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This paper provides insights into the little‐explored gendered perspective of the parenting practices of Somali immigrant mothers in a Canadian province (Alberta). We use a critical ethnographic methodology and a transnational feminist framework. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with ten Somali mothers aged 18 to 50. Mothers were interviewed about their parenting practices in a post‐migration context, including challenges. Our results show immigrant mothers combine their cultural values with new values from Canada that they find effective. We find gendered differences in how parenting experiences are perceived. Our results suggest the need for anti‐racist and culturally safe health, education, and child policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the initial integration experiences of Syrian refugee children in schools in Canada. We conducted two focus groups with twelve Syrian refugee parents and three focus groups with eighteen children. Our research shows that Syrian refugee children experienced emotional barriers while struggling with their identity as Syrian "refugees." Their low English proficiency, English only practice in classrooms and teachers' low expectations further exacerbated the barriers to children's school integration. Syrian refugee children not only found it difficult to make friends with local students but were also subjected to constant bullying and racism that affected their sense of belonging and connection. Our research has both local and global implications, given a global increase in refugee student population. This paper makes an important contribution to the student voice theory by integrating the voices and concerns of Syrian refugee children trying to integrate into the Canadian school system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late‐2000s, Canada has admitted an increasing number of foreign workers with a wide range of temporary work permits to meet local labour shortages and growing labour market demands. Unlike permanent residents, temporary residents are subjected to restricted work authorizations and social citizenship rights. Besides, Canadian policies distinguish different groups of temporary foreign workers based on their skill level and work permit type to determine their eligibility for employment, social rights and permanent residency. Reviewing secondary sources, this paper contributes to analyzing the key policies that have shaped the diverse streams within the Canadian temporary migration program. The analysis also highlights the inequalities experienced by various categories of temporary foreign workers in Canada and assesses these inequalities within the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the qualitative findings from a mixed‐methods study of the educational and employment experiences of male and female Syrian refugees who settled in Regina, Canada. Canada admitted over 40,000 Syrian refugees who settled in 350 communities across Canada, including many smaller, non‐traditional refugee‐receiving centres. This influx necessitated the expeditious development of additional services as well as a re‐allocation of local resources. Drachman's (Social Work, 37, 68, 1992) three‐phase migration framework was employed to trace the experiences of these Syrian refugees through the pre‐migration, transit and resettlement phases. The findings demonstrated that the participants perceived a shift from independence to dependence on the government as they moved through each of the successive phases of migration. While participants had constructed identities as "hard workers" back home, they found that their experiences and credentials from back home were devalued and learning English was a prerequisite for employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, Canada expanded the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to include service and hospitality sectors. By 2010, more migrants entered Canada with temporary visas than as permanent residents. While some found employment in hospitality and tourism, most were concentrated in the fast food sector. Working transnationally, this paper uses Tim Hortons' concurrent global expansion and its arrival in the Philippines as a case study of the global mobilities and intersecting pathways of capital and labour. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of feminist political economy, it illustrates how the aspirations and mobilities of the Filipino workers at the centre of this study are organized in the service of capital; capital, in this example, as represented by the globally ambitious Tim Hortons' parent corporation, Restaurant Brands International (RBI) and, more specifically, the Brazilian American global investment firm that owns and manages RBI, 3G Capital, as well as by the efforts and objectives of franchise holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Canada has been not only welcoming growing numbers of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), but also, increasingly, creating pathways that allow workers and their families to become permanent residents. In this paper, we use a series of unique longitudinal files to study the factors that predict a TFW's transition to permanence. We find that age, sex, skill level and duration as a temporary resident are all important factors for understanding who obtains legal residency in Canada, but that source country wealth is not. We discuss the implications of our findings and make suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The temporary foreign worker programme (TFWP) is widely used in many sectors in Canada. Research on the TFWP in Canada has documented multiple types of abuse within the programme, often related to worker lack of access to citizenship and social benefits. Less is known about how mobile and often precarious migrant workers are able to navigate negative, challenging situations identified within the Canadian literature. Flagpoling, a process used by international migrants in Canada to gain mobility in situations where their movement may be constrained, is not talked about in the mobilities