

Our book further shows that the epiphanic bifurcation (or emergence of bifurcating turning points) can be affected by such factors as the migrant’s language acquisition (see, for example, Caló and Baglioni in this volume) and employers’ personal knowledge and sentiments about the process of migration (see Duomo and Lillie, in this volume). A successful completion by the migrant of a language programme or an encounter with a compassionate immigration official, therefore, may become a major turning point that would steer the epiphanic bifurcation toward a more generative epiphany about integration.

In some cases of epiphanic bifurcation, our informants were experiencing their withdrawing and generative epiphanies almost simultaneously. Yet for the majority, the generative bifurcation appeared much later –months after a withdrawing, negative turning point – as fostered by an additional positive turning point. In these cases, the epiphanic bifurcation was based on the clustering of two turning points and, consequently, on their cumulative effect. In biographic research, positive turning points that do not intersect with hardships lose their value in the ‘golden fleece’ hunt. As scholars argue, what is taken for granted proves itself to be meaningless in identity quests because an easy life does not teach anything (Campbell, 1991, 2008[1949]; Mackey-Kallis, 2001). Our informants’ stories prove that events invoking positive change reveal their biographic power only when they occur within the turning point cluster: when they soothe the effect of major negative events or when their own effect is combatted by sequential painful events. Maria Mexi shows in this volume that migrant-women’s entire dedication to their families became substitutive for their employment integration (the ‘career of a mother’) only when they were comparing its advantages with their failure to access the job market.

For our informants, the effect of epiphanic bifurcation often meant a philosophical acceptance of their own personal limitations and a rather optimistic reconciliation with unsurmountable career barriers. This is shown, across all chapters, in the informants’ crisis passage of accessing the labour market and applying for the first job at destination: the turning point of rejection generated both despair and desire to learn new skills. The volunteering experience and the acquisition of EU citizenship became the second turning point to speed up the new skill development or facilitate the once-impeded job market entrance, or both. In this reference, Caló and Baglioni show that EU citizenship becomes more than a turning point that allows ending the precarious status (and the crisis passage). It also turns into the sought identity boon in terms of both economic/professional achievement and personal growth.

The cumulative/aggregated nature of epiphanies offers us two additional angles to look at turning points. They can be differentiated through the prism of their visibility and composition. On the grounds of visibility, the turning points can be distinguished as visible (overt, or explicit) and hidden (covert, or implicit). The visible turning points were easily recognised by the informants in their retrospective epiphanies during the interview. They related to what Denzin (1989) calls ‘major’ events. They could create new identity passages and epiphanies on their own (as single events) or in a cluster with other events that acted either as the harbingers or aftermaths of the major turning points.

In terms of their composition (or structure), turning points can be thus divided into single and clustered. The experienced cluster of time-separated turning points made the cumulative effect on the epiphany (‘as if nothing had really happened’ and ‘as if the epiphany had just arrived out of the blue’). The initially invisible turning points were often discovered by our informants during their epiphanic moments, when the established rapport between them and the researcher facilitated their recognition of those hidden personified events that had been nested within the turning point clusters.

Such turning points were usually hidden – or nested – within the context of other, bigger institutional events such as war. As shown by Gheorghiev and Numerato in the Czech chapter, the Syrian refugee-woman Naz was initially complaining that the war had ruined her life by having forced her to leave the country. However, she had eventually admitted that it was not only the war but mainly an encounter with gender discrimination at the moment of her university application that had implied no career prospects in Damascus for herself or her daughter.

Such accounts show that the epiphanic bifurcation has been largely grounded in turning point clusters, which combine institutional and personified or institutionally-personified events. An institutional turning point could foster the migrant’s withdrawal and negative perception of the host country, while a personified event that took place later fostered their generative thinking about integration and mobilised their work of migrant agency. Thus, our informants failed their first job interviews and started to feel desperate before meeting a helpful person or joining a solidarity group that opened the door towards believing in oneself as a professional and as a person. And vice versa, in certain critical situations, some informants did lose their hope for a better life – the hope that was later shattered by a traumatic encounter with a rude or biased person or an institutional malpractice. In this reference, the authors of the Danish and Czech chapters illuminate how the cumulative effect of the war in Ukraine or Syria was intensified by impeded educational rights and disrupted career opportunities for skilled women from these countries. Our interviews also show that an intrinsically instrumental event (such as war or pandemic) was paving the platform for another – more personified – turning point (such as gender-based administrative practice) within the geo-political or socio-economic regime of changing power relations.

