In her lecture, Ms. Alcorso presented findings from her dissertation research on migrant workers in Sydney, Australia, which absorbs around 40 percent of new migrants. After setting the scene and discussing alternative ways to theorize migrant employment patterns, she examined workers’ experiences and employer practices in two sectors: information technology and the hotel industry.
Her aim is to address the question of how migrants fare in the post-industrial labor force, where service industries account for the majority of jobs, and to compare it with past employment patterns in the manufacturing industry, where non-English speaking migrants from southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia were channeled systematically into poor quality, low paid jobs, while those from the UK and northern Europe were incorporated in a manner similar to the locally born.