Using Global Northern, non-Jewish, female, highly skilled partners and spouses of Israeli Jewish citizens in Israel as a case study, and depicting their interactions with bureaucracy, integration into the labour market, gendered aspects of integration and clashes between self-perception and ascription this paper teases out that, despite its specificity, the case of Israel allows forming conclusions about the precariousness of a class of presumed privileged migrants. The central finding is that Global Northerners experience a status deprivation, which includes deskilling and social marginalization. This nexus was experienced as limiting personal agency, which allows for questioning their presumed status of privileged migrants; it concurrently underscores the importance of the analytically difficult and diffuse nexus of personality and agency. The ethnographic data demonstrates that individuals coped with the challenges differently, suggesting that specific personalities and intra- and interpersonal resourcefulness underpin individual resilience thresholds. © 2019 The Author. International Migration © 2019 IOM

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bureaucracy perception skilled labor immigrant ethnography Israel labor market gender role