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Unemployed Female Skilled Migrants from India in the Netherlands : the entrepreneurial self under structural dependencymore
by Kate Kirk and Kathinka sinha kerkhoff
Most Indian ‘high-skilled’ migrants in the Netherlands are male and single. If married, they generally bring their wives as ‘dependents’ and any skills these ‘trailing spouses’ may have remain unregistered. Although their legal status... more
Most Indian ‘high-skilled’ migrants in the Netherlands are male and single. If married, they generally bring their wives as ‘dependents’ and any skills these ‘trailing spouses’ may have remain unregistered. Although their legal status includes a work-visa, no special policies exist that integrate these women into the Dutch economy/society. Consequently, these women are marginalised in (national) development debates and generally remain unemployed. This chapter concerns these women’s ‘entrepreneurial selves’, non-unitary subjectivity and mental well-being. Ethnographic research was carried out among (mostly) unemployed Indian female spouses in the Netherlands. Part of this research encompassed post-arrival memories of individual women, which the authors here present as a ‘collective biography’. These narratives are analysed by placing them in a (feminist-) discourse that positions the female (paid-) worker as the new ‘poster-girl’ for neo-liberal dreams of upward mobility. The same d...