9.6 Identity ‘Boon’: Arriving at the Epiphanic Moment

The epiphanic moment itself can be compared with an identity boon - with the golden fleece of understanding something new about oneself as a changed person and one’s own new place in the new world of the EU. The epiphanic moment may relate to the boon that has been found – for example, the migrant’s generation of integration-wise thinking (boon found). In this reference, our informants’ fully-achieved (found) boons were associated with the re-evaluated spaces of motherhood, political activism, skill acquisition, better lifestyle, or European citizenship. Apart from that, their epiphanic moments also revealed their identity boons that were ‘lost’ somewhere en route or ‘suspended’ (delayed and unfinished). For our informants, the boon lost meant their withdrawal from integration activities and projects, while the boon suspended (or the boon-in-progress) refers to their self-positioning in terms of still searching for the meaning of one’s own migratory journey. The boon suspended thus implies the unfinished, or ‘fluid’, nature of integration.

The crisis passages through which their boons have been attained can be compared with the work of their migrant agency. The observed crisis passages fall within the following categories. On the one hand, we can see the informants’ crisis passages of withdrawal, generation, and bifurcation. Within each passage and across all passages, the boundaries between different strategies – e.g., recuperation, resilience, resistance – could be blurred, conveying complex configurations of migrant agency. Here we can see the two main types of epiphanic passage (two challenges): existential depot and existential battlefield. The ‘depot’ could be the temporary career depot (in the form of waiting for confirmation of job/asylum application) and the ‘toad pool’ eternal depot (where people got stuck, bogged down, and de-skilled). While the ‘battlefield trial’ was associated with new skill development, accumulation of experience signified redemption (or breakthrough) toward a new career or a specific desired job.

Immigration laws, employment contracts, specific traits of national welfare and labour market, socio-cultural practices of job recruitment, and various other frequently mentioned barriers and enablers of integration are the factors that have structured and (re)directed the informants’ epiphanic passages. Their list includes such migrant-network actors as officials and ordinary people with whom our informants came into dialogue and who supported, temporarily obstructed, or completely disrupted the informants’ navigation through their crisis passages. In Joseph Campbell’s (1991, 2008) rhetoric of cultural symbolism, those people resemble the ‘mentors’, ‘thresholds’, and ‘villains’ (‘dragons’) who architecture ‘calls for action’ (or turning points) and whom the responding navigator should respectively befriend, treat with caution, or ‘fight to death’ (‘slaughter’) on their way to the ‘Golden Rune’ (or the epiphanic moment of self-fulfilment).

9.7 Fighting for the ‘Kingdom’ – Waiting for the Boon

As our interviews show, the boon of labour market integration is associated for our informants with obtaining legal status and finding the ‘right’ job in their area of specialisation, or at least commensurate with prior professional experience. Such economic position can be compared with what Campbell (2008[1949]) calls ‘regaining the lost kingdom’. Many of our informants had initiated their migratory journeys in conditions of unemployment, war, and violence in their countries of origin – in conditions when their old kingdom was destroyed, their old job was taken away, and their old property was lost or stolen. That is why regaining the lost kingdom through migration was a desired prize for many of them. It was especially meaningful for the women who escaped an abusive marriage/relationship or another situation of domestic violence.

