Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Immigrants – Employment – Canada'

For a number of years, Canadian immigration selection policy has deliberately emphasized the human capital characteristics of applicants in determining admissibility for permanent residence. Largely due to these measures, Chinese immigrants today are overwhelmingly well-educated and skilled. This thesis examines the role of geography in shaping Chinese newcomers’ post-arrival employment status, with an emphasis on working in the high-tech sector. Given that Ottawa is a leading node of high-tech employment in Canada, this project initially investigates the probability that Chinese newcomers will work in the high-tech sector in Ottawa-Gatineau relative to other cities. The project subsequently examines the degree to which employment in the high-tech sector in Ottawa-Gatineau is related to ethnic, social and demographic characteristics of local spaces where people live and work. All aspects of the study adopt a gender lens with respect to interpreting employment status. The study finds that Chinese immigrants in Ottawa-Gatineau are more likely to work in this sector than their counterparts in Vancouver and Toronto. They are also more likely to work in high-tech relative to individuals in other immigrant groups or the Canadian-born population. With respect to co-ethnic residential and work spatial configurations, as well as social and demographic characteristics of residential neighbourhoods, the study finds that these factors exert quite different influences on the likelihood that Chinese women and men will work in Ottawa-Gatineau’s high-tech sector. The results are quite distinctly different for women and men, and underline the importance of a gendered analysis of relationships between geographic location/place and employment status.

African-trained landed immigrants in the Alberta labor market are faced with employment over qualification and professional devaluation. Researchers have documented the precarious labor market position of this cohort and efforts undertaken by federal and provincial Canadian governments to address it. Little is known, however, about how these African immigrants perceive job satisfaction and over qualification. Guided by human capital theory, this phenomenological study focused on the perceptions of job satisfaction and over qualification among 11 landed immigrants of African origin in Alberta, Canada. Data were collected using semi structured interviews. Hatch's 9-step technique was used to analyze data, resulting in coded domains, master outlines, and themes. Findings indicated that labor market initiation, quality of life, labor market practices, and reeducation contributed to the immigrants' perceptions of job satisfaction and over qualification. Findings also suggested that labor market introductory programs and skills refining may influence labor market performance. Results may be used to enhance socioeconomic integration services and programs run by immigrant-serving organizations in Alberta.

A qualitative - exploratory study was conducted to investigate the experiential consequences of underemployment for Chinese immigrants who were former professionals in their country of origin. Twelve male immigrants aged 28 to 63 who have resided in Canada 1 to 4 years were interviewed. For the most part, the study was existentially based using a phenomenological - content analysis format to derive results. Results indicated that Chinese immigrants' problematic responses to underemployment differed greatly depending upon their initial place of origin i.e., familiarity with and adaptability to the host society being the significant factor. Counseling suggestions to assist these individuals followed the existential paradigm. Finally, several possibilities that exist for further research into this topic of the underemployed immigrant are described.
Education, Faculty of
Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of
Graduate

Drawing on over 150 hours of participant-observation and 41 semi-structured interviews conducted between September 2013 and April 2014 with the participants and organizers of an employment and leadership skills program for immigrant women at two Neighbourhood Houses in Vancouver, this ethnographic study examines the influence of Canadian immigration policies and settlement services on the employment trajectories of immigrant women. A key research finding concerns how women with precarious legal status and/or limited English language skills negotiate gaps accessing services and employment opportunities, and thus how the prompt provision of settlement supports and work permits would improve immigrant women’s labour market participation and economic standing in Canada. A second key finding concerns the value of settlement-oriented employment programs that recognize and emphasize newcomers’ skills rather than deficits, and that leverage this human capital to promote participants’ social integration and sense of citizenship in Canada. This dissertation is sociologically significant in its contribution to explicating the distinctive institutionalized racial and gender barriers that research participants encountered in their attempts to achieve meaningful employment and full citizenship in Canada. The policy recommendations suggested by this research include: 1) more efficient federal-level procedures for processing immigration applications and issuing work permits, 2) improved access to provincially-funded healthcare services and English language for employment training programs, 3) affordable, employer-recognized programs for assessing foreign credentials, and 4) greater outreach and education about multiculturalism, cultural sensitivity and inclusivity at the local level of settlement service agencies and neighbourhood-based community organizations.
Arts, Faculty of
Sociology, Department of
Graduate

