There are eight main scientific achievements linked to the SMACT project, that are linked to articles in different stages of the publication process. Firstly, we have captured the discrimination that highly skilled migrants face in Switzerland, this is mitigated not by the level of skill, but depends rather on the desirability of the country of origin (with non-EU countries facing the most discrimination), possession of additional citizenships, and the language proficiency in Swiss official languages. Furthermore, female expatriates face far more direct and indirect discrimination in the work place, which manifests by limiting access to opportunities, recognition and promotions. The severity of the discrimination depended on whether line managers were also expatriates or locals, where multi-national work environments exerted less pressure to conform on highly skilled migrants.
Secondly, our results indicated that significant adjustment issues were found in social interactions and work-life balance in highly skilled migrants up to 15 years of living in Switzerland.
Thirdly, when we assessed the broader socio-environmental system, we found that there were structural barriers to integration, that resulted in continuous tasks that were required by migration control or other administrative processes that reduced leisure time. The psychological effects of these processes were seen in the narratives of highly skilled migrants who claimed that they were struggling with notions of ‘being good enough’, ‘having to constantly prove themselves’ and ‘to be deserving’ to stay in Switzerland.
Fourthly, we used the Conservation of Resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989; Hobfoll et al., 2015) to assess what participants believed to be stressors or threats, as well as the resources that they used to prevent resource loss.
Fifthly, we found that expatriates often move into positions of vulnerability, due to their lack of knowledge of the law, negative attitudes towards migrants which limited accessible information. Negative situations often resulted, such as being in legal disputes, having to pay fines for not knowing context-specific information, and being exploited in work and living conditions.
Sixthly, we reconsidered the classification of highly skilled migrants (i.e. AEs and SIEs), and instead used descriptions of voluntary or involuntary migration experiences. Expatriates, with voluntary experiences reported a ‘betwixt or between’ state (Ibarra, & Obodaru, 2016), and were less adjusted in comparison to involuntary migrants.
Seventhly, as part of the longitudinal findings we examined if personality indicators would affect adjustment processes. Using a latent profile analysis, we found that the most significant predictors for work adjustment outcomes were proactive personality and learning goal orientations moderated by acculturation motivation, whereas for non-work outcomes the most significant predictors were resilience and learning goal orientations moderated by cultural distance.
And lastly, we assessed a model using intentions to stay as a predictor assess expatriate adjustment in social and work domains based on the time spent in Switzerland according with cultural distance as a moderator and controlling for language proficiency. Our results show that expatriate adjustment issues change according to time spent in a host country, but that expatriate adjustment issues remained in social interaction and work-life domains up to 15 years after initial migration to Switzerland.
