Immigrants and mobile phone uses: Spanish-speaking young adults recently arrived in London

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of immigrants’ mobile phone uses by focusing on a particular social group, European young adults, and moment in the migration process—arrival at a new place. It analyses the experiences of 25 Spanish-speaking young adults recently arrived in London through a qualitative methodological lens based on semistructured interviews and participant observation at relevant sites of arrival in the city. We looked at the potential mobile phones have to empower youth in their migration processes—from improving their transnational communication to accessing relevant and timely information at destination—as well as the challenges young migrants face to fully enjoy mobile services in a new national context. We argue that this tension between the potential benefits and challenges of mobile communication is particularly prominent when arriving at a new place, a moment characterized by economic and emotional uncertainties. However, this temporal dimension has tended to remain underexplored in the literature that deals with mobile communication and users’ strategies. Thus we propose the concept of “immigrants’ technological adjustments” to name the set of decisions immigrants take as information and communication technologies (ICTs) users in order to ensure the availability of digital resources and services while moving between countries. We draw upon empirical examples from fieldwork in order to offer a new conceptual tool that further develops the burgeoning field of immigrants and ICT use.

Keywords

immigration intra-European mobility London mobile phones technological adjustments young adult Spaniards

If many of us, the young people who emigrate to a foreign country had to choose our most precious goods, we would choose the computer or the mobile phone. Not for our addiction to social networking sites, games, or online films, but because they allow us to feel close to our friends, our family, or our partner. They allow us to overcome what English people so accurately call to be homesick

(Serra, 2014, p. 77)

Introduction

Despite being a very heterogeneous population group, immigrants constitute a particular profile of mobile information and communication technologies (ICT) users, sharing similar practices and needs arising from their spatial movement across territories. Digital technologies have reshaped immigrants’ management of family and social relationships, commercial ties, political activism, religious affiliation, and other cross-border engagements (Boyd, 1989; Diminescu, 2008; Nedelcu, 2012; Vertovec, 2009), allowing immigrants to communicate and access information from multiple locations in real time (Ros, 2010; Ros, González, Marín, & Sow, 2007).

With this paper we aim to contribute to the understanding of immigrants’ ICT uses, especially mobile phones, by focusing on a particular social group and moment of migration: Spanish-speaking young adults recently arrived in London. Migration is rarely a linear process and actors might move in multiple directions and destinations across time (King, 2002; Redstone & Massey, 2004). However, we can distinguish different sequential events for analytical purposes, such as “pre-migration and departure, transit, and resettlement in the new environment” (Drachman, 1992, p. 68) as well as return or back-and-forth movements. Each of these moments involves different needs and expectations as well as ICT practices. By focusing on the moment of arrival, we aim to highlight the importance of contextualizing the analysis of mobile phone uses, not only across the lines of who and where, but also and very importantly, when.

We focused on Spanish young adults moving to London in search of better opportunities after the economic crisis, pushed by one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe, reaching more than 55% for people aged under 25 (Eurostat, 2016). Estimations indicated that between 2007 and 2013, 341,000 Spaniards emigrated abroad, mainly to the UK, France, Germany, and Ecuador (González Ferrer, 2013, p. 5); 64% of which were under 29 years old (Navarrete Moreno, 2014, p. 74).¹

The paper begins with some theoretical considerations, drawing on sociological studies of mobile communication and ICT and development studies. It then presents the methodological implications of the qualitative research conducted in London in 2013. The empirical sections follow, focusing on participants’ experiences of ICT use in preparation of their migration projects and the main challenges they faced as mobile phone users immediately after moving across national borders. The final section summarizes key results and points to future lines of research.

Theoretical implications of ICT use of young adults and immigrants

The extensive literature on immigrants and ICT has covered a wide range of topics (Borkert, Cingolani, & Premazzi, 2009), including the undoubted relevance that ICT use has in diverse migration projects. As Diminescu (2008) observed, “The use of ICT is a must when it comes to preparing to travel, orienting oneself in the traveled space and organizing encounters” (2008, p. 571). More recently, McGregor and Siegel (2013) concluded that social media can “reduce the emotional cost of separation and allow access to both information and contacts that can assist the migrant in having a smooth relocation” (2013, pp. 5–6). González (2008) agreed that nowadays “migrants can take the decision to migrate with more information . . . take better decisions about routes, destinations, conditions and when to depart” (2008, p. 12). However, she also found that “The more availability of information does not necessarily mean having better information” (2008, p. 12).

