Difference and distinction? Non-migrant and migrant networks

In recent years the role of social networks, and of social capital, in shaping migrants' lived experiences and particularly, their employment opportunity has increasingly come to be recognised. However, very little of this research has adopted a relational understanding of the migrant experience, taking the influence of non-migrants' own networks on migrants as an important factor in influencing their labour market outcomes. This paper critiques the alterity and marginality automatically ascribed to migrants that is implicit in existing ways of thinking about migrant networks. The paper draws on oral history interviews with geriatricians who played an important role in the establishment of the discipline during the second half of the twentieth century to explore the importance and power of non-migrant networks in influencing migrant labour market opportunities in the UK medical labour market