This chapter examines how migration affects the departure country. We have adopted a domestic view, which considers only those people who remain in the country of departure. In contrast, a national approach would also include the specific benefits that an emigrant gains by going abroad. This latter definition, especially if long-term migration is being considered, is not wholly appropriate for measuring the effect of migration in the departure country, and therefore only those variables that relate to the departure country have been considered.

Researchers have tried to measure the effect of migration on economic growth in the departure country, bearing in mind that a decrease in population should produce an increase in per-capita income, whereas the loss of human capital through emigration could, instead, decrease the rate of income growth. However, these effects are accompanied by a flow of remittances, which should favor economic growth. This is because such payments help to reduce financial constraints on productive activities and encourage household consumption. In the longer term, migration of the most educated could foster investment in education by those who remain. This could stimulate economic growth, and some workers, having increased their human capital abroad, could be persuaded to return, something that should also favor economic growth.

Attempts to construct an overall balance sheet of the consequences of migration have often been hampered by the lack of information.

THE EVOLUTION OF MIGRATION

From Countries of Emigration to Countries of Immigration

Almost without its being noticed, the southern European countries have been turned from emigration countries into countries of immigration. This change was not sought, and in fact it was unexpected, as shown by the flurry of immigration legislation in the various countries, initially in Spain in 1985 and in Italy in 1986, later in 1992 in Greece, and in Portugal in 1993. This was designed to revise the immigration laws and regularize situations that had built up during the period when the authorities were taken by surprise and had not yet passed specific provisions. The decline in emigration from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal took place before the 1980s. In fact the decrease occurred before 1974, the year when economic recession in the main northern European receiving countries led them to introduce restrictive immigration policies for foreign workers (see Figure 1.1). However, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, the balance between inflows (+) and outflows (−) changed from negative to positive for all the southern European countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal (see Table 1.1). In the case of Italy, especially, positive flows, counted in the thousands, first turned into tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands.

This chapter concentrates on the welcome and unwelcome effects of immigration on the labor market and economy of the receiving country. We do not rehash the well-worn discussion of immigrant integration and assimilation, mentioning it only marginally in the wider context of the economic effects immigrants can have. We start with a survey of the main theoretical and empirical results derived from studies conducted in the United States and Europe, presenting, where available, results for the southern European countries. Special attention is given to the question of complementarity or substitution between groups of workers. Empirical evidence from the United States, Canada, Australia, and northern Europe is used to interpret the southern European cases and is compared to the limited research available for these countries. The aim is to assess the impact of illegal as well as legal immigrants on native wage and employment growth.

AN OVERVIEW OF MODELS BY MAIN THEMES

Four main lines of approach can be identified. The first analyzes the role played by foreigners in the labor market (complementarity or substitution), and the second studies how foreigners integrate into the structure of wages and jobs. The third examines the contribution of immigrants to economic growth in the receiving country, and the fourth tries to assess the impact immigrants have on social expenditure.

These four approaches are exclusively economic, and they should be integrated with analyses of the demographic consequences of immigration. Demographic changes affect an economic system deeply.

Attention now turns in this chapter and Chapter 7 to the mobilisation of social resources in the reproduction of advantage. As I outlined in the Introduction, Goldthorpe defined social resources in terms of involvement in social networks that can serve as channels of information and influence in getting a job. He cited the famous research by the American sociologist, Mark Granovetter, on the importance on contacts on careers. Moreover, Goldthorpe argued that social resources are especially important when academic success is not forthcoming. That is to say, parents can call on family and friends to help their less academically able children get good jobs. In the development of an explicit theoretical explanation of middle-class reproduction, however, his initial discussion on the importance of social resources in the reproduction of advantage disappeared from view. In his desire to assert the significance of economic resources and downplay the importance of cultural resources in his critique of Bourdieu, it seemed that Goldthorpe had to ignore social resources as well. Again, I thought this was a shame for precisely the reasons that Goldthorpe initially acknowledged: namely, that networks of a formal and informal kind are often an important source of information and advice in the job search process as Granovetter described. The consequence of this neglect – probably an unintended rather than an intended consequence of Goldthorpe's attack on Bourdieu's ideas – was that he could no longer consider the interconnections between social resources and economic (and cultural) resources.

This chapter and Chapter 5 focus on the mobilisation of cultural resources in the reproduction of advantage. In the introduction, I noted how Goldthorpe initially equated his notion of cultural resources to Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital to refer to the value attached to education within families. He also included issues of occupational inheritance and traditions of self-employment within families. Later, however, he rejected Bourdieu's culturalist explanation of class stability because of its inability to explain change: namely, the increasing participation of both middle-class and working-class children in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. He also directed hostile criticism at Bourdieu's characterisation of a working class seemingly lacking in cultural capital and suffering from a ‘poverty of aspirations’. Now, as I have argued elsewhere, it is one thing to identify the shortcomings of Bourdieu's theory and another to deny the importance of cultural dispositions and practices in the reproduction of advantage altogether. Despite some of the problems with Bourdieu's work, which plenty of others besides Goldthorpe have noted, I think his ideas about the importance of cultural capital in the reproduction of privilege and power are worth considering further. After all, the previous two chapters illustrated how parents convert their economic capital into cultural capital by investing in a good education for their children so that they acquire the necessary credentials to gain access to desirable jobs. That they invested their financial resources in this way was influenced by the value attached to educational success.