In particular, various scholars have increasingly recognized the important role mobile phones have played in shaping contemporary migration cultures in very different contexts, from rural Jamaicans (Horst, 2006; Horst & Miller, 2006) and overseas Filipinos (Paragas, 2009) to Chinese regional migrants (Law & Peng, 2008; Wallis, 2011; Yang, 2008), to mention a few. Although there is no “single, integrated ‘theory of mobile communications’ to comprehensively cover all the issues at hand” (Ling & Donner, 2009, p. 12), this paper echoes the theoretical framework proposed by Horst and Miller (2006) based on the sociology of communication and development studies. This framework offers a way to tackle the tensions between the potential of mobile communication to improve users’ lives and the difficulties they might face in fully enjoying that potential, depending on their changing socioeconomic and personal contexts. Horst (2006) identified this tension among her participants in Jamaica in terms of what she called “the blessing and burdens of [cell phone] communication,” highlighting the pros and cons that different people experience as ICT users in a particular spatio-temporal setting.

The sociology of communication via mobile phones has too often ignored “the burdens” by focusing on skilled users located in rich metropolitan regions enjoying the advantages of the new technologies. However, its main contribution has been to pioneer the study of these mobile devices as symbols of social status in consumer societies (Wirth, von Pape, & Karnowski, 2008) and their unique affordances, mainly “mobility and individuality” (Horst & Miller, 2006, p. 7), which allow users to enjoy ubiquity, reachability, and immediacy in communication and information services.

According to Hemelryk Donald, Dirndorfer Anderson, and Spry (2010) “Mobile phones are designed necessarily to allow the user to experience some spatial control over their communications practice” (2010, p. 11), a particularly valued affordance to manage multiple life domains, such as socializing, work, family care, and leisure time. A good case in point is the popularization of specific practices such as microcoordination, “the ability to adjust an agreement as the need arises” (Ling & Yttri, 2002, p. 139) and hyper-coordination, the combination of instrumental and expressive “social and emotional interactions” (2002, p. 140).

An empirical application to specific migrant contexts is exemplified by transnational family studies. Through rich qualitative analysis, these studies have shown the multiple communicative resources or “polymedia” (Madianou & Miller, 2012) people rely on to “recreate, albeit for a few minutes and at a distance, a feeling of home, of domesticity” (Bonini, 2011, p. 881) as well as to provide and receive care across borders (Baldassar & Merla, 2013; Carling, Menjívar, & Schmalzbauer, 2012; Nedelcu & Wyss, 2016; Panagakos & Horst, 2006; Parreñas, 2005). More importantly, this research has nuanced ICT advantages for transnational family communication, acknowledging the multiple “burdens” or emotional and economic difficulties involved in the process, including lack of intimacy (Wilding, 2006) and resource asymmetries between migrants and nonmigrants (Carling, 2008; Horst, 2006; Mahler, 2001).

When conceptualizing “polymedia” Madianou and Miller (2012) argued that the costs of media access were increasingly a secondary element in migrants’ media choices, privileging cultural contexts and emotional dimensions as more determinant factors in migrants’ repertoires of connectivity. However, the authors also stated that, far from being a general trend, “polymedia was only an emergent condition in relation to our actual fieldwork.” In the end, they added: “In practice, very few of our participants have experienced communication as a kind of entirely free choice from a menu of possibilities” (Madianou & Miller, 2012, p. 127). As we will see in the section Mobile Phone Usage on Arrival: Potentials and challenges, our fieldwork also confirms that economic constraints still play an important role in the way migrants from diverse backgrounds use digital resources. In this sense, we argue that the polymedia concept is less useful to describe an empirical reality than to express a desire for a future one.

Economic difficulties have been specifically addressed by development studies, which have looked at mobile phone adoption by low-income users in so-called developing regions of the world. On the one hand, this literature has optimistically highlighted the potential ICT has to empower users in contexts of high inequalities by providing access to relevant and timely information (Fernández-Ardèvol, Galperin, & Castells, 2011; Moonesinghe, de Silva, Silva, & Abeysuriya, 2006). On the other hand, it has also paid special attention to the multiple socioeconomic and cultural difficulties people from diverse backgrounds have to access and appropriate technology, also known as digital divides. This concept emerged in the 1990s and was initially concerned with measuring ICT access (mainly in so-called Third World regions) from a quite normative, linear, and quantitatively driven approach. In the early 2000s, attention shifted “from access and ownership toward skills and literacies” (Leurs, 2015, p. 19). Contemporary critical approaches that acknowledge digital divides as plural, qualitatively nuanced, and multiply located (Frissen, 2005; Tsatsou, 2011; van Dijk & Hacker, 2003) have paved the way to more refined and multidimensional analyses that highlight the embedded and embodied nature of people’s relationships with technology in their everyday lives. Thus digital divides can be also found at the core of wealthy societies such as in Europe (Tsatsou, 2011) and in ICT-skilled social groups such as second generation young migrants (Leurs, 2015) or, as this paper illustrates, young adults moving within affluent—though unequal—European regions.

