ABSTRACT

Informed by narrative interviews with 24 highly educated Eritrean migrants, this chapter explores the socio-cultural integration experiences of highly educated Eritrean migrants in the UK. I mainly focus on expectations, challenges and the struggle of the migrants to ‘fit in’ their host country. I argue that, despite various challenges, highly educated Eritrean migrants are global citizens who hold secular and open worldviews to embrace cultural differences with the established population. Yet, I show that holding secular and open worldviews are not enough to integrate to a new culture and get access to required services. Besides, my findings indicate that, contrary to their expectation, many of the skills and expertise held by the Eritrean migrants are considered deficient in the UK. Hence, they use their educational attainment to gain additional knowledge, skills and experiences, which help them to integrate to their host country. They often went back to college to attain a second bachelor’s degree or pursue their graduate study in order to gain a UK qualification. They also opted to volunteer in different institutions to gain local work experience. This helped them to nurture additional experiences and multiple (multicultural) identities to deal with cultural differences they found between their lives in Eritrea and the UK. Eritrea being one of the hardest contexts, this study adds a more robust explanation to the global debates around global citizenship education and migration.