Migrating to complete transitions: a study of high-skilled youth migration to France

This chapter presents the results of a pioneering study on young, highly-qualified emigrants moving from Portugal to France. My analysis draws on a survey (of 113 individuals) distributed in 2012 to Portuguese emigrants in France aged between 20 and 35 who held at least one completed university degree. Its purpose was to map socio-demographic patterns. This was followed by fourteen semi-structured biographical interviews through which I could grasp a detailed understanding of the pathways leading to the interviewees' decision to migrate. In this chapter I analyse some of the data collected through the questionnaire, focusing on (blocked) transitions to adulthood, and conclude that most of the respondents decided to migrate mainly because they wished to stop being sociologically young - that is, trapped in transition, waiting to get stable job, to get married and have children. Therefore, these emigrant trajectories result from a process of increasing reflexivity about structural constraints in the country of origin; they are individual and collective responses to the collapse of the standardised, linear life-course model