Despite economic downturn in Europe, the EU universities experience a rapid growth in the Chinese student population. Surprisingly, although the number of the young Chinese who stay in Europe upon graduation increases, academic scholarship largely ignores the labor incorporation paths that these highly skilled migrants take. Thus far, the scholarly literature on the Chinese in the European Union has mainly explored the social mobility of low skilled immigrants, employed in the informal ethnic catering and trade business. Accordingly, lacunae in the research on migration trajectories and social mobility of Chinese graduates in Europe call for scholarly attention. My study aims to fill these gaps by exploring the variation in the Chinese graduates’ labor incorporation patterns and in their spatial mobility in the United Kingdom and Spain. These states differ in the university tuition fees, migration policies towards highly skilled workers and in the period of the Chinese students’ influx, thus providing an economically and socially diverse sample. In particular, I focus on the causal relations between social mobility and migrants’ class and status origins, human capital, spatial mobility and networks. I also examine macro-level hypotheses predicting that the EU and host states’ labor market institutions, changes in the EU policies on highly skilled and the outburst of economic crisis matter for the patterns in the Chinese highly skilled labor incorporation. Seizing on the bodies of literature on stratification, social mobility, economic incorporation and human capital, this study relies on surveys and semi-structured interviews to collect data on labor and residential trajectories from selected highly skilled Chinese migrants in Spain and the UK. My research contributes to the literature on the relations between spatial and social mobility, at the same time adding a transnational level perspective to the study of highly skilled Asian migration.
