“Model Minorities” in a “Sociolinguistic Paradise”: How Latin-American Migrants Talk About Job Interviews in Norway

Abstract

In countries of the Global North, migrants’ lower participation in the labor market is often explained as rooted in their low qualifications and poor command of the dominant language. However, when migrants do have higher education, professional experience and language competences, the higher rates for un- and underemployment are seen as a consequence of the lack of relevance of migrants’ foreign degrees to the local labor markets and the lower status of non-Western university degrees. Furthermore, access to employment is governed through formalized recruitment processes and implemented in the job interview, an institutionalized gate-keeping arena that requires migrant candidates to translate and reframe their foreign education and work experience to make them visible to interviewers and institutions. In this sense, job interviews create and reproduce the linguistic penalty (Roberts 2021) an added communicative burden that further complicates migrants’ access to the local labor market. The present chapter analyzes the discursive regimes that support labor-market inequality through the narrated experiences of two highly educated Latin American migrants living in Oslo. The main analytical focus is placed on participants’ positionings vis-à-vis dominating discursive regimes on migration and labor-market insertion, and how participants use group categories and temporal structuring in job interview narratives to convey their perspective and experiences.