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Upon migrating to a new country, immigrants will often turn to their ethnic communities for support, forming bonding social ties in the process. However, there are also those who form bridging ties by reaching outside of one's immediate ethnic group. The social position occupied by individuals in society is maintained and reproduced by the cultural and human capital they possess, wherein the socialised dispositions, conceptions, and level of education unite and differentiate social groups. As a result, immigrant network formation occurs not only on the lines of ethnicity, but also on cultural and human capital. In this paper, we use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada to investigate how immigrants use social ties upon arrival to Canada. We find that newcomers with lower levels of human capital will be more likely to bond, whereas higher human capital newcomers will often bridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses two dimensions of 'waiting' in the realm of family reunification: the policy perspective and the immigrants' experience. First, in line with the migration management paradigm, the Canadian government has introduced various measures to reduce 'waiting times'. We discuss changes in the family reunification programme of parents and grandparents implemented since 2011 as emblematic of these measures. Such changes are also situated within global trends that make family reunification policies more restrictive. Second, based on 19 interviews with already established immigrants who are sponsors of a parent, we analyse the experience of 'waiting for care'. For families attempting to reunite to fill care needs, new measures may speed up reunification, but they may also mean that being together is, for many, more difficult to achieve, temporary, and precarious. We argue that the politics of 'waiting times' management has depoliticised the right to family reunification and institutionalised temporariness in this component of immigration policy. These repercussions of state policies significantly alter how immigrant families can provide care to their members and sustain social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between Canada, one of the world's leading immigration countries and a country that often serves as an international 'poster child' for well managed migration, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental organisation that provides migration-related services for Canada and many other countries. Despite growing awareness about the role of the IOM in migration politics, a research gap remains regarding how states cogitate and evaluate their partnership with the IOM. This article draws on publicly available government evaluations, conducted by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which speak to the strongly inter-dependent, but also highly ambivalent reality of collaboration between Canada and the IOM. In exploring and discussing the nature of this relationship, the article also speaks to the particularities of 'migration management' and the larger transformations in global migration governance reflected in Canada's partnership with the IOM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of social capital has gained popularity in the field of migration studies in recent decades, yet we still know relatively little about how immigrants develop social networks in their host countries – despite the fact that networks constitute the core of social capital. This paper applies a Bourdieuian approach to migration research while examining the network development processes of immigrants from Turkey to Canada, all within the framework of social inequality based upon occupation and class. My findings demonstrate that network development with co-nationals, members of other immigrant groups, and native-born Canadians is a complex process in which such various factors as social class, ethnicity, habitus, and different forms of capital jointly shape the opportunities to access social networks, as well as the nature of such networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on in-depth interviews undertaken eight years apart to provide a reflection upon the nature of transnational relationships and settlement over time. It follows the lives of five immigrant families between 1999 and 2007, and focuses in particular on the accounts provided by the women. These individuals migrated to Canada from Hong Kong or Taiwan during the 1990s, and then 'stuck it out', when most of their friends, in contrast, had returned home. The paper uncovers changes in their familial and personal circumstances as a consequence of migration to Canada and their subsequent experiences of transnationalism, and provides insights into the longevity and durability of transnational relationships. It contributes to debates around the persistence of transnationalism over time and the relationship between transnationalism and integration for migrants, whilst also making a methodological point about the need for more longitudinal qualitative accounts of immigrants' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on return migration, this paper draws out the tensions between integration and transnationalism, flexibility and rootedness, and citizenship and nationalism. I argue that the recognition of transnationalism necessitates a conceptual re-examination of return migration. Substantively, the paper is based upon my research on the flow of skilled migration between Canada and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Since 1998, China has been the top source country of skilled immigrants to Canada. In recent years, however, a counter-current has emerged with the return movement of PRC immigrants back to China. I examine how the cultural politics of identity play out amongst PRC immigrants in Canada in light of this reverse migration. Drawing on focus groups and interviews, I suggest that not only the act of return, but its very discourse, has influenced the ways in which the politics of identity and belonging are evolving amongst PRC immigrants in Canada. Ultimately, hybridised forms of cultural identification become the norm for migrants whose homes are no longer tied to one place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a generational cohort method, this paper compares the self-employment rates of immigrant parents and their children when they were in the same age range of 25 to 44. The focus is on three questions: (1) Are the children of immigrants more or less likely to be self-employed than their parents? (2) Are the children of immigrants more or less likely