The literature on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) as well as on migrant communication has shown people’s resilience when faced with digital divides: numerous studies have shown low-waged migrants take advantage of low-end ICT devices and services (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2005; Gordano 2014; Sabaté i Dalmau, 2014) and develop their own strategies of appropriation such as pay-as-you-go mobile services, collective Internet access points, and multiple SIM card ownership, among others (Gordano, 2013; Sey, 2009). This literature also proved useful to analyze the ICT strategies of recently arrived immigrants who wanted to keep connections and access digital services despite and beyond their scarce economic resources.

We argue that, on the one hand, a fruitful combination of these theoretical inputs acknowledges the complexities inherent in technology use (or nonuse) depending on various geopolitical locations and diverse social groups marked by differential axes of power in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, skills, education level, and economic income, among others. Following this literature, the section Mobile Phone Usage on Arrival focuses on the tensions between the potential mobile phones have to empower youth in their migration processes and the difficulties they face to fully enjoy mobile services on arrival. In this sense, this approach proved useful in our analysis of mobile phone use among Spanish young adults in London, enabling us to better contextualize ICT practices in relation to individuals’ sociodemographic and cultural profiles as well as wider economic, political, and technological structures at particular moments.

On the other hand, the reviewed literature has only partly referred to the importance of considering different migration moments when studying immigrants and ICT (Ros, 2010). Besides scattered references to the benefits of staying connected (almost taking it for granted), it has not considered in extenso the particularities of arriving in a new country as a distinct moment in ICT usage. Thus we argue that it is worth analyzing in more detail what happens with ICT access and use from the moment of taking the decision to migrate to the first months after migration, as experienced by a particular social group sharing basic characteristics.

From a sociodemographic perspective, the case of young people and ICT use is particularly challenging since research on ICT use among this social group—especially located in affluent urban settings—has identified them as forerunners of digital technologies (Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2007), typically highly skilled users who lead a particular “mobile youth culture” (Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu, & Sey, 2007) with “mobiles everywhere” (Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2007). As part of the so-called “digital generations” (Buckingham & Willet, 2013), young adults’ everyday lives are pretty much entangled with mobile technologies. Based on this theoretical background, we anticipated most Spanish young adults arriving in London to be intensive users of digital resources. The apparent advantage of their age cohort regarding ICT skills in a European context of good telecommunication infrastructure, however, did not exempt them from facing multiple challenges inherent to arriving at and settling in a different country.

Notes on methodology

This interdisciplinary paper takes a socioconstructivist epistemological stance (Schwandt, 2000) that considers social reality as located in specific historical contexts and embodied by diverse actors who make sense of their practices according to the different locations they occupy in a given society (Berger & Luckmann, 1967).

The qualitative study presented here did not aim to be comprehensive but rather to zoom into the diverse experiences of mobile phone use by 25 Spanish-speaking young adults, aged 18 to 35, recently arrived in London, one of the top destinations of Spanish young emigrants. Three researchers conducted fieldwork in that city between July and October 2013, combining semistructured interviews with participant observation in relevant sites of arrival, mainly a hostel, two shopping malls, an NGO offering advice and training to immigrants, the Ecuadorian consulate, the Spanish consulate, and the Spanish Ministry of Labour offices in the United Kingdom (UK). Interviewees were contacted in these observation sites through snowball sampling. The selection criteria for the final sample was based on time of arrival (less than 2 years), gender representation, and the inclusion of both Spanish-born persons (5) and nationalized Spaniards born in Ecuador (11), Colombia (6), Venezuela (1), Peru (1), and Paraguay (1), who have taken advantage of their European entitlements to move freely across the continent.² Most of them were single and had no family responsibilities, except for a Colombian woman who migrated with her 8-year-old daughter. Spanish-born participants had their parents in Spain, they were first-time migrants, and they had a university degree. By contrast, nationalized Spaniards’ parents were scattered between Spain, London, and their Latin American countries of origin; they were migrating at least for the second time; and some of them had undergraduate studies but no university degrees. Despite having different socioeconomic and cultural profiles, resources, motivations, and expectations, most participants had faced unemployment in Spain and they got financial support from their families to settle in London, where they quickly got “any job” in the service sector.

