A Biographical Approach to Understand Long‐Term Occupational Trajectories of Immigrants in the UK Labour Market

ABSTRACT

This study adopts a biographical approach to examine migrants' integration experiences within the UK labour market. It employs monthly retrospective data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to identify distinct occupational trajectories experienced by migrants who arrived in the UK between 1927 and 2016. We identified five representative trajectories capturing labour market stability (i.e. stable paid employment, stable self‐employment, and stable family care), precarity (transitional unemployment) and enhancement (investing in education). Overall, these trajectories evidence that a high proportion of UK migrants experienced successful integration, characterised by fast and sustainable labour market entry, while only a small percentage (2.36%) experienced transitional unemployment. EU nationals were substantially more likely than non‐EU migrants to experience this success, despite being less educated on average and entering without prior job offers. Our analysis also revealed that gender, education, age at arrival, and ethnicity all significantly influence the integration process. They interact in unique ways to influence the probability of immigrants embarking on one of the identified trajectories. High national unemployment during migrants' year of arrival was identified as a consistent factor of labour market exclusion, indicating that initial inactivity significantly increased migrants' vulnerability to future economic scarring.