This thesis focuses on how a group of linguistically and culturally diverse individuals in an employment preparation class for immigrants to Canada use communicative strategies and resources to build common ground, that is, how they use language to form a socially cohesive group that foregrounds shared knowledge, shared relational identity, in-group membership and shared attitudes and feelings. The thesis draws from a 12-week ethnographically informed study using participant observation with audio recording and semi-structured interviews as the main methods of data collection. It builds on the combined insights drawn from the well established discipline of interethnic communication and the relatively new but growing field of research on English as a lingua franca. While the former illuminates factors that make intercultural communication problematic, the latter sheds light on what makes it work despite cultural differences and linguistic limitations. In analysing the data, which consists primarily of transcriptions from audio recordings of spoken classroom interactions, the thesis draws analytic inspiration from scholarship situated in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. It borrows concepts from the Communities of Practice framework to understand how individuals from highly diverse backgrounds develop shared ways of talking/behaving and negotiate interactional norms. The thesis contributes to academic knowledge in several ways. It challenges common assumptions about iscommunication in intercultural contexts. It shows miscommunication episodes as potentially productive sites for negotiating meaning and restructuring social relations. It argues that the notion of ‘national’ culture, which has fallen into disfavour amongst scholars, should not simply be dismissed because ananalysis of the data collected suggests that it can serve as a multifaceted interactional resource for speakers alongside other identity categories. An important contribution of this thesis to the field of intercultural communication lies in its careful attention to what participants actually do in interaction over an extended period of time rather than starting from any a priori assumptions.

The employment success of immigrants to Canada has been a primary focus of sociological research on immigrant integration. However, much of this research has examined the concept of “employment success” solely in terms of earnings. Studies that focus on whether immigrants obtain employment matching their desired or pre-migration occupations provide inadequate measures by examining whether or not immigrants obtain employment in their desired occupations at a very broad level. In addition, the majority of quantitative analyses use cross-sectional data to examine the economic integration of immigrants. The following research tests hypotheses which examine the relationships that various ascribed, human capital, and occupational characteristics have with multiple dimensions of employment success for a cohort of recent immigrants to Canada. Longitudinal analyses of several dimensions of the employment success of recent immigrants are conducted with the use of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada. These “dimensions” include an examination of the likelihood that an immigrant will obtain employment in his or her intended occupation, or a “job match”, at some point during his or her first two years in Canada, the rate at which he or she obtains a job match during this time, and the change in his or her occupational prestige scores and wages between jobs. A case study of immigrant engineers is also presented, providing some insight into the employment success of immigrants seeking employment in regulated professions. Human capital theory, the theory of discrimination, and Weber’s theory of social closure are employed to examine different predictors of immigrant employment success. A distinctive contribution of this study is the examination of how different characteristics of an immigrant’s intended occupation may influence the likelihood of him or her obtaining a job match and the rate at which he or she does so. By examining several different aspects of employment success and accounting for immigrants’ employment throughout their first two years in Canada a more comprehensive picture of the economic integration of recent immigrants is obtained. However, the results indicate that one over-arching theory is not adequate in explaining the process of the economic integration of recent immigrants to Canada.