Their diverse migration experiences were similarly framed by the relevance of ICT in the everyday life of this age cohort, the difficulties to settle in an English-speaking society, and the intricacies inherent in a common national context of origin at the time of migration. Indeed, their main motivation to leave Spain was to look for better opportunities abroad after the harsh economic crisis that started in 2007. Different reasons took them to London, mainly that they knew someone already living there (following their personal networks), that unlike Spain it did offer some job opportunities, and that they could learn English, a language they perceived as a key resource to access better job opportunities anywhere.

The empirical analysis presented in the next sections is based on the combination of field notes and semistructured interviews. The former were collected during and after the interviews, when participants were using or talking about their mobile devices and interacting with peers, employers, or others. The latter were voice-recorded, transcribed in full and analysed with the qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti (Version 5). The coding process included top-down codes related to participants’ motivations to migrate, ICT equipment and use before and after migration, and future plans and expectations. Bottom-up codes that emerged from participants’ accounts were also considered. The validity of data collection and analysis was based on a regular process of internal audits between the three researchers involved in the fieldwork as well as feedback provided by colleagues through email, face-to-face meetings, and research workshops.

The Mobile Phone Usage on Arrival section focuses on the tensions between two main issues: (a) the potential mobile phones have to empower youth in their migration processes and (b) the difficulties they face to fully access and use mobile services on arrival.

Mobile phone usage on arrival: Potentials and challenges

Migration involves facing a series of economic and emotional uncertainties in various domains of life, including housing, work, and family arrangements. Historically, migrants have developed diverse strategies to cope with these uncertainties, now they increasingly rely on the potential of ICT.

In our fieldwork we identified various strategic uses of ICT to deal with uncertainties. Although ICT devices, uses, practices, and purposes are often mixed, multimodal, and convergent (Jenkins, 2004), we can broadly distinguish three main uses in participants’ accounts—information access, communication, and entertainment—with their corresponding purposes and the means or platforms they used, as summarized in Table 1.

Table 1.

Technological equipment of Spanish immigrants recently arrived in London.

		Spaniards in London (n = 25)
		Nationalized (n = 20)	Spanish-born (n = 5)
Technological equipment	Smartphone	19	4
	Mobile phone subscription: pay as you go	12	3
	Mobile phone subscription: Monthly plan	6	2
	Mobile Internet	16	4
	Internet at home	17	5
	Computer/laptop/tablet	18	4

The next sections focus on what we found more revealing in terms of ICT access, use, and appropriation at the particular moment of migrant arrival, paying special attention to how participants took advantage of the unique affordances of mobile phones—including immediacy, ubiquity, and reachability—as well as to the difficulties they faced to fully access and use mobile services, as indicated by the literature. We organized the analysis in three thematic threads: (a) access to information, (b) transnational family communication, and (c) ICT appropriation and adjustment strategies.

Access to information

Migrants’ access to information proved to be particularly important, both before travelling and at the moment of arrival in London. Mobile communication was essential for this purpose among participants but, as this section illustrates, access did not always ensure quality information.

For most participants, the decision to move abroad developed in quite unexpected ways, more as a reaction to the economic crisis in Spain than as part of a desired and carefully planned personal initiative. Partly for this reason, their accounts evidenced high degrees of improvisation and little search for information on their destination in advance. This reality coincides with previous findings showing that the widespread availability of information on destination before migration did not ensure better informed migrants (González Martínez, 2008). Only a few participants acknowledged having looked for quality information before travelling, comparing pros and cons of different destinations, estimating their monthly budget, or learning some useful phrases in English, as Belén (35, Ecuador) explained:³

Before travelling, as I told you, we were torn between Germany and the UK so we went online to look [for information], because my sister and I love technology. She looked at Germany and I at the UK and I started to read about jobs, the bus, how life was there, the best places and all that. And I liked London. We visited [web] forums of people living here [in London]. I subscribed to “Españoles en Londres” [“Spaniards in London”]. “Viajeros por Londres” [“Travellers in London”], and many other websites.

The most popular sources of information were web forums, blogs, and social networking sites, where content was provided informally and in Spanish by other Spanish-speaking immigrants who had already arrived in London and shared their experiences, doubts, and tips online, constituting true communities of interests (Armstrong & Hagel, 2000, p. 85). Public service websites were less popular because they were only in English, thus less accessible for recently arrived immigrants with little knowledge of the language. This means that the potential benefit of accessing immediate and updated information about the place of destination through digital resources was overshadowed by the challenge posed by the lack of official information available in another language for users who are not fluent in English

Other practical information that interviewees looked for online, either before travelling or once in London, related to cheap accommodation, available job offers according to their training or previous work experience, and how to obtain a work permit.

