Resilience in labour markets, a curse?

Abstract Resilience is promoted as a positive virtue for adaptation to changes that need perseverance to new conditions, often worse. However, highly-skilled immigrants — especially from Sub Sahara Africa –seeking employment in Finland experience a prolonged and uncertain cycle of new demands for resilience. By drawing on research interviews with highly-skilled black Africans, the article illuminates the negative aspects of resilience for negatively racialised immigrants in the global North. The findings of the thematic analysis bring forth the how skilled jobseekers understand, navigate, and give meaning to the resilience demanded of them as the Finnish labour markets keep shifting goal posts and adding barriers of exclusion and precarity. Accordingly, resilience can further and uphold injustice and for those having to perform resilience it can become a curse, antithetical to positive change.