Making It in the Land of Opportunities: The Role of Social and Cultural Capitals of Refugees in the Process of Reconstructing Professional Trajectories

Background and purpose: Highly-skilled refugees are an underserved and understudied population in social work. To understand their specific needs, their professional trajectories, and to precent their brain waste, social and cultural capital theories were used to guide this qualitative case study. It is known that while bonding capital allows individuals to get by within their social position, bridging capital stimulates upward mobility from their current social position to a more advantaged one.  Cultural capital, which defines highly-skilled migrants, is known to be difficult to translate across various country-contexts. Less is known about how different categories of highly-skilled refugees utilize their social and cultural capital to reconstruct their professional trajectories. This study aims to address this gap by using the case of refugees in the New York City area. It explores ways in which recent highly-skilled refugees build and deploy their social and cultural capital. This paper also explores the roles that existing policies and programs targeting refugee self-sufficiency play in this process.

Methods: 33 in-depth interviews were conducted, including seven with NYC and NYS public administrators involved in serving refugees, eight with Voluntary Agencies  (VOLAGs) service providers, six with other non-profit organizations’ providers, and twelve with participants who were asylum-seekers and refugees living in the city. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and Dedoose software was used for data analysis. Thematic analysis using the inductive approach was utilized, with Charmaz’s Grounded Theory method of qualitative data analysis.

Results:  Social, cultural and economic capitals are intertwined and translate one into another. A shortage in one type of capital, can prevent highly-skilled refugees from using opportunities to reconstruct their professional trajectories. The study allowed to identify professional trajectories of highly skilled refugees influenced by various combinations of the capitals. Participants who arrived in the U.S. with some level of economic capital and cultural capital matching the needs of the local labor market managed to successfully benefit from the policies and programs offered to refugees in NYC. Through the programs, they developed the necessary bridging and linking ties, and eventually reconstructed their professional careers. Bonding ties connecting them to their ethnic communities were irrelevant in the process. Refugees who had home-country specific cultural capital exacerbated by less economic capital to start with were often trapped in underemployment. They could not utilize available policies and programs to the same extent as the first group. Unlike the first group, bonding ties connecting them to their ethnic communities played a critical role in getting by. Some participants could not benefit from ethnic networks as they were socially excluded, and further marginalized due to their sexual orientation. 

Conclusion and implications: The needs of highly-skilled refugees are poorly met in the existing policies and programs. Social work practitioners could use the social and cultural capital framework to better understand the professional trajectories of the highly-skilled refugees and prevent their brain waste.