A comparative study on the adaptation processes of Spanish young people emigrated to the UK and Chile during the period 2010-2014

Abstract

The article analyzes how those young Spanish people (aged between 25 and 35) with a university degree, migrated to the United Kingdom and Chile between 2010 and 2014, build their adaptive processes in both countries. These processes are complex and they depend on a range of factors, such as the skills of migrants regarding the language of the arrival country, their habituation to the climate of such country, the social position they acquire after migration, their interaction with the local population, the images they construct about their society of origin, and the level of integration in the new social spaces they access, etc.. Depending on all these factors, multiple possible adaptation paths of migrants can be configured. These paths are systematized here by means of a three-dimensional analytical model that distinguishes among nostalgic, converse and cosmopolitan ways of adaptation. Such model is used to examine how university skilled migrants construct, deconstruct and reconstruct their adaptive strategies in the UK and Chile, two different socio-economic and cultural contexts. Firstly, in the UK, the adaptive processes reveal a more versatile character, showing adaptation paths of young Spanish immigrants that are classified, respectively, as nostalgic, converse and cosmopolitan. However, those young Spanish people settled in Chile manifest greatly affected by the high degree of privatization of problems and public services existing in this country, in which it is broadly assumed that the costs of such problems and services have to be individually paid. This causes that these young migrants, faced to this very difficult situation that is so hard to understand and accept by them, develop adaptation processes mainly characterized by the nostalgia for their origin society and the idealization of the return.