This open access book comparatively analyses intergenerational social mobility in immigrant
families in Europe. It is based on qualitative in-depth research into several hundred
biographies and professional trajectories of young people with an immigrant working-class
background who made it into high-prestige professions. The biographies were collected and
analysed by a consortium of researchers in nine European countries from Norway to Spain.
Through these analyses the book explores the possibilities of cross-country comparisons of how
trajectories are related to different institutional arrangements at the national and local
level. The analysis uncovers the interaction effects between structural institutional settings
and specific individual achievements and family backgrounds and how these individuals
responsed to and navigated successfully through sector-specific pathways into high-skilled
professions such as becoming a lawyer or a teacher. By this it also explains why these
trajectories of professional success and upward mobility have been so exceptional in the second
generation of working-class origins and it tells us a lot also about exclusion mechanisms that
marked the school and professional careers of children of immigrants who went to school in the
1970s to 2000s in Europe - and still do.
