Project title

Voices of Migrant Workers: Online Narratives of Labour Market Inclusion and Exclusion in the Netherlands

Research question

How difficult do migrants perceive navigating the Dutch labour market to be, and which factors contribute most to this difficulty?

Project description

Migrant workers play an increasingly important role in the Dutch labour market, yet their pathways into employment remain uneven. Existing research and policy debates rely largely on administrative statistics and surveys, which provide useful benchmarks but reveal little about how migrants actually navigate labour market institutions, interpret requirements, confront barriers, or mobilise informal strategies.

Jisu Kim addresses this gap by turning to an unconventional but revealing source: large-scale, organically produced narratives from Reddit, where migrants seek advice, share experiences, and exchange practical tips. Using computational text analysis and semantic network modelling, she identifies the key difficulties, support mechanisms, and sense-making processes that shape migrants’ labour market experiences, comparing multiple migrant subgroups to capture variation across different situations and backgrounds. To quantify these dynamics, the project introduces the Migrant Market Access Score (MMAS), a multidimensional index capturing migrants’ perceived clarity, accessibility, and manageability of labour market navigation. By combining narrative depth with analytical breadth, the project offers new insights into labour market inclusion in the Netherlands, and into what it actually feels like to find your way in an unfamiliar system.

Selected publications

  • Kim, J., Weber, I., & Zagheni, E. (2026). The Grass Really is Greener on the Other Side: Immigration and Changes in Expressed Sentiments Online. International Migration Review, 01979183261427417.
  • Rottenkolber, A., Ali, O., Mónus, G., Li, J., Kim, J., et al. (2025). It’s who you know—unless you’re famous: professional networks and prestige in scholarly mobility (No. WP-2025-028). Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany.
  • Baik, K. and Kim, J. (2025) Analyzing the Discourse around Russo-Ukrainian war in Germany: Understanding Variances in Public Stances. In print in The international conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2025).
  • Kim, J., Zagheni, E., and Weber. I., (2023), Improving Migration Statistics Using Social Media, In Practitioners’ Guide on Harnessing Data Innovation for Migration Policy. IOM