Present but not counted: highly skilled migrant women in Belgium

Family reunification is one of the main channels for migration to the EU, yet little is known about the skills and labour market trajectories of family migrants. Family migration continues to be seen within a gendered and binary paradigm of the male economic migrant and female dependent. Related policies disadvantage migrant women and limit their participation on the labour market in material and structural ways. While EU’s Single Permit Directive gives family migrants immediate and unlimited access to the labour market, its efficacy is limited as highly skilled migrant women are a blind spot in existing infrastructure and integration policies. This paper studies how migrant women push back against being categorised as dependents and circumvent the penalty of family migration policies. Migration categories become key sites of negotiation as women opt to move as students, labour migrants, by acquiring citizenship or as temporary workers to gain better access to the labour market while accomodating familial roles. Findings highlight the need for disaggregated data on family migrants in terms of skill and education, and for data collection that can capture the dynamism of lived experience.