In the Introduction, I outlined Goldthorpe's theory about the mobilisation of different types of resources – economic, cultural and social – in the reproduction of advantage. I noted how Goldthorpe emphasised the crucial importance of economic resources – wealth, income and other forms of capital – in this process because they are exclusive goods (i.e. they are not owned by others) that can be easily transmitted from one generation to another. Thus, with respect to education, middle-class parents with high and stable incomes use their economic resources to buy the best education for their children, especially in the acquisition of educational credentials. Armed with good qualifications, their children are then in the position to apply for high-level jobs that demand the very educational credentials they have bought. Without such economic resources, working-class parents cannot buy the best education for their children so they cannot ensure that their children do well at school and achieve the educational qualifications required for entry into good jobs. Economic resources are the key, therefore, for middle-class and, for that matter, working-class reproduction. The theory, of course, makes the processes of class reproduction sound deceptively simple and straightforward. What about the different demands on income such as the number of children to be educated? What about different choices about how money is spent, including holidays, for example, over education? How can a lack of economic resources be circumvented? How might other sources of economic capital be mobilised?

I started this book on an autobiographical note talking about my personal experiences of social mobility and that of my sisters and brother. Despite our modest background, my youngest sister Deirdre and myself had the opportunity to go to university and get good professional jobs. Although Barbara did not go on into higher education, she took up the opportunity to train as a nurse in her early twenties and enjoyed mobility into a semi-profession. My brother John did not take up opportunities at school and college. It meant he started work in a lowly position in a factory and experienced redundancy more than once. That said, he has subsequently enjoyed work–life mobility to secure his current managerial position. In our different ways, we have been very fortunate and, yes, even though I am a sociologist, I would say we have been very lucky. I also stressed in the Introduction, however, that such stories of mobility are ‘two a penny’. The sociological evidence shows that lots of people in Britain have enjoyed mobility from working-class origins to middle-class destinations, via education or otherwise, since the 1940s. It has not been unusual for social mobility to be of the long-range kind either – including mobility from unskilled manual origins to high-level professional destinations. Comparative research also indicates that social mobility is very common in America too.

This appendix is a descriptive account of how I did the research that underpins this book. It focuses on the processes of doing the research by simply discussing the various stages of the project in Britain and America. I have tried to be frank and honest about my experiences in the writing of this narrative rather than offer a sanitised discussion of the methods I employed. Inevitably, however, reflecting back on how I did the research forced me to order my thoughts, think about how I would write up this discussion and so on. I had to find ways of summarising a piece of research that was conducted over quite a lengthy period of time across two countries. This meant that I had to make decisions about topics that I thought interesting and worthy of discussion and issues that I considered less critical and have omitted from this account. It is impossible, in other words, not to ‘clean up’ narratives of research to some degree and it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Be that as it may, I hope the discussion of my experiences in doing this project will be interesting and beneficial to the readers of this book and researchers on other projects. In the following pages, I describe how I contacted doctors and teachers in Britain and America. Then I go on to consider the experience of doing the interviews – especially the extent to which my aide memoire worked – in both countries.

As Bourdieu had led me to expect, the middle-class parents of my American and British interviewees mobilised their cultural resources to facilitate their children's educational and occupational advancement. They assumed and expected that their children would do well in school and they held high occupational aspirations for them. These dispositions and values contributed to the interviewees' success in becoming doctors and teachers. That said, in both countries, the parents of my working-class interviewees did not lack cultural capital. They also placed a high premium on academic success although they hoped rather than assumed that their children would do well. Their occupational horizons were somewhat more modest than their middle-class counterparts but they did not seek to limit their children's aspirations as academic success propelled them onwards. They were keen, in other words, to take up educational opportunities that expanded in the post-war period of prosperity. In this chapter, I turn my attention to how the interviewees, now all middle-class parents, seek to mobilise their cultural resources to ensure their children's educational and occupational success. Most of the interviewees' children were still making their way through the education system although some of them, as young adults, were seeking to establish themselves in the labour market. Despite the diversity in their ages, all of them had been in education from the 1980s onwards when a harsher economic and political climate, including tax cuts reducing the quality of public and state educational provision, took hold.

The mobilisation of economic resources by parents certainly helped my American and British interviewees from affluent backgrounds in the pursuit of educational and occupational success as Goldthorpe's theory led me to expect. They were especially useful in risky situations that might jeopardise advancement. A lack of economic resources, however, did not hold back the interviewees from more modest class backgrounds in either country, somewhat contrary to Goldthorpe's theory. Academic success was, of course, crucial and soft money from various sources made up for the absence of financial assistance from parents not in a position to help out. In other words, the mobilisation of resources increased the probability of academic success although a lack of economic resources did not necessarily limit educational and occupational advancement. That said, the experience of competition for good jobs was much easier for the more affluent and far harsher for those from modest backgrounds. These are the key findings of Chapter 2. This chapter focuses on the interviewees as parents and their accounts of how they were applying or had applied their economic resources to help their kids do well in school and get good jobs. Despite their diverse class backgrounds, the interviewees are now, of course, all in middle-class jobs in medicine and teaching although diversity persists in that the medics would be described as upper middle class by Americans and middle class by the British and the teachers would be described as middle class by Americans and lower middle class by the British.