Credits: Nesli Soylu
By Nesli Soylu, Dr. Abduhalim Albakkor, Dr. Ricky van Oers, and Dr. Giacomo Solano
The workshop
Researchers from the Centre for Migration Law (CMR) and the management faculty of the Radboud University organised an interdisciplinary workshop on the interplay between migration and social class at Radboud University on 24 September 2026. The workshop was organised by Nesli Soylu, Abduhalim Albakkor, Ricky van Oers, and Giacomo Solano, with the generous support of the Netherlands Network for Human Rights (NNHRR), the Radboud University and the RUNOMI (Radboud University Network on Migrant Inclusion).
While scholars have increasingly paid attention to the role of social class in the lives of people on the move, the area warrants further exploration. Migration scholarship has extensively examined how race, gender, ethnicity, and religion shape spatial and social (im)mobility, but social class has remained comparatively underexplored (Van Hear 2014; Bonjour and Chauvin 2018; Khourshed et al. 2019; Ellermann 2020; Pearlman 2020; Hunkler et al. 2022). The workshop addressed this gap by asking how social class and social capital, including social networks, shape migrants’ trajectories from pre- to post-migration, and how they affect class mobility.
The workshop featured 13 presentations by scholars from different Universities in Europe and beyond, representing a range of disciplines, but all studying migration. The presentations inter alia examined how class affects the possibility to migrate, access to legal status as well as resources after migration; how class intersects with categories such as gender and ethnicity; and how legal status shapes access to rights and social mobility. They focused not only on South-North migration but also on South-South migration, as well as on return migration. Together, they showed that social mobility cannot be understood as the automatic outcome of migration, effort, or education. Rather, it is shaped by legal categories, labour-market structures, social networks, and the resources migrants are able to utilize. Below is a summary of selected presentations given at the workshop.
Class in the ‘in between phase’
Nesli Soylu’s (Radboud University) paper, “The In-Between Phase: From Leaving Turkey to Obtaining a Migration Status in the Netherlands,” examined the class mobility that takes place between departure from Turkey and the acquisition of a migration status in the Netherlands. Drawing on 14 life-history interviews with Turkish asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, the paper followed respondents from departure through transit and arrival, up to the point at which they obtained legal status.
The paper showed that this in-between phase was far from a neutral waiting period. For asylum seekers, it involved dangerous and costly journeys, repeated camp transfers, prolonged uncertainty, restricted access to formal work, and, for some, reliance on informal and exploitative employment. Many arrived in the Netherlands having depleted their savings or incurred debt. For respondents who had held middle- to high-class positions in Turkey, these conditions produced a sharp downward shift in class position, as professional status, income, and social standing were difficult to sustain without secure legal status.
The undocumented respondents were able to reach the Netherlands with a legal visa, but experienced prolonged economic marginality and social exclusion afterwards. Their lack of legal status shaped their access to fair wages, housing, and social relationships, and in one case intersected with gendered care responsibilities and dependence within marriage.
Despite their different starting points and routes, both groups ultimately faced social isolation and precarious, unprotected work. Soylu therefore demonstrated how legal status structures access to rights and resources, and migration law can produce downward class mobility by preventing migrants from drawing on the class-based resources they possessed prior to migration.
Aspiration, networks, and incomplete mobility
Tinashe Chimbidzikai’s (Leiden University and University of Göttingen) paper, “Aspirations Without Ascent? Social Class, Religious Networks, and Precarious Mobility among Zimbabwean Migrants in South Africa” examined how educated Zimbabwean Pentecostal migrants in Johannesburg pursue middle-class futures through work, education, entrepreneurship, consumption, family obligations, and church participation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a superdiverse urban context, the paper argued that migration can produce visible progress without secure ascent.
