Abstract

Due to rising dependency ratios, Western economies are focusing on attracting and retaining international employees, not just for low-skilled jobs but increasingly for high-skilled roles, especially in ICT and technology sectors. Despite labour needs and policy efforts, skilled immigrants often face difficulties in job matching and experience bias in recruitment, leading to higher unemployment rates among them (Shirmohammadi et al., 2019).

Research on migrant integration has focused on coping strategies and acculturation. Coping studies explore survival in new environments, while acculturation research examines attitude, behavior, and identity changes. The literature review of acculturation, coping, and integration success of international skilled migrants by Hajro et al. (2019) suggests that integration success is multifaceted and factors leading towards successful integration – both in the domains of personal and work life – work together, not in isolation, and that future research should investigate the critical combinations of these factors.  

Responding to this call and relying on 14 life-story interviews with high-skilled immigrants in the Finnish ICT sector, we ask “how do high-skilled internationals make sense of and negotiate their lives in a new country?”. As these individuals are making sense of and expressing their reasons for this move, their living in the new country, and their future goals, they share a range of experiences. Their experiences are both emotional and rational and both positive and negative reflecting high-skilled internationals’ diverse journeys in the new country.

Our analysis suggests that acculturation is more an outcome of the individual’s journey and experiences in the country, rather than a conscious and strategic choice. We also suggest that acculturation is a multimodal process, in which modes can vary across three life domains of high-skilled internationals, including work, social relations and societal aspects. Seeing voluntary retention in the host country as a proxy of sufficient integration success, the success is shaped by at least one positive anchoring experience in any of the three domains, with emphasis varying over time and across individuals.

Keywords: highly skilled internationals, migration, retention, acculturation