Many participants had friends or relatives already living in London who had helped them to get practical information to adjust to the new city. Indeed, these (usually ethnically oriented) networks of support provided valuable advice on issues such as job and accommodation opportunities, how the public transport system works, or what mobile phone company has the best data plans. This confirms previous research findings that establish informal social networks as the primary source of information of recently arrived immigrants, followed by institutions and official organizations (Hernández Plaza, Pozo, & Alonso-Morillejo, 2004).

The growing Spanish-speaking community in London that developed from the historical settlement of Latin Americans since the 1970s played a key role in this regard, especially in providing jobs in their multiple enterprises usually related to cleaning services and the food sector (McIlwaine, Cock, & Linneker, 2010). Having a British mobile phone number constituted a key resource for recently arrived immigrants to enter this flexible service sector and many interviewees had got their first jobs as substitutes in restaurants and/or cleaning shifts that were requested and offered through last minute phone calls, through “micro-coordination” (Ling & Yttri, 2002). On the one hand, immediate communication with relevant sources of information provided immigrants with job opportunities. On the other hand, job offers circulating in these ethnic networks were usually low-quality, precarious, and badly pay. Participants acknowledged this contradiction but they took it as the price they had to pay for being recently arrived immigrants avid to get “any job.”

While looking for information in Spain was mostly done through personal computers, once in London, mobile phones—in particular smartphones with Internet access—acquired more relevance for this and other purposes due to their relatively easy availability and specific affordances. Their ubiquity allowed users to access relevant information resources on the spot, whenever and wherever needed. As shown in Table 1 and Figure 1, some widespread examples among participants included the use of online tools to move around the city (e.g., Google maps and public transport timetables) and online translation services.

Figure 1.

Most used mobile phone applications by Spanish young adults recently arrived in London (n = 25).

Most participants arrived in London with very little knowledge of English and they faced serious problems to communicate orally so they used their mobile devices to translate words or even to hold conversations. Ana (32, Colombian), who had been living in London for 1 year with her 8-year-old daughter, could not take English courses because she had a full-time job in a coffee shop to cover their living expenses. Sometimes her daughter helped her to interact in English, otherwise she used a mobile application:

I try to make myself understood in any way: with gestures, with the mobile phone translator . . . I translate something with the help of the mobile phone, then I write it on a sheet of paper and hand it over. It works. Or I explain that I can’t speak English and ask people if they can be so kind to speak next to my mobile phone recorder, then I can translate it.

Transnational family communication

The capacity of mobile phones to allow communication almost independently of time and space constraints (Ling & Campbell, 2009) was particularly relevant in the maintenance of family bonds across distance as well as to keep in touch with relatives, friends, and acquaintances located in societies of origin and destination, and other parts of the globe.

Transnational family communication was the main reason for participants to have Whatsapp, Skype, and Facebook as the most used mobile applications, as shown in Figure 1. In particular, Whatsapp emerged as the most popular platform to feel in “perpetual contact” (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) with close family members and friends, as illustrated by this participant’s description of a daily interaction with his girlfriend who stayed in Spain:

Every other minute, “beep, beep,” the Whatsapp rings. “So, how are you? Who’re you with?” “Nobody, I’m just here, having a coffee” or “I’ve just get out from a [job] interview” or “I’m going to the park to have a beer” . . . The only thing that is missing is the physical contact. (Isaias, 28, Spain)

Mobile apps providing immediate and ubiquitous communication were important resources for immigrant interviewees to keep in touch with their loved ones, to provide care for them, and to develop a sense of affective proximity and “domesticity” (Bonini, 2011). However, the process of maintaining bonds at a distance was never straightforward but fragile and frustrating when the lack of intimacy, time, and/or money hindered the mediated communicative events.

“[International] phone calls are very expensive and it’s much more practical to have a Skype session every 2 days than talking on the phone,” said Isaias, a computer engineer working as a waiter in London at the moment of the interview. He preferred to hold Skype video conferences with his parents living in Spain so, before leaving to London, he had downloaded the software and taught them its basic use, anticipating the mutual need of communication at a distance. Other participants also preferred online videoconferences (also called “voice over Internet protocol” or VoIP) services. Ana (32, Colombian), who had a big transnational family (extended family in Colombia; her mother, one sister with husband and children; an ex-husband in Madrid; and another sister with husband and children in London), explained:

There are plenty of possibilities [to keep in contact with them] . . . I use Line or Tango . . . It depends . . . I don’t use phone calls so much, ‘cause it’s a prepaid, then it runs out of credit in 2 minutes.

All in all, users could rely on various available digital tools and platforms and choose the most convenient to them for price and purpose. This coincides with the concept of “polymedia” (Madianou & Miller, 2012), though as next section illustrates, economic difficulties still shape recently arrived migrants’ connectivity.