Il est bien connu que les immigrants rencontrent plusieurs difficultés d’intégration dans le marché du travail canadien. Notamment, ils gagnent des salaires inférieurs aux natifs et ils sont plus susceptibles que ces derniers d’occuper des emplois précaires ou pour lesquels ils sont surqualifiés. Dans cette recherche, nous avons traité de ces trois problèmes sous l’angle de la qualité d’emploi. À partir des données des recensements de la population de 1991 à 2006, nous avons comparé l’évolution de la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs au Canada, mais aussi au Québec, en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Ces comparaisons ont mis en évidence la hausse du retard de qualité d’emploi des immigrants par rapport aux natifs dans tous les lieux analysés, mais plus particulièrement au Québec. Le désavantage des immigrants persiste même lorsqu’on tient compte du capital humain, des caractéristiques démographiques et du taux de chômage à l’entrée dans le marché du travail. La scolarité, l’expérience professionnelle globale et les connaissances linguistiques améliorent la qualité d’emploi des immigrants et des natifs. Toutefois, lorsqu’on fait la distinction entre l’expérience de travail canadienne et l’expérience de travail étrangère, on s’aperçoit que ce dernier type d’expérience réduit la qualité d’emploi des immigrants. Dans ces circonstances, nous trouvons incohérent que le Canada et le Québec continuent à insister sur ce critère dans leur grille de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés. Pour valoriser les candidats les plus jeunes ayant peu d’expérience de travail dans leur pays d’origine, nous suggérons d’accroître l’importance accordée à l’âge dans ces grilles au détriment de l’expérience. Les jeunes, les étudiants étrangers et les travailleurs temporaires qui possèdent déjà une expérience de travail au Canada nous apparaissent comme des candidats à l’immigration par excellence. Par contre, les résultats obtenus à l’aide de la méthode de décomposition de Blinder-Oaxaca ont montré que l’écart de qualité d’emploi entre les immigrants et les natifs découle d’un traitement défavorable envers les immigrants dans le marché du travail. Cela signifie que les immigrants sont pénalisés au chapitre de la qualité d’emploi à la base, et ce, peu importe leurs caractéristiques. Dans ce contexte, la portée de tout ajustement aux grilles de sélection risque d’être limitée. Nous proposons donc d’agir également en aval du problème à l’aide des politiques d’aide à l’intégration des immigrants. Pour ce faire, une meilleure concertation entre les acteurs du marché du travail est nécessaire. Les ordres professionnels, le gouvernement, les employeurs et les immigrants eux-mêmes doivent s’engager afin d’établir des parcours accélérés pour la reconnaissance des compétences des nouveaux arrivants. Nos résultats indiquent aussi que le traitement défavorable à l’égard des immigrants dans le marché du travail est plus prononcé au Québec qu’en Ontario et en Colombie-Britannique. Il se peut que la société québécoise soit plus réfractaire à l’immigration vu son caractère francophone et minoritaire dans le reste de l’Amérique du Nord. Pourtant, le désir de protéger la langue française motive le Québec à s’impliquer activement en matière d’immigration depuis longtemps et la grille de sélection québécoise insiste déjà sur ce critère. D’ailleurs, près des deux tiers des nouveaux arrivants au Québec connaissent le français en 2011.
It is well documented that immigrants face many difficulties in the Canadian labour market. Particularly, compared to native-born, they earn lower wages, occupy more precarious jobs and are often overqualified. In this research, we discuss these three issues in terms of job quality. Using the data from the 1991 to 2006 Canadian population censuses, we compare the trends in job quality of immigrants and native-born in Canada, Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. These comparisons highlight the rising gap in job quality between immigrants and native-born in the four geographical areas, but especially in Quebec. This gap persists even after controlling human capital, demographic variables and unemployment rate at entry in the labour market. Overall, we found that education, work experience and language skills improve the job quality of immigrants and their native-born counterparts. However, when we separate Canadian and foreign work experience, we find that the latter type of experience reduces job quality of immigrants. In these circumstances, it is counterproductive that Canada and Quebec continue to insist on this criterion in the point systems. We also suggest increasing the importance of age in the point systems in order to encourage the admission of younger candidates with little or no foreign experience. Youth, foreign students and temporary workers who already have work experience in Canada appear to be ideal candidates for immigration. Nevertheless, using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method, we show that the job quality gap between immigrants and natives is mainly due to unfavourable treatment of immigrants in the labour market. This means that immigrants are penalized in terms of job quality regardless of their characteristics. In this context, the selection of the best candidates for immigration may produce a limited effect. We therefore suggest acting downstream with public policy to support employment integration of immigrants. To do so, a better coordination between all actors in the labour market is required. Professional orders, government, employers and immigrants must establish accelerated pathways of skills recognition for newcomers. In addition, our results indicate that the treatment of immigrants in the labour market is more problematic in Quebec compared to Ontario and British Columbia. It is likely that Quebec society is less open to immigration given its francophone character and its minority status in North America. Since the beginning, the desire to protect the French language motivates Quebec to be actively involved in immigration and the Quebec point system already emphasizes this criterion. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of newcomers to Quebec speak French in 2011.

