1Adji is a second-generation immigrant in France in his thirties at the time of the interview. He was born to Turkish parents who came to France in their twenties to seek employment. Adji lived in Lyon during his childhood but moved to Vénissieux with his mother after his parents’ divorce, when he was around age 18. Since then, he had been living and working in Vénissieux. Adji got a professional qualification. With this degree, he intended to get a job in plumbing. However, due to a variety of reasons, such as a lack of working experience and social connections, he never succeeded in this regard. Instead, he had been stuck with unskilled, unstable, and low-paying jobs in catering. As with Qi in Shanghai, Adji’s experience demonstrates the importance of education for one’s success in the urban labor market. However, unlike Qi, Adji did not have the right family background, social support, and high aspirations to get a good education. Due to his parents’ low level of cultural assimilation, his limited French proficiency prevented him from getting a good education in the first place. His family did not put much emphasis on the importance of education. As a result, he failed in his efforts to get a professional baccalaureate. Perhaps more importantly, it is the segmented labor market in France that made it almost impossible for Adji to get a plumbing job, no matter how hard he tried.

Family Background, Social Support, and Educational Attainment of the Second Generation

2A central focus of the segmented assimilation theory is the socioeconomic attainment of the second-generation immigrants (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Zhou 1997). According to the theory, immigrant groups embark on different paths of assimilation in post-industrial destination countries, such as the United States. It proposes a set of determinants on assimilation outcomes of different immigrant groups, which include both individual-level and contextual factors (Zhou 1997). Individual-level factors include things like education, age upon arrival, and local language proficiency, while structural factors include things such as ethnic/racial status, family background, and community characteristics. The theory of segmented assimilation “assumes that these two sets of determinants are in themselves of minimum importance” and emphasizes the interaction between individuals’ characteristics and structural factors and its implications for assimilation outcomes (Zhou 1997).

3As for Adji, his family’s low level of assimilation and a lack of social capital that is conducive to his educational attainment resulted in his failure to get a good education. First, as a second-generation immigrant, Adji mainly spoke Turkish at home, which was a “disability” for him, as he described it. We do not know whether his father spoke French, but from this experience we do know that his mother did not speak French. As his father had to work, he must have spent most of his time speaking Turkish with his mother. Native language ability is an indicator of how assimilated immigrants are in the destination society (Alba et al. 2002). Apparently, the extent of assimilation of his parents as first-generation immigrants was limited, which put a limitation on Adji’s exposure to the culture and language of the mainstream society. Granted, the preservation of parental languages and ethnic cultures can be beneficial if there is an ethnic enclave that can provide routes of upward mobility (Zhou 1992). However, this is not the case for Adji. Because of his “disability” in French language, he repeated the first year of both primary school and middle school. It is also likely that his questionable French proficiency prevented him from getting more education than the professional qualification he obtained. For instance, when he tried to get a professional baccalaureate, he could not understand the technical details of the courses and was slow in progress compared to other students. After two years, he failed to get the degree. Because of the language barrier, his sister, who was interested in getting a better education, went back to Turkey for her education, which also points to the fact that it can be very difficult for children of immigrants to get a good education in France.

4Second, from his account, we know that the social support he could get from his family and maybe the ethnic community was quite limited during this whole educational process. Adji mentioned that his father ran a business, and that he had worked with his father in the restaurant business. It is thus likely that his father was a restaurant owner, which kept him very busy. His mother was a housewife who did not speak French. According to him, his brother “did not study at all,” which indicates that his brother quit school early and went directly to work. His sister had to go back to Turkey to get a good education. Also, his family was not able to help him in making decisions regarding schooling in the French system. For instance, after he got his professional qualification in plumbing, he could go directly to find plumbing jobs. But he was “misguided” to study for a professional baccalaureate. It turned out that he had neither the capability nor the need for this degree. His story points to the possibility that his family and ethnic community did not create an environment that promoted his education, which is important for immigrant children to have in order to get ahead in education (Zhou and Kim 2006).

5Compared to children of migrants in China, even though there is no formal exclusion of second-generation immigrants from the educational system in France, disadvantaged family background in terms of socioeconomic status and assimilation level and a lack of social capital can negatively affect the educational and occupational outcomes of the second generation. Adji’s parents came to France in their twenties from Turkey. His father was an “employer” in the restaurant business, and his mother was a housewife. As first-generation immigrants, his parents succeeded in terms of fulfilling the goal of making a living in France. However, the door to assimilation was shut for Adji when he failed to get an adequate education.

Human Capital, Social Capital, and the Unbreakable Line of the Segmented Labor Market

6When Adji’s personal disadvantages met with the segmented labor market in France, he faced the impossible task of finding his dream job. Granted, to some extent Adji’s failure to set his feet in plumbing was a result of his family background and education. However, even though Adji failed to get a degree higher than his professional qualification, his professional qualification was supposed to be enough for him to work as a plumber. Therefore, perhaps more fundamentally, it is due to structural factors that Adji failed to get a plumbing job in particular and a formal job in general. As a result of the unbreakable line of the segmented labor market, Adji was trapped in low-skill, low-pay, and precarious jobs that are characteristic of the secondary labor market (Piore 1979).

