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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]

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]

It is now common to identify a policy convergence around migration which is eroding the longstanding distinction made in the migration literature between "traditional" countries of immigration (like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States) and other Western states. Taking the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as instructive, this article focusses on the case of Canada, arguing that its settler‐colonial foundation has impacted and continues to impact three areas relevant to the comparative study of migration: 1) national discourse; 2) land and forms of social power; and 3) politics and forms of solidarity. The implications of settler‐colonialism for the study of international migration are broader than the case of Canada and suggest the need to link considerations of Indigeneity systematically in migration studies, and to address the particularities of settler‐colonial states in relation to other Northern states by being attuned to "divergence within convergence." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selective migration policies are proliferating worldwide as governments try to attract scientists, highly skilled engineers, medical professionals and information technology professionals. Selective migration policies can be grouped into three ideal-typical models: the Canadian 'human capital' model based on state selection of permanent immigrants using a point system; the Australian 'neo-corporatist' model based on state selection using a point system with extensive business and labour participation; and the market-oriented, demand-driven model based primarily on employer selection of migrants, as practised by the US. After providing an overview of each model, the article compares the three models in terms of policy outcomes as measured by various metrics and then explains how Canadian, Australian, and US governments have recently adopted policies from one another and deviated from their respective selective migration policy models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]