This dissertation interrogates the deficit assumptions about English proficiency of skilled immigrants who were recruited by Canadian governments between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through the lens of literacy as social practice, the eighteen-month ethnographic qualitative research explores the sequential experiences of settlement and economic integration of seven well-educated Chinese immigrant professionals. The analytical framework is built on sociocultural approaches to literacy and learning, as well as the theories of discourses and language reproduction. Using multiple data sources (observations, conversational interviews, journal and diary entries, photographs, documents, and artifacts collected in everyday lives), I document many different ways that well-educated Chinese immigrants take advantage of their language and literacy skills in English across several social domains of home, school, job market, and workplace. Examining the trans-contextual patterning of the participants’ language and literacy activities reveals that immigrant professionals use literacy as assistance in seeking, negotiating, and taking hold of resources and opportunities within certain social settings. However, my data show that their language and literacy engagements might not always generate positive consequences for social networks, job opportunities, and upward economic mobility. Close analyses of processes and outcomes of the participants’ engagements across these discursive discourses make it very clear that the monolithic assumptions of the dominant language shape and reinforce structural barriers by constraining their social participation, decision making, and learning practice, and thereby make literacy’s consequences unpredictable. The deficit model of language proficiency serves the grounds for linguistic stereotypes and economic marginalization, which produces profoundly consequential effects on immigrants’ pathways as they strive for having access to resources and opportunities in the new society. My analyses illuminate the ways that language and literacy create the complex web of discursive spaces wherein institutional agendas and personal desires are intertwined and collide in complex ways that constitute conditions and processes of social and economic mobility of immigrant populations. Based on these analyses, I argue that immigrants’ successful integration into a host country is not about the mastery of the technical skills in the dominant language. Rather, it is largely about the recognition and acceptance of the value of their language use and literacy practice as they attempt to partake in the globalized new economy.