and labour agency literature. Drawing from a case study of migrant workers in Atlantic Canada's seafood processing plants, this paper pulls together the mobilities, labour agency and precarity literature to explore how migrant workers are able to extradite themselves from workplaces that are less than ideal and better position themselves towards gaining citizenship status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over 60 years ago, the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Millions of Jews immigrated to Israel over the twentieth century, a process known as aliya (literally, "going up"). Yet over the years, thousands of Israelis have also chosen to leave Israel in a movement termed yerida ("going down"). As the term suggests, this reverse migration has been highly stigmatized. During the 1960s and 1970s, emigrants were publicly disparaged in the Israeli media for having abandoned a struggling state. Consequently, Israeli migrants suffered strong feelings of guilt that often, hampered their integration process abroad, a phenomenon observed as late as the 1990s. This paper, however, reveals that feelings of stigmatization have greatly decreased among Israeli migrants in recent years. The study is based on research that I conducted in 2008-2009, involving nine months of participant observation in Vancouver's Israeli community and 34 in-depth interviews. Unlike in previous studies, most of my informants expressed no feelings of guilt over having left Israel. Of those who did, most framed their guilt as a longing for family and friends rather than the patriotic longing for the land as expressed by previous generations. Previous studies have also found that Israelis harbour a "myth of return" - a continuously expressed desire to return to Israel and a reluctance to accept their stay abroad as permanent. However, I have not found that the myth of return is still strong today, despite the continued prevalence of a strong sense of Israeli identity among Israelis abroad. I suggest that these changing attitudes are the product of shifting ideals in Israeli society that have developed as the state of Israel has matured. This paper thus serves to update the outdated image of Israeli migrants as it exists in the prevailing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) within the policy and scholarly debates on 'best practices' for the management of temporary migration, and examines what makes this programme successful from the perspective of states and employers. Drawing on extensive qualitative and quantitative study of temporary migration in Canada, this article critically examines this seminal temporary migration programme as a 'best practice model' from internationally recognized rights-based approaches to labour migration, and provides some additional best practices for the management of temporary labour migration programmes. This paper examines how the reality of the Canadian SAWP measures up, when the model is evaluated according to internationally recognized best practices and migrant rights regimes. Despite all of the attention to building 'best practices' for the management of temporary or managed migration, it appears that Canada has taken steps further away from these and other international frameworks. The analysis reveals that while the Canadian programme involves a number of successful practices, such as the cooperation between origin and destination countries, transparency in the admissions criteria for selection, and access to health care for temporary migrants; the programme does not adhere to the majority of best practices emerging in international forums, such as the recognition of migrants' qualifications, providing opportunities for skills transfer, avoiding imposing forced savings schemes, and providing paths to permanent residency. This paper argues that as Canada takes significant steps toward the expansion of temporary migration, Canada's model programme still falls considerably short of being an inspirational model, and instead provides us with little more than an idealized myth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary Canadian immigration has grown beyond traditional programs for students, caregivers and agricultural workers to include trade-related temporary visas under NAFTA and the GATS. Current Canadian debates envision supplanting Canada's permanent immigration programme with a temporary visa programme to remove skill shortages. Several questions emerge under these temporary schemes including who should choose the number of temporary immigrants and under what employment conditions. This paper offers an alternative policy to the current government-determined quota on temporary visas to answer these two questions. Under the proposed scheme offered in this paper, a Canadian worker can place a job voucher up for auction on the Internet. If the Canadian worker finds an acceptable offer for his one-year (or less) voucher, then the temporary immigrant is permitted to seek a job in Canada. Thus, under this auction scheme Canadian workers are compensated for the presence of temporary immigrants, and the actual number of temporary immigrants admitted depends on the total number of Canadian workers who sell their vouchers, not on a government fat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks of September 11 and their immediate aftermath along the US-Canadian and US-Mexican borders focused attention on border management strategies in ways previously unimaginable. Suddenly confronted by the fact that existing systems and processes were not particularly effective either at protecting security or facilitating legitimate traffic, the United States, in conjunction with the Canadian and Mexican Governments, demonstrated an uncharacteristic willingness to reconceptualize its approach to physical borders. While initiating a series of internal policy adjustments to secure themselves against terrorist threats, the US, Canadian, and Mexican Governments also signed two bilateral agreements — the 12 December 2001 United States-Canada Smart Border Declaration and the 22 March 2002 United States-Mexico Border Partnership Agreement. These agreements represent