The informants argue that this boon of integration can only be found when a migrant can enter the labour market at destination in the conditions of informational transparency and with full respect to their rights, including adequate salary, working schedule, and work-life balance. Our informants believe that only in these conditions of equity can migrant-newcomers find regular and sufficient employment at destination. Unfortunately, this outcome has been rare. In the majority of our cases, the ‘boon found’ was equivalent to occupying a position and fulfilling professional tasks that were different from their previous professional experience back home. Some understand this situation as the ‘boon achieved’ while others think that they have not yet fully regained their kingdom and cannot reconcile themselves with having only a fraction of it.

All informants agree that the degree to which you will be able to regain your kingdom depends on your first job at destination and on the recognition of your credentials – the latter factors influencing the former. Those who see themselves as ‘waiting for a better opportunity’ picked the first job ‘under-scaled’ available hoping for their ‘second chance’. The herein postponed boon is tied to their current situation of ‘having a very dirty manual job’, which has been often obtained through the irregular market.

Migrant agency in this case intertwines with the segmented nature of European labour markets, which allocate employment resources according to an invisible division of workers as if in castes. It becomes a discriminatory milieu, in which the migrants specialise in certain tasks and jobs (not always of their first choice and generally considered at the bottom of the moral hierarchy of work) while local populations are engaged in other professional (and often more desired) areas. Our informants thus had to take their first jobs in the sectors of personal care, domestic work, agriculture, cleaning, and waste collection. For example, the highly skilled and tertiary-educated Maria arrived in the Czech Republic as an undocumented migrant and had to accept ‘the dirtiest job at the factory for CZK 32 per hour’. In the same stance, Adam, who worked as a medical doctor in his country of origin, is employed in a fast-food restaurant in Canada. The unfinished epiphanic passage of ‘being in-waiting’ or ‘temporarily living in the belly of the beast’ is perceived as a ‘degrading experience’, ‘jail sentence’, or ‘hanging nowhere’.

Some informants may, however, believe that they ‘have taken a step back’ to enable the next – more positive – phase of their agency. They sometimes try to use this ‘backstepping’ time to master some new skills such as language or accumulate residence experience for their prospective citizenship. Support networks, family obligations, and some personal beliefs are among the enablers of the informants’ bifurcation that is associated with resilience and hope.

9.8 The Boon of a ‘Toad’ – Boon Lost

Our research also shows that, while making this compromise of ‘backstepping’, our informants often underestimate the danger of ‘being in-waiting for a long time’. Ndomo and Lillie (in this volume) compare such naïve migrants with a toad from an old African legend, who dove into the cooking pot and tried to swim in the simmering water as its temperature rose; by the time the toad realised that being in the boiling water was not safe anymore, he had no energy to swim back to the surface. He was boiled in the water, remaining there forever.

The authors draw a parallel between the rising temperature of the pot’s water and the labour market sector where migrants are employed in dirty and low paid jobs. In this connection, Simon Duffy (2011) confirms that in highly developed countries, demoralising and stigmatising dirty jobs are often delegated to migrant-newcomers. As Ndomo and Lillie (in this volume) further argue, this employment segment is indeed very harsh, extremely difficult to manage on an optimistic note, and detrimental to labour market integration. The ‘toad’ metaphor thus applies to a newcomer-migrant who underestimates dangers that may be awaiting them in the ‘belly of the beast’ into which they jump in hopes of their return to the kingdom.

This is illuminated by Valerie, who was interviewed by Caló and Baglioni. She accepted the only job available and started working in a beauty studio, providing waxing and other beauty treatments for a retail company, with no plan for her career’s future development. She has literally become ‘boiled in the heating water’ at destination: physically exhausted, impoverished, and stigmatised – and feeling civically dead.

The ‘toad pot’ (or ‘toad pool’) symbolises a specific type of epiphanic passage in the belly of the beast from which there is no way out, while such ‘toad pool’ stories usually remain hidden from the public eye.

9.9 The Boon of Solidarity: Still Fighting for the Kingdom – But Not Alone Anymore!

In this difficult milieu, some migrants, however, do manage to find qualified employment although it may mean an entirely different career. For example, the medical doctor Angela reunited with her expatriate husband, who had been working in Finland for some time. Unable to find qualified work immediately upon arrival, she had to put her medical career on hold. During that waiting period, she decided to retrain as a nurse, and she is now successfully developing a career in that role. Angela was actively using her social connections and the connections of her professionally-established husband to rebuild her career. Her story shows the importance of networking for newcomer-migrants as well as of combining various resources such as gender and informal work. She had gained her experience through volunteering while her husband had been supporting her financially.

