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.