to be self-employed than the children of Canadian-born parents? (3) Is the generational change from immigrant parents to their children in the self-employment rate different to that from Canadian-born parents to their children? The results show that Canadian-born male children of immigrants had a lower self-employment rate than their fathers. The decline in the self-employment rate was not unique from immigrant fathers to second-generation men. It was also observed from Canadian-born parents to their children. For both groups, the decline was related to changes in life-course events—longer schooling, fewer marriages and fewer children. Similar to the difference among their fathers, the second-generation men had a higher self-employment rate than the third-and-higher-generation men. Among women, the self-employment rate increased from immigrant mothers to their daughters and from Canadian-born mothers to their daughters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the discursive continuity between newsprint representations of Mexican refugee claimants in 2007 and the subsequent visa policy imposed on Mexicans by the Canadian government. It argues that the production of a Mexican refugee ‘crisis’ in local media rested on three dominant discourses: the encoding of Mexicans as illegal, criminal and fraudulent Others; the perceived exorbitant costs of refugee claims; and the necessity to control ‘illegitimate’ claimants to prevent them from exploiting the deficiencies of the Canadian refugee system. Such discourses reveal overt and inferential forms of racism and challenges to the self-proclaimed tolerance of multicultural Canada. The paper is based on a review of newsprint articles and readers' opinions published in Windsor in 2007 and 2008. Three rhetorical devices were predominantly used in media discourses—lexicons, the numbers game, and expert/authority legitimation—to elevate the refugee influx to a level of ‘crisis’ and to perpetuate a positional superiority over refugee claimants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although rates of residential crowding in Canada declined between 1971 and 2001, the drop for immigrants was not nearly as pronounced as it was for the Canadian-born. This paper determines the extent to which the differential trends in residential crowding can be attributed to changes in educational attainment, household composition, economic characteristics (including housing values), Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) of residence, and skin colour (visible minority status). The prospect of changing effects over time for several factors is also assessed. There are two main findings. The first is that basic household characteristics explain a significant portion of the 30-year immigrant/Canadian-born divergence. Secondly, including time interactions reveals that differences in propensities across CMAs emerged post-1971, and that there have been almost no significant changes in the propensity to crowd among visible minority groups since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, conservative groups of Low German-speaking Mennonites have collectively migrated to preserve their religious integrity. However, their contemporary migrations to North America are not collective or church-sanctioned, but primarily economically motivated. This paper explores the intertwined processes of gender and religion in transnational social spaces through the destination experiences of Mennonite women in Canada. The paradoxes of the transnational social field-each simultaneous gain and loss-constitute a double-bind wherein choice is elusive. Caught in the contest between physical and cultural survival, women find themselves in the 'nothing' of in-between, as conflicting social fields and systems of capital-secular and sacred-collide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Quebec's management of immigration and diversity in the promotion of cultural and political autonomy from Canada. Quebec has been able to secure some of the prerogatives of a sovereign nation-state in part through its control of immigration and its development of an intercultural integrative policy framework. Instead of diminishing the national distinctiveness of Quebec within the Canadian federation, rising immigration has accentuated it in many ways. The concept of intercultural nationalism is used to define a particular state-building strategy that is responsive to economic and demographic changes brought by increased global integration. We argue that the emergence of Quebec as a strong nation with sporadic, but specifically dominant and legitimate state power is reflective of the adaptations that many nation-states have undergone in response to the challenges of globalisation. By that measure, the Quebec state is, in a sense, more of a national state than it ever was in the past. Increasing diversity both within and outside its borders has contributed to this evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey conducted by Statistics Canada in 2001, this paper shows that visible minorities, particularly blacks, are the least likely to be self-employed when compared to Europeans. The rate of self-employment for visible minorities is lowest in manufacturing and the primary sectors of the economy. To the extent that social capital is important for self-employment, its benefits vary by type of social capital and industry. There is also evidence that the employment benefits derived from social capital vary across ethno-racial groups, challenging the view that social capital is a source of ethnic advantage for minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature suggests that the foreign-born, and especially recent arrivals, enjoy better health than their Canadian-born counterparts, as measured by a number of health outcomes including self-assessed health and chronic conditions. Using data drawn from Statistics Canada's longitudinal National Population Health Survey (NPHS), the paper evaluates the so-called ‘healthy immigrant effect’ with respect to chronic conditions. Specifically, it evaluates the presence, number and type of chronic conditions (heart disease, asthma, arthritis, diabetes) within the immigrant population, with comparisons made to the native-born population. Native- and foreign-born prevalence rates for chronic conditions are also age–sex standardised to aid comparison. Evidence from both descriptive and multivariate analysis supports the healthy immigrant effect with respect to chronic conditions. Strong evidence of health disparities across arrival cohorts is also found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]