ICT appropriation and adjustment strategies

ICT access on arrival proved to be a basic need for immigrants, but many participants faced the challenge of fine-tuning and adapting their mobile technologies when moving across national borders. This included making decisions on what technological equipment to travel with (if they keep it the same as in the country of origin or if it is worsened or enhanced after the migration experience) as well as their choices regarding mobile phone plans and providers. Despite its importance in immigrants’ lives, this process that we call “immigrants’ technological adjustments” tends to remain underexplored in the literature, either because it is not a main object of inquiry or because it is taken for granted, especially among youth. Specific questions about it in the interviews we conducted revealed various and changing strategies of connectivity from the moment of taking the decision to migrate onwards.

Isaias (28, Spain) improved his technological equipment before travelling to London, buying a brand new mobile device as a necessary tool for his new life: “[In Spain, I used to have] a Nokia dumbphone, super old one . . . I had had it for a lot of years and it was just for messages and that’s it. And for missed calls too,” he said. He defined himself as a “quite antitechnological” person who did not usually spend money on the latest hi-tech gadgets, but this time he had decided to ensure himself a good connectivity in order to face the challenges inherent in settling in a new country:

I became aware of my situation . . . you never know where you will end up being . . . Well, you know that at least with a smartphone you’re connected anytime . . . I knew that I would have some problems and well, with this [smartphone] at least I have a relief. At least I earn some money, I don’t need to be looking for telephone booths, I don’t have to be worried about phone credits, [I know] that anytime, for any purpose, I can have anything I want, I can tell anybody whatever I need.

His words reflect various relevant issues present in other participants’ accounts, including the awareness of the uncertainties of migration and the importance of ubiquitous communication to be always reachable and continue their family and social lives despite being physically far away. Isaias’s example of mobile technology enhancement as part of his migration project, however, proved to be more of an exception than the rule for the interviewed Spanish young adults.

The qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed that, as a general trend, the technological possibilities of many recently arrived immigrants were drastically reduced in the process of moving between countries. This was caused by their initially limited economic resources and the need to manage them carefully when restarting a life elsewhere. This meant that often participants faced a series of technological challenges, finding themselves in a situation of disadvantage or partial disconnection in which basic services such as regular Internet access were not always available. This limited connectivity or digital divide would be expected in other migrant contexts where economic constrains seem to prevail (e.g., Chinese regional migrants), but it is quite surprising among a Spanish digital generation with economic and legal resources to move across Europe.

Participant observation in relevant sites of arrival also revealed many difficulties in ICT access and use by this population. Aware of this situation, the Ecuadorian consulate in London offered a free Internet access room with eight laptops as well as v arious desktop computers and English lessons. Many young immigrants who had ICT skills but no computer or Internet at home would visit this place regularly, like Spanish-Ecuadorians Joaquin (31) and Jorge (25). Both had left their personal computers in Spain but once in London, they realized how much they needed them to keep in touch easily with their loved ones or to look for jobs or a better accommodation. Their smartphones brought from Spain gave them some relief even if they were a bit old fashioned and were not working properly, as was the case of Joaquin. He had left his precarious job as a waiter in Madrid to get a better salary in London, though this implied taking three part-time jobs as a cleaner and kitchen porter in different companies: “Once here [in London], this [smartphone] is my mate, my friend, and my confidant, because I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a TV or anything,” he said, though he complained that the camera and the screen of the device were broken and he would need to get another one soon. His case reflects the tension between the potential smartphones offer to overcome social isolation and “reduce the emotional cost of separation” (McGregor & Siegel, 2013, pp. 5–6) during migration and the limitations of his old device, which he could not update until his economic situation improved.

A similar statement was made by Jorge, who had arrived in London with his elder brother only 2 weeks before the interview to get a job and learn some English. “If it hadn’t been for the mobile phone I had, I would have been disoriented. The mobile phone did help me a lot. it’s my mini laptop.” At the moment of the interview, he and his brother were subletting a room in a house without an Internet connection where the landlord had given them the password to access a neighbour’s network. However, the signal was so weak that they had to try getting half the body outside the window or ducking under the table to try to get a better Wi-fi signal.

In the hostel where many Spaniards lived during the first phase of their stay in London, wireless Internet was only available in a common living room with sofas, a TV set, and a minifootball table. It was usually noisy and crowded with people holding videoconferences with family and friends in Spain. The place was like an improvised Internet room with very little intimacy to have private conversations, though this did not seem to bother anybody and sometimes it helped to start conversations and eventually a new friendship.