Dans le contexte de l'effritement de la société salariale (Castel 1995), on constate au Canada une prolifération de statuts d'emplois atypiques, une flexibilisation et une précarisation du travail, ainsi qu'une augmentation du nombre de travailleuses et travailleurs pauvres. Deux formes d’emploi semblent particulièrement illustrer la pauvreté et la précarité en emploi : le travail immigrant en agence de placement temporaire et le travail migrant temporaire. Alors que le travail en agence de placement (TAP) constitue un marché du travail précaire, on y retrouve un grand nombre d’immigrants reçus, de demandeurs d’asile ou de réfugiés, employés dans des emplois sous-qualifiés, malgré des niveaux de scolarité souvent élevés. Par ailleurs, le programme fédéral des travailleurs étrangers temporaires peu-spécialisés (PTET-PS), permet aux employeurs canadiens le recrutement d’une main-d’œuvre étrangère pour des postes déclarés non pourvus par une main-d’œuvre locale, établissant des normes spécifiques d'emploi et de migration et constituant un marché du travail transnational et fortement concurrentiel au travail salarié. La thèse interroge les processus institutionnels de construction des conditions d’accès à l’emploi pour ces deux catégories de travailleurs non natifs du Canada que sont (1) les immigrants reçus et les réfugiés insérés en emploi d’agences de placement dans le secteur de l’entreposage et (2) les travailleurs étrangers temporaires peu-spécialisés travaillant dans un abattoir. Une immersion ethnographique effectuée sur le mode de la participation observante pendant près de deux ans au Centre des travailleuses et travailleurs immigrants (CTI) à Montréal, complétée par une série d’entretiens semi-directifs réalisés auprès de travailleurs, de personnes ressources et d’intervenants du secteur communautaire, montrent que la construction de ces régimes de travail doit être analysée (1) au croisement des politiques publiques d'immigration, de la régulation du travail, des mesures d’insertion en emploi des immigrants et de l’encadrement du regroupement familial, (2) au regard des pratiques des acteurs du marché du travail (entreprises, agences de placement/recrutement, organisations professionnelles et sectorielles) et (3) en considérant les manières dont les travailleurs intègrent les conditions structurelles de l’emploi immigrant à leurs stratégies de vie personnelles et familiales. Il ressort que l’association de statuts juridiques d’immigration et de certaines formes d’emploi structure des régimes de travail caractérisés par la captivité en emploi, construits relativement aux enjeux et aux besoins immédiats des secteurs d’activité et légitimés par une législation entravant de façon systémique l’accès des travailleurs aux droits et libertés. On observe ensuite que ces régimes de travail contraint produisent des conditions d’accès à l’emploi définies sur un continuum allant de la qualification des personnes, à leur déqualification professionnelle, à leur disqualification sociale. Alors que les travailleurs rencontrés ont la particularité d’être fixés à leur emploi précaire par des contraintes liées à leur exclusion des emplois valorisés et/ou à leurs statuts juridiques d’immigration, la thèse interroge finalement les formes possibles de mobilisation et de défense collective de leurs intérêts à travers une étude de cas portant sur des actions collectives soutenues par un groupe communautaire en lien avec des syndicats.
In the context of the erosion of the “société salariale” (wage-earning society, Castel 1995), in Canada as elsewhere, we are witnessing the proliferation of atypical employment conditions, the flexibilisation and casualization of work, and an increase in the number of working poor. Two forms of employment best illustrate poverty and precariousness in employment: immigrants working in temporary placement agencies (temp agencies) and temporary foreign workers (TFWs). The precarious labour market of temp agency work harnesses a large number of highly educated landed immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers employed in low-skilled jobs. Moreover, the federal program for low-skilled temporary foreign workers (TFWP-LS), allows Canadian employers to recruit foreign workers for positions unfilled by the local workforce. The TFWP-LS establishes specific employment and immigration standards, thereby institutionalizing a transnational labour force competing with domestic wage-earners. This thesis examines the institutional processes that create the terms of access to employment for two categories of foreign-born workers in Canada: (1) landed immigrants and refugees working in warehouses through temporary placement agencies and (2) low-skilled temporary foreign workers in slaughterhouses. A nearly two-year ethnographic immersion at the Immigrant Workers Centre (IWC) in Montreal, based on the “observant participation” method, complemented by a series of semi-structured interviews with workers, key informants and community sector stakeholders, showed that the construction of these work arrangements is complex. An understanding of these categories of work requires an analysis: (1) at the intersection of immigration policies, labour regulations, employment integration measures for immigrants, and regulations related to family reunification; (2) in relation to the practices of labour market actors (companies, placement/recruitment agencies, professional and sectorial organizations); and (3) in consideration of the ways in which workers incorporate the structural conditions of im/migrant employment in their personal and family life strategies and choices. Results show that immigration status has intersected with certain forms of employment to structure work arrangements characterized by forced labour. Those work arrangements are built on the short-term needs of industries and are legitimized by legislation that systemically impedes workers' access to rights and freedoms. These constrained work arrangements lead (im)migrant workers through a deleterious process, starting with their qualification as an (im)migrant to Canada, then professional de-skilling and finally social disqualification. While the workers met in the context of this project are constrained in their precarious jobs due to their exclusion from qualified jobs and/or by their legal immigration status, the thesis concludes by exploring the possible forms of mobilization and collective defense of their interests through a case study of collective action supported by a community group in connection with trade unions.

Despite the increasing levels of education possessed by recent immigrants to Canada, the incomes and employment status of newcomers is declining. While there exists a significant body of research that tracks this decline, few focus on immigrants living outside the ‘traditional’ migrant communities of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. This thesis uses data from the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey to investigate earnings and employment chances of immigrants and non-immigrants based upon educational achievement throughout Canada. This study divides Canada into four tiers based on the number of immigrants received in order to assess the economic outcomes of the two groups. Economic outcome is judged through the lens of social capital framework and human capital theory to evaluate the influence of social networks and individual accomplishments. Results of the regressions analyses indicate that those who are Canadian-born have stronger returns to education in all but the 3rd-tier though the differences appear to be relatively minimal. Specifically, among foreign-born migrants, living in the 3rd-tier coincides with better earning returns to education while schooling is only important for employment for those residing in 1st-tier centres. Additionally, the influence of social networks is negligible regardless of nativity status. Despite lesser returns to education, immigrants appear to earn more than their native-born counterparts based upon occupation, though the results for employment suggest that reaching this point may be more difficult than for those Canadian-born. Lastly, there seems to be economic opportunities for immigrants outside of the 1st-tier leading to better monetary outcomes. The findings of this project contribute to current immigration literature in Canada and hold implications for the Canadian immigration policy.