7First, the theory of human capital cannot explain Adji’s failure to find a plumbing job (Mincer 1974). Having a professional qualification is far from being enough. Adji’s experience demonstrates that he seemingly could never have the required level of human capital to get a plumbing job. To get such a job you cannot have any flaw on your resume. From the description of his encounters with the temp agencies, we know that his lack of work experience was one of the main reasons he could not find a job. As mentioned, he was “misguided” to study for a professional baccalaureate for two years. After two years, he failed to get the degree, an unexpected consequence of which is that during those two years he ended up accumulating no work experience in plumbing. According to him, because he did not work right after he got the professional qualification, this gap created a lot of trouble in his job search. The job opportunities were so few that for all the visits and all the calls to temp agencies he made, he did not find even a single job, which made it impossible for him to have any experience in plumbing. In addition, when Adji started going to temp agencies to look for jobs, he quickly found that that a mere professional qualification was not enough. He was told that among other things, he also needed a driver’s license. He said that “something is always missing.” To meet the requirements of the job, Adji did try to get a driver’s license, but only after six to seven years after he got his professional qualification. Therefore, in a segmented labor market, someone cannot be “perfect” enough to get the job one wants.

8Second, Adji mainly derived social capital from a co-ethnic network that confined his accessible jobs to catering, making it hard to achieve upward mobility in the segmented labor market (Massey et al. 1993; Portes 1998). Adji’s experience points to the possibility that his lack of social capital is also an explanation for his failure in finding a plumbing job. From his description, it seemed that he was alone in navigating through the complicated system of temp agencies and other institutions. His family members and friends did not advise him or offer much help in the process. At least, they may have helped to such a low extent that Adji rarely mentioned them in his story. After he got the driver’s license, he restarted the job search in plumbing. At that time, it occurred to him that he could approach his own “population” for help. He first did an internship with a Turkish friend for three months. Because of personal differences, he quit the job. After that, he worked for an Arabian friend he made during the time he studied for the professional baccalaureate. The “friend” tried to take advantage of his labor and exploit him. During the two weeks Adji worked for him, he worked so hard that his back broke; he got diagnosed with a herniated disc later. Because of this illness, Adji had to give up on the idea of working as a plumber for good. When he tried to get into another job in optical fiber, his cousin was able to offer him an internship. But the cousin was a self-employer who could not hire Adji.

9Finally, a job search on the labor market in itself is very demanding for people like Adji (Fang et al. 2013). Getting the required documents ready for the job search turned out to be an impossible mission for him. He mentioned more than once that he dreaded the idea of submitting a CV and a cover letter in order to apply for a job. One of the advantages of catering jobs is that one does not have to prepare such documents. To apply for jobs through formal channels, Adji sometimes needed to use the computer and the Internet to fill out applications for a job. He did not have easy access to a computer. When he found one, he did not know how to navigate through the webpages to get to the right link to proceed with the application. Adji did not know where he could find help with his online job search. Therefore, to find a formal job in the labor market, even the initial barriers in the job search look insurmountable for Adji.

Blocked Upward Socioeconomic Mobility for Second-Generation Immigrants in French Cities

10Even though Adji was educated in France and could speak French, it was likely that he will not be able to surpass his parents in socioeconomic attainment. As a result of all his disadvantages, the road to upward socioeconomic mobility was blocked for Adji. From the preceding analysis, it is likely that individual and structural factors worked together to cause Adji to be assimilated to the bottom of the social hierarchy of French cities (Silberman, Alba and Fournier 2007). He was trapped in catering jobs. Adji has easy access to catering jobs mainly because of his social network. He never needed a CV or cover letter to find jobs in catering. Over the years, he had been working catering jobs when he was not searching for plumbing jobs or doing internships. He said that in catering he could always find work. He himself came to acknowledge at one point in the interview that “what works best is relations.” However, catering is a low-skill field, especially for those jobs in fast food restaurants. This type of job has long working hours. It is physically and emotionally demanding. It is socially alienating. Because those jobs are informal and low-skill, Adji had to change jobs on a constant basis.

11However, unlike his parents, Adji was apparently not satisfied with the current situation. Arriving in France as first-generation immigrants, his parents could be considered successful in accomplishing their goals. His father was a business owner and his mother a housewife. They raised a family in France. For Adji, who grew up in France, he wanted to achieve more than that. He attempted to get a professional job, but he had no success. Even though he could “always work,” he was not satisfied with the catering jobs. The barriers and failures he encountered in the labor market made him very frustrated, and he became very critical of the social and economic systems in France. Indeed, in the status quo, chances are that Adji will not see any improvement in his employment prospects.