The lack of good Internet connection in participants’ homes in London was not a widespread problem for most participants though. They really needed Internet at home since mobile Internet subscriptions were often limited to pay-as-you-go or prepaid plans that did not allow them to access Internet anywhere, anytime or to download large amounts of data. All in all, the various challenges that recently arrived immigrants faced in the quality and intensity of their mobile communication services (the indicators of intensity can be summarized as “regularity and rate” [Ros, 2010, p. 33], i.e., “how often” migrants communicate and “how much” it costs) positioned them as disadvantaged users affected by multiple digital divides.

Mobile phone use was often highly conditioned by the politics of prices set by providers. As highlighted by Palen (2002) more generally, “the technical infrastructure and its consequences on billing can affect how mobile phone users construe social proximity” (2002, p. 18). Not only did limited connectivity negatively affect immigrants’ ability to keep in touch regularly with their loved ones across distances, but it also prevented them from accessing key social and economic resources to settle in their destination. This is especially problematic in a highly digitalized society such as the UK where most services are provided online, including those related to public administration and job applications, among others (Helsper, 2011).

In general, interviewees had chosen their British telecom provider by word of mouth, following peers’ recommendations. Despite enduring London’s expensive living standards, they agreed that telecommunication services were cheaper in the UK than in Spain. However, recently arrived immigrants would first obtain a limited prepaid subscription before signing a postpaid contract with a fixed monthly fee. Table 2 summarizes this and other information related to participants’ technological equipment.

Table 2.

ICT uses, purposes, and platforms.

Uses	Purposes	Platforms
Information access	The practicalities of arrival: job search, accommodation, costs of living, public transport, vocabulary in English, education opportunities, tips and advices on living in London.	Official websites, fora, blogs, Google maps, Google translator, mobile phone calls
	For news search	National and local newspaper sites, social network sites
Communication	To keep in touch with family, partners and friends	Mobile phone calls and SMS, VoIP (e.g. Skype, Tango, Line, Viber), Whatsapp, Facebook, email
	To keep in touch with acquaintances and casual others (neighbours, friends, employers, etc.)	Mobile phone calls and SMS, social network sites
Entertainment	For accessing and sharing music, web series, films, reading materials, etc.	Social network sites, websites

Many times, participants dealt with various telecom providers and mobile devices across two or more countries. This evidenced some uncertainty in their lives (e.g., where to live and stay connected) but it was also experienced as freedom through feelings of “mobility and individuality” (Horst & Miller, 2006, p. 7), as Rosana (27, Paraguay) explained:

I’ve always had [a mobile phone with] a prepaid card and it’s better, because this way I can take it anywhere I want. When I go to my house [in Paraguay] I take it too and it works because I put in another SIM card.

Her testimony evidences immigrants’ ability to appropriate connectivity services, adapting providers’ services to their own needs while living on the move. It also exemplifies what we called “immigrants’ technological adjustment,” defined as the various decisions immigrants take as ICT users in order to ensure the availability of digital resources and services on arrival in a new country with its particular scenario of telecommunication providers, market rules, prices, and plans.

Immigrants’ technological adjustment is highly conditioned by economic limitations they have to endure as recently arrived people in a foreign country. Another example of it is related to whether immigrants cancel or maintain their telecom service subscriptions in their country of origin and how they preserve the contacts database stored in their mobile SIM cards. In our fieldwork, most participants had cancelled their Spanish subscription to avoid paying for a service they would not use regularly and unlocked their mobile devices before travelling to London in order to use them with a British provider. Yvonne (31, Spain), a biologist now working as a waiter in London, said that maintaining a subscription with a Spanish provider was useless and “an unnecessary expense.” She and her boyfriend emigrated in search of better job opportunities and they had no intentions of returning to Spain in the short term. Like other participants in their situation, they had moved their mobile phone contacts’ information to their new British phone or just kept in touch through popular online platforms such as Facebook. The few participants who had kept their Spanish mobile phone number active evidenced a mixture of feelings of attachment to Spain and doubts about the duration of their stay abroad. They preferred to pay the minimum monthly fee to avoid their accounts being cancelled “just in case” (they return to Spain). Thus, the diversity of immigrants’ strategies for technological adjustment reflected deeper implications in their migration projects such as their plans to definitely settle in London or to move back to Spain some day.

Conclusions

This paper has shown the tensions between the potential that mobile phones have to empower immigrants and the challenges they often face to fully enjoy mobile services during the early stages of migration, with a focus on three key areas: access to information, transnational family communication, and technological adjustments between countries of origin and destination.