Volunteering is only one way to trail your path into the labour market because it provides work experience in the country of settlement and enables access to new interpersonal ties. Being networked is a key condition to obtaining employment at destination. Danielle, who was interviewed by Caló and Baglioni (in this volume), notes that access to the UK job market ‘is not about just finding the link and applying for jobs. It is all about network connection and experience in the UK. So it is not easy to create personal connection if you are not here since you are born here’. Similarly, another migrant interviewed by Ndomo and Lillie notes that ‘the way to work in Finland is to know a friend who will recommend you to the company that is looking for workers. This way you can work with them for a very long time as they see how you work, because they are afraid of signing a long-term contract with you in case you are not suitable for the work’.

In other cases, the migrants’ commitment couples with opportunities provided by local civil society organisations, and volunteering becomes a valid surrogate of work experience in the country of settlement. This is shown in the story of Diana, who now lives in Switzerland:

The volunteer work that I am now doing is closely connected to my area of professional specialisation. It gives me confidence that I have the ability to work in the field here in Switzerland. For me, it is important to see how a third party can see and value my work. Now I have a good estimate of where and how I can further get a decent job with a decent salary (Mexi, in this volume).

In this connection, all our authors note that the crossroads between ethnic/female solidarity and institutionalisation may lead toward a positive bifurcation among backstepping migrants. This is illuminated by the effectiveness of such an institutionally-personified enabler of integration as support from municipal case workers of the diasporic origin for our female informants. However, the ‘network’ solution may not work equally for everyone. For example, Bruun Bennetzen and Pace (in this volume) argue that skilled women who arrive as dependent migrants from North Africa are often marginalised in their network membership and, consequently, in their job search. These women complain about the inadequacy of public services and the scarcity of childcare resources. For example, a recently divorced woman from Yemen who initially followed her husband to Denmark confesses to having no access to the mobilisation of her resources:

I think you will hear this from a lot of women you interview: due to the lack of support from your partner, you always feel like you are falling behind. And when you are falling behind, you don't feel that you are good enough. I feel very sad because things are not working out here (ibid.).

Thus regaining (or rebuilding) the kingdom through the migrant network may work well for some migrants, depending on their country of origin.

9.10 The Boon of the ‘Sacred Marriage’ – The Boon of Womanhood

To what extent do material benefits remain important and to what extent can migrants be resilient when facing their loss? Here we can ask what is more important for our informants to ‘regain the kingdom’ and return to their career or revive their fragile ‘sacred marriage’. The epiphanic conflict between the economic incentives and moral benefits is sometimes resolved by our informants in favour of the latter. This is seen in the accounts of those who re-evaluated their humanistic values after having been affected by the critical event of divorce, separation from children, or imprisonment.

The feminisation of positive epiphanic bifurcation toward the ‘sacred marriage’ (or family preservation) is illuminated by the trajectories and epiphanic moments of migrant women who are mothers seeking to restore their relationship with their separated children. A negative turning point (such as detention, divorce, or job loss) becomes positively bifurcating for such migrants when it relates to motherhood or political activism. The dynamics of the bifurcated epiphanic passage manifests itself in the women’s progression from aspirational failure at destination and consequent frustration – toward hope in the form of expecting a decision on asylum or job application. Such women experience additional turning points that are steered by their ‘mentors’ from ethnic or gender solidarity networks, or both.

The reconciliation with a less qualified job may also be seen as an integration boon of womanhood. This is illustrated by the liberation of battered wives from their violent husbands or other abusive familial ties at origin and their consequent orientation toward a ‘normal working life’ at destination. Such a woman may see her less-qualified job at destination as a desirable outcome of integration because an event such as a job can enable her independence. The preserved ‘sacred marriage’ is embodied here by various spaces of womanhood, whose moral values outweigh the incomplete material benefits.

