The Border Within: Highly Skilled Syrians in the UK Narrativising Work and Belonging

This paper argues for a reconceptualisation of migrant work as a critical site for negotiating borders and belonging, focusing on highly skilled Syrian migrants in the UK, a group often overlooked in migration scholarship. Through 17 narrative conversations, the study examines how borders are embodied, negotiated, carried and crossed in the everyday professional lives of this group. Grounded in affect and bordering theories and guided by a decolonial methodology, the study explores how these professionals navigate racial, political and social hierarchies within the UK’s socio-political context. Our study asks: What does it mean to cross a border when mobility gives way to emplacement? How do borders persist within racialised migrant bodies as they navigate work and belonging? Findings highlight the affective dimensions of migrant work, revealing tensions between imposed identities and the agency to redefine the self beyond victimhood. Work functions as both an anchor and a contested terrain where identities are negotiated, transformed, and, at times, placed at risk. As the first study of its kind on highly skilled Syrian migrants in the UK, this research contributes to migration scholarship by foregrounding work as a critical space where selfhoods are actively negotiated, with significant implications for migration scholarship and the politics of identity and belonging.