Our approach based on the articulation of two related fields of knowledge: the sociology of communication and ICT4D: the former conceptualizes the social implications of mobile phones’ unique affordances—ubiquity, reachability, and immediacy—the latter acknowledges the sociocultural and economic difficulties in ICT access and appropriation by users facing contexts of high inequalities. The main argument emerging from the combination of these two important bodies of work is that ICTs—and in particular mobile phones—are both beneficial and challenging resources for migration: beneficial for the specific potential of their affordances (as indicated by sociology of communication) but challenging in terms of the emotional (e.g., lack of intimacy, asymmetries, and lack of physical contact) and economic difficulties (e.g., lack of a regular income to access data plans) they face during the migration process (as indicated by transnational family communication and ICT4D). The condition of mobile phones as essential tools in very diverse migration projects entails users continuously having to navigate the tension between this technology’s benefits and challenges.

We also found that the time dimension of migration was either missing or taken for granted in much of this literature, as if any time point of the migration experience involved similar ICT needs and uses. As immigrants do not constitute a homogeneous social group, migration is not a static phenomenon and so different migration moments involve diverse technology requirements. In this sense, we argued that the moment of arriving in a new place is particularly important in immigrants’ lives because it is when numerous vital changes occur, important decisions need to be made, and pervasive uncertainties are faced.

We focused on the experiences of 25 Spanish-speaking young adults recently arrived in London (less than 2 years) mainly to work and learn English after the severe economic crisis that has affected Spain since 2007. Results from our qualitative research confirm the importance of ICT for migrants facing situations of high uncertainty following migration. In particular, the mobile phone is the most accessible portable device that provides immigrants with access to useful information and key contacts (e.g., jobs, accommodation, language translation, and public transport options) both before and after arrival. More importantly, ICT offered them various resources to keep in touch with their loved ones across distance, in a relatively easy and regular way. The concept of polymedia (Madianou & Miller, 2012) proved useful to acknowledge the diversity of ICTs involved in migrant transnational family communication, though it privileges cultural contexts and emotional dimensions over the economic costs of communication. Our fieldwork, however, confirmed the persistence of economic constraints limiting migrants’ connectivity, especially among recently arrived immigrants who lacked a regular income.

Most participants travelled with their Spanish smartphone and had the skills and the motivations typical of their age to be intense ICT users. However, some of them lacked good mobile and fixed Internet connections and/or another device (e.g., laptop or tablet) to support their communication and information needs on arrival. This situation evidences one particular kind of digital divide in which people who used to have good ICT access (in their country of origin) find themselves in the vulnerable situation of partial disconnection after migration. As previous theoretical debates have shown, digital divides are not singular or static but multiple, changing over time, and affecting diverse regions and social groups.

To some extent, migrants could appropriate ICT resources to take full advantage of different services at minimum costs (e.g., pay-as-you go services and multiple SIM cards ownership), as previously analysed by ICT4D literature regarding disadvantaged populations in so-called Third World countries. ICT appropriation strategies emerged in response to the technological uncertainties during the migration process that left some of them with limited connectivity for some time. In this sense, our conceptualization of immigrants’ technological adjustments aimed at underlining how connectivity cannot be taken for granted when people move across borders and how important it is to contextualize analyses in particular moments of the migration process, since each moment involves different ICT needs, expectations, and practices.

This paper presented a partial account of a particular group of immigrants’ experiences at the moment of arrival in a new country. It would have highly benefited from a follow-up with participants in order to analyse how their mobile phone usage and access evolved over time, though this was not possible due to time constraints. Future research could use longitudinal analysis and more nuanced approaches to migrant connectivity that acknowledge the dynamic and changing nature of the relationship between immigrants and ICT across diverse spatio-temporal moments to bridge multiple geopolitical and emotional locations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to María Angel and Stefana Broadbent for their support in fieldwork and to Sarah Wagner, Greig Krull, and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions to improve previous versions of this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No. 288587 MASELTOV. The research project MASELTOV aimed to develop a mobile phone application that promotes the integration of recently arrived immigrants in Europe through informal language learning, spatial navigation, and community building, among other mobile services.

Notes

Author biographies

Cecilia Gordano Peile received her PhD in the Information and Knowledge Society from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where she was a Research Assistant for the Migration and Network Society Program in 2013–2014. In 2015, she was a visiting researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture, and Mobility (UNU-GCM). She holds a European MA in Gender and Women’s Studies (GEMMA) from Utrecht University and Universidad de Granada.

Adela Ros, holds an MA in Political Sciences and Sociology from (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Diego. She has been Professor in the Humanities Department at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (1997–2003); Coordinator of the Human Movements and Immigration World Congress during the period 2003–2004; and Director of the Immigration Office for the Autonomous Government of Catalonia (2004-2006). She held the position of Director of the Migration and Network Society Research Program at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (2007–2014) where she has been conducting research on the cross-cut of migration and technologies of communication.

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