The paper showed that migrants pursue these futures while navigating precarious employment, legal uncertainty, xenophobic exclusion, debt, deferred settlement, and the disruptions of COVID-19. Chimbidzikai developed the concepts of adaptive re-entry and adaptive middle-class formation to explain the social labour through which incomplete mobility is made credible across workplaces, churches, families, neighbourhoods, and bureaucratic systems.
The paper also examined Pentecostal churches as infrastructures of aspiration. These churches sustained migrants’ mobility projects through social capital, moral recognition, practical assistance, and emotional support, while simultaneously regulating respectability. Finally, Chimbidzikai showed how hope functioned as a coping strategy, enabling migrants to continue working towards desired futures when progress was delayed or uncertain. Yet hope could also become exhausting when legal insecurity, job loss, illness, lockdowns, debt, and xenophobic exclusion repeatedly exceeded individual effort. The paper therefore presented Zimbabwean Pentecostal migrants neither simply as victims of structural constraint nor as exemplary entrepreneurial subjects, but as adaptive social actors for whom middle-class futures remained desirable yet difficult to secure.
Merit, gender, and recognition
Lorena Izaguirre’s (UCLouvain) paper, “When Merit Doesn’t Translate: Gender, Class, and Divergent Adaptation in South–South Migration” explored what happens when education and effort do not translate into recognition or mobility. Based on 18 biographical interviews with university-educated Venezuelan women displaced to Lima, Peru, the paper examined how women experience and narrate occupational downgrading in a labour market characterised by structural informality.
Izaguirre argued that meritocratic beliefs, the conviction that effort and credentials produce recognition and mobility, are not universal, but are shaped by particular regimes of mobility and class formation. The paper showed that the capacity to abandon meritocratic expectations is itself a classed and gendered resource, unevenly distributed among migrants who share similar educational credentials and national origin. In this way, the paper addressed the workshop’s central concern with how class intersects with gender to produce differentiated opportunities and experiences among people on the move.
Rethinking class and mobility
Across the presentations, the workshop highlighted that social class is central to understanding migrants’ trajectories, but cannot be examined separately from legal status, gender, social networks, xenophobia and labour-market structures. The papers showed that class shapes who is able to migrate, how migrants navigate legal and bureaucratic systems, and what forms of belonging, participation, and mobility become possible after arrival.
Rather than treating social mobility as an individual achievement, the workshop emphasised the need to examine the conditions under which mobility is enabled, delayed, or reversed. This includes attention to the resources migrants bring with them, the networks they mobilise, the legal categories to which they are subject, and the institutional and labour-market contexts in which they build their lives.
Bios
Nesli Soylu is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Migration Law, Radboud University. Her research uses socio-legal and empirical methods to examine the interplay between social class and migration status. Her work focuses on migrants from Turkey in the Netherlands, including family migrants, international students, refugees, undocumented migrants, and labour migrants.
Dr. Abduhalim Albakkor is a Sociology Lecturer at University College Roosevelt (part of Utrecht University) located in the province of Zeeland, Netherlands. Until September 2026, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Migration Law at Radboud University. His research examines migration, diasporic communities, and the social and emotional dimensions of refugee experiences, with particular attention to how social class, gender, age, and migration policies shape belonging, identity, and life trajectories.
Dr. Ricky van Oers is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Law and Migration Law and Director of Societal Impact at RUNOMI, Radboud University. Her research focuses on migrant inclusion and social justice. She received an NWO XS grant in 2025 to study the role of social class for people on the move, as part of the broader Migration-Class Nexus project.
Dr. Giacomo Solano is Senior Assistant Professor in Migrant Inclusion at the Nijmegen School of Management, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Radboud University, and a member of RUNOMI. His research interests include the social and labour-market integration of migrants, migrant entrepreneurship, comparative integration policies, and social network analysis.
Acknowledgements: The organisers would like to thank the Netherlands Network for Human Rights (NNHRR) and the NNHRR Migration and Borders Working Group as well as Radboud University, RUNOMI and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for their generous financial support, which facilitated the realisation of the workshop.