This study, guided by a feminist framework, aims to disclose aspects of the lived experience of Chinese immigrant women in the Canadian labour market, to explore the factors affecting their job search and employment opportunities, and to identify the gaps between the experience of women and the existing policies and programs, so as to increase our knowledge in this area and to help inform the development of more effective and meaningful intervention strategies to improve their situation. Recognizing the importance of the words of women, this study adopts a qualitative design to generate rich information from the interviews held with eight Chinese immigrant women from Hong Kong, with different occupational backgrounds. The women's narratives reflect the disadvantaged position of Chinese immigrant women: their exclusion from the mainstream labour market and concentration in Chinatown. The findings refute what traditional theories and authorities have said: that racial minority immigrant women's personal shortcomings account for their employment problems; their unfulfilled high expectations, culture shock, lack of confidence, lack of language and job skills. Instead, the research findings reveal what has been omitted in most literature: that Chinese immigrant women have been historically discriminated against, that there are structural and systemic barriers perpetuating their employment difficulties. The findings reveal that employment inequality is rooted in unequal power relations and Chinese immigrant women are triply disadvantaged due to their multiple roles as women, as immigrants, and as racial minorities.

The literature review on immigrant’s self-employment activities has limited the debate around the leading factors to this type of activity. Much research on the subject has tried to answer the question ‘what are the determinant characteristics to become self-employed?’ In addressing that question researchers have focused on the relative value of the block mobility thesis and the ethnic enclave theory. This focus created a research gap; researchers have ignored how self-employment may be used by immigrants as an alternative or complementary strategy for accessing a new labour market. Using the Longitudinal Immigration Database, this research explores, using survival regression analysis, the extent to which immigrants adopt different labour market strategies following their admission to Canada. More specifically, it examines their rate of access to labour market activities, the length of time they stay in specific type of labour market activities and the determinant factors for such events. The findings of this research demonstrate that 27 per cent of the economic immigrants, who were admitted to Canada between 1990 and 2008, are likely to rely on paid and self-employment activities simultaneously over time. This finding reinforces the need to analyse self-employment activity as a concurrent activity to paid employment. The regression analysis results on the concurrent activities imply that immigrants admitted under the self-employed category are more inclined, than the other economic immigrants, to rely on the two types of activities when integrating into the Canadian labour market. The findings of this thesis indicated that the traditional theories on self-employment activities are inadequate to explain concurrent self-employment activities and paid employment activities. There is a need to develop contemporary theories around this new concept of concurrent labour market activities that would take into consideration self-employment and employment theories as well as immigrants’ adaptive integration capacity.