an important development in the US's relationship with each of its North American neighbours, acknowledging not only the deep economic, social, and cultural ties, but also the new reality that the United States cannot attain the additional security it desires through unilateral actions alone. Thus, while September 11 forced a reassessment of vulnerabilities, it simultaneously provided the United States an opportunity to work more systematically with its contiguous neighbours for security benefits, a realization likely to flow into other areas where the benefits of cooperation eclipse those of unilateralism. This paper analyses the first year of the two border accords, tracking their implementation and evaluating their successes and failures. Most importantly, the paper outlines outstanding challenges, highlights steps that the governments should take to achieve additional border security and efficiency, and draws conclusions regarding factors likely to make their efforts more, or less, successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the migrant networks that develop between migrants, non-migrants and the larger Indian diaspora. Specifically, it examines the decision to migrate to Toronto, Canada and how this decision is shaped by, and in turn shapes the migrant network. Based on 35 interviews with migrants from Karnataka, South India, two main findings are presented. First, migrants are deliberately choosing settlement countries in which their families are not yet located, thereby becoming 'migrant pioneers' in their country of settlement, which is an attempt to expand their migrant networks globally. Second, the narratives these migrants receive and subsequently impart to others are often inaccurate, which can lead to miscommunication flows among these migrant networks. These findings are considered in light of the large body of research on migrant networks and the ways they develop and transmit information. This paper argues that existing understanding of migrant networks is somewhat static. Findings indicate that these 'migrant pioneers' may be engaging in global risk-diversification strategies for subsequent generations, but may themselves suffer from the more immediate consequences of misinformed networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the formation of diverse social ties among international migrants to Vancouver, Canada. We look specifically at the influence of involvement in Neighbourhood Houses -- a type of voluntary association -- on facilitating diverse tie formations. Past research has found that membership in different types of associations can lead to more or less network diversity. We build on this research by considering how different types of involvement can lead to either increases or decreases in cross-ethnic or non-immigrant ties among new immigrants. We find that targeted, instrumental types of involvement in Neighbourhood Houses can lead to more diverse immigrant social ties and that general, expressive types of involvement can lead to more homogeneous social ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporary migration programmes have re-emerged as a preferred mechanism for regulating labour migration in many migrant-receiving countries in the past decade. In this paper, I consider the role of shifting Canadian immigration policies, notably the expanded streams for temporary workers, in the changing flow of migrants from Trinidad to Canada. Temporary programmes can bring workers to Canada relatively quickly, but they limit access to permanent residency and citizenship, in sharp contrast to most of Canada's earlier immigration policies. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals that Trinidadians actively seeking to make the move to Canada have little interest in new temporary work programmes. Rather, they continue to plan futures in Canada that they expect to be years in the making. I consider some reasons for this apparent refusal to submit to the new migration realities. I show that present-day Trinidadian emigrant desires and practices are deeply connected to individual, familial and national emigration and immigration histories. Trinidadians are declining to participate in new immigration regimes and are restricting their migration practices to those forms that are historically familiar and have been proven successful. I attempt to show how ethnographic approaches that take seriously migrants' agency can assist in developing a fuller understanding of the ways in which migration flows are changing. These approaches reveal what are otherwise the silences and invisibility surrounding those whose previous access to permanent migration streams has been diminished through neoliberal restructuring of migration policy. I argue that temporary worker policies disregard long-standing histories of migration and engagement with capitalist processes for people in particular regions of the world, rendering them, for policy purposes, effectively 'people without history' (Wolf, 1982). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native-born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well-educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three-quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low-skilled, low-wage, insecure forms of 'survival employment'. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for 'Canadian experience', 'Canadian credentials' and 'Canadian accents' were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding 'survival employment'; in the long run, however, women's greater investment in additional post-secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well-educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the 'everyday racism' that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re-think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants' own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite considerable interest in remittances to developing countries, the limited availability of large sample data has constrained aspects of our understanding of remitter behaviour. This paper utilizes data from Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC) to investigate how the demographic characteristics of recent immigrants influence their remittance levels shortly after their arrival in Canada. We identify several hypotheses and use a Tobit model to estimate the impact of individual characteristics on remittance choices. As expected, remittances rise with incomes, age and falls with the size of the migrating family, housing costs and education. We also estimate how remittances are affected by other characteristics, such as gender, marital status, religion, region of origin, region of settlement and attitudes towards home and host communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implicit in Canada's immigration policies is that some immigrants are endowed with a particular entrepreneurial spirit, and that this spirit relates to immigrants’ origin. This paper examines whether attitudes towards entrepreneurship indeed relate to origin, or whether they can be explained through labour market circumstances at the place of settlement and/or Canada's immigrant selection procedure. The empirical study focuses on the reported attitudes towards entrepreneurship. A survey of 509 Vancouver residents of a predominantly Chinese immigrant neighbourhood, a predominantly South Asian immigrant neighbourhood, and a neighbourhood of non-immigrants reveals that ethnic origin is a weak indicator of entrepreneurial attitudes. Instead, urban or rural background emerges as a more powerful predictor. The results also raise doubts about whether the Canadian government's immigration policy, which selects immigrants on the basis of economic potential, indeed selects immigrants with a greater desire to become self-employed. Furthermore, the amount of time immigrants have spent in Canada does not significantly affect attitudes towards entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using landing records and tax data, this paper examines both the changing composition of the Chinese immigrants in Canada in the past two decades and their levels of economic performance. Our research found that, in addition to a shift in origin, economic immigrants have been on the rise and other classes of immigrants have declined. This has been accompanied by a significant increase in their educational qualifications and proficiency in a Canadian official language. Yet, despite their increased human capital, Chinese immigrants still experience very different economic outcomes in the Canadian labour market compared to members of the general population of Canada. For one thing, they have much lower employment and self-employment income than the general population. Moreover, these earning differentials hold true for all age groups, both genders, and Chinese immigrants from all origins. While their levels of economic performance increases with length of residency in Canada, this study suggests that it would take more than 20 years for Chinese immigrants to close the earning gaps with the general population. Evidence also suggests that Canadian-specific educational credentials are indeed worth more than those acquired in the immigrants' country of origin, and are much better remunerated by Canadian employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging perspective in the study of global diasporas stresses the effect of economic globalization and migration shifts in reshaping the population and identifying the formation of diaspora communities. This paper analyses the immigration patterns from Hong Kong and mainland China to Canada between the 1980s and 1990s. and shows that the migration shifts have been influenced by political and economic forces in Hong Kong and China, as well as changes in Canada's immigration policy. The imminent return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its uncertain political future in the 1990s were often cited as the main reasons for Hong Kong's large emigration in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In reality, the rising volume of Hong Kong emigration was prompted by the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident in China and its aftermath, and by the booming economy of Hong Kong in the early 1990s that created the means for many middle-class Chinese to emigrate. At the same time, Canada's expansion of the Business Immigration Program in the mid-1980s also benefited immigrant entrepreneurs from Hong Kong. In contrast, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 did not deter the economic growth of China. Immigration from China rose after 1989 when Canada allowed Chinese students studying in Canada to immigrate, but it was after the mid-1990s that immigration from China expanded due to Canada's greater emphasis on admitting economic immigrants and to China's growing middle class. The continuous arrival of well-educated and urban-based immigrants from China is likely to change the population composition and identity complexity of the Chinese community in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between family change and economic well-being among recent immigrant families with children to Canada during the 1977 to 1997 period. Whereas the average income to needs ratio of all Canadian families with children is up modestly over this period, this study documents a substantial decline in the average level of economic well-being of recent immigrants. In this context, this study draws attention to the relevance of not only structural explanations that emphasize the role of labour markets and/or government policy in shaping the economic conditions of immigrants, but also the potential impact of shifts in the living arrangements and family structure of immigrants. More specifically, an increased incidence of lone parenthood has had a net negative impact on the economic well-being of immigrants, albeit not to the same extent as among non-immigrants in Canada. Yet, other changes have had a slight positive impact, including an ongoing decline in the average number of children per family, an upward shift in the age distribution of parents, and a slight increase in the tendency of immigrants to co-reside with family members beyond the immediate nuclear family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]