9.11 Liquid Agency, Liquid Integration: Concluding Remarks

This book brings together a variety of experiences of labour market integration that have been lived through by migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) who have settled in Europe and North America over the last 7 years. These biographic experiences have been located in Canada and southern, northern, central, and western Europe (namely: Denmark, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and the UK). While dealing with rapidly increasing inflows of economic and humanitarian migration through a variety of channels, these countries have different political-institutional approaches towards welfare service provision and labour market organisation. They range from States with strong welfare systems (like Denmark and Canada) to countries with rigid labour market policies and fewer social provisions (like Italy).

This book is unique in its in-depth exploration of the interactional context around labour market integration across Europe: a nuanced examination of the role of specific events and daily encounters in migrants’ lives enables a better understanding of wider social forces that may shape their agency and labour market integration (for instance, marriage, networking, xenophobia, immigration law). We achieve this through the innovative framework of interpretive biography, while looking into integration from the angle of epiphanic passage – or the nexus between the turning point (an event that challenges the life of a migrant), migrant agency (the process of making decisions on this challenge), and the epiphany (a consequent identity change that conveys a new perspective on integration). The adoption of the interpretive biographical approach pays off as it allows us to identify both dynamics of, and subtle similarities in, MRAs’ experiences, as well as to analyse the interaction between individual biographies and policy environments without being hampered by contextual differences.

‘What is labour-market integration?’, we may ask. And what would be the best way to think about it? Our book shows that integration is a process of establishing yourself as a professional and as a person in a host society. It is a long journey of responding to critical events, encountering and overcoming various obstacles, and possibly finding a desired outcome. However, it may happen that the outcome may be not what was initially expected.

It is a difficult journey during which the migrant may be lost, depending on how ready they are for it. It is therefore an outcome of migrant agency that follows a socio-cultural scenario, although with individualised configurations. It is a process of self-discovery through which the migrant not only finds a better place to live and work but also re-evaluates the symbolic meanings and social relations that they encounter. It is a complex socio-cultural scenario in which each migrant is both the actor and the director.

Integration is affected by specific events, which, however, trigger more complex relations and engage migrants in complex existential passages. Responding to a particular event, the migrant undergoes a crisis passage during which they re-examine their goals and values before finding some meaning in their new life. It is a biographical journey as if through the belly of the beast.

Migrants experience various kinds of critical events. These events are steered by institutions or people – or both at the same time. These events may provoke withdrawal and generation of some positive ideas and practices. But they can also be quite ambivalent and offer multi-directional trajectories; they can provoke epiphanic bifurcations.

These events may be apparent for the migrant but may also go unnoticed until a certain point. The migrant often comes to understand their meaning in retrospect, during the interpretive biographic interview.

These events open new crisis passages (epiphanic passages) for migrants, through which the migrant experiences various kinds of physical but also emotional and intellectual hardships that may be somehow released when the migrant reaches the epiphanic moment of self-revelation.

This interpretive-biographic architecture of migrant agency points to its fluid, or liquid, nature. By nature, migrant agency and its outcome of labour market integration are both liquid because they can manifest themselves in a variety of forms: stepping back and waiting for the second chance, searching for or mobilising networks, looking for a job, and learning new skills. It is liquid because it is never final: it can be interrupted, delayed, broken, or stretched. Backsliding migrants who wait and learn as well as migrants who do not work in desired jobs but devote themselves to their families or engage in volunteering can be strong, resilient agents and well-integrated people, depending on how they understand their own integration. The relativity of labour market integration is further proof of its fluidity.

The ‘belly of the whale’, or the ‘epiphanic passage’, is actually the negotiation between the economic incentives/priorities and humanistic values. The so-called lost/regained kingdom and sacred marriage interweave and may have different meanings for different migrants. The dynamics of the epiphany are revealed in the consolidation of integration forces. This is perhaps another creative way to think about labour market integration.