The three chapters of my dissertation examine immigrant assimilation in the Canadian labour market. Through three levels of analysis, which are distinguished by the sample restrictions that are employed, I investigate immigrant labour force and job dynamics, immigrant propensity for self-employment, and immigrant wage assimilation, respectively. In the first chapter, I exploit recently-introduced immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of Canada's native-born and immigrant populations. I am particularly interested in the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and in how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compares between immigrants and the native-born. The main finding is that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears about equally due to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and in using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. I find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant jobseekers face barriers to low-wage jobs. We interpret these findings as emphasizing the empirical importance of the quintessential immigrant anecdote of a low-quality "survival job" becoming a "dead-end job". The second chapter analyzes immigrant choice of self-employment versus paid employment. Using the Canadian Census public use microdata files from 1981 to 2006, I update the Canadian literature on immigrant self-employment by examining changes in the likelihood of self-employment across arrival cohorts of immigrants and how self-employment rates evolve in the years following migration to Canada. This study finds that new immigrants, who arrived between 1996 and 2005, turned to self-employment at a faster rate than the earlier cohorts and that immigrants become increasingly likely to be self-employed as they spend more time in Canada. More important, I examine immigrant earnings outcomes relative to the native-born, instead of within, sectors and thus explore the extent to which a comparative advantage in self-employment, captured by the difference in potential earnings between the self- and paid-employment sectors, can explain the tremendous shift toward self-employment in the immigrant population. The results show that the earnings advantage between the self- and the paid-employment sectors accounts for the higher likelihood of self-employment for traditional immigrants in the years following migration. However, the potential earnings difference cannot explain the reason that non-traditional immigrants are more likely to be self-employed as they consistently lose an earnings advantage in the self-employment sector relative to the paid-employment sector. My paper suggests that immigrants may face barriers to accessing paid-employment, or immigrants are attracted to self-employment by non-monetary benefits. Lastly, in the third chapter, studies which estimate separate returns to foreign and host-country sources of human capital have burgeoned in the immigration literature in recent years. In estimating separate returns, analysts are typically forced to make strong assumptions about the timing and exogeneity of human capital investments. Using a particularly rich longitudinal Canadian data source, I consider to what extent the findings of the Canadian literature may be driven by biases arising from errors in measuring foreign and host-country sources of human capital and the endogeneity of post-migration schooling and work experience. The main finding is that the results of the current literature by and large do not appear to be driven by the assumptions needed to estimate separate returns using the standard data sources available.

New immigrants to Canada, specifically those of non-Western origin, frequently experience the phenomenon of the no Canadian work experience employment barrier. This paper is based on information gathered in a focus group comprised of male and female new immigrants with university education and advanced skills and work experience who have been in Canada for less than five years. The focus group revealed respondents did face the no Canadian experience barrier. But they actively created strategies to overcome the barrier, which included: researching and doing more preparation for the realities of the Canadian job market prior to arriving in Canada but not simply relying on insufficient information provided from Canadian government, having decent English language abilities and a mild accent, altering their resumes and verbalization of their experiences to fit in with Canadian employer expectations. This paper also found that government and settlement organization current strategies and services were ineffective for highly educated and skilled immigrants and ignored the needs of immigrant women with young children. In conclusion, issues related to intercultural communication need to be considered for smoothing immigrants integration into the Canadian workforce.

New immigrants to Canada, specifically those of non-Western origin, frequently experience the phenomenon of the ‘no Canadian work experience’ employment barrier. This paper is based on information gathered in a focus group comprised of male and female new immigrants with university education and advanced skills and work experience who have been in Canada for less than five years. The focus group revealed respondents did face the ‘no Canadian experience’ barrier. But they actively created strategies to overcome the barrier, which included: researching and doing more preparation for the realities of the Canadian job market prior to arriving in Canada but not simply relying on insufficient information provided from Canadian government, having decent English language abilities and a mild accent, altering their resumes and verbalization of their experiences to fit in with Canadian employer expectations. This paper also found that government and settlement organization current strategies and services were ineffective for highly educated and skilled immigrants and ignored the needs of immigrant women with young children. In conclusion, issues related to intercultural communication need to be considered for smoothing immigrants’ integration into the Canadian workforce.

L'Enquête rétrospective sur les travailleurs sélectionnés au Québec a permis d’analyser la relation formation-emploi des immigrantes — arrivées comme requérantes principales — et de jeter un regard sur le parcours en emploi de ces femmes, en comparaison avec leurs homologues masculins. Une attention particulière est mise sur l'effet de genre et de la région de provenance, ainsi que l'interaction entre ces deux variables. Des modèles semi-paramétriques de Cox mettent en exergue comment les caractéristiques individuelles, mais aussi les activités de formation dans la société d’accueil, affectent au fil du temps les risques relatifs d’obtenir un premier emploi correspondant à ses qualifications scolaires prémigratoires. Puis, des régressions linéaires font état des déterminants du salaire après deux ans sur le territoire. Les résultats montrent que l'accès à l'emploi qualifié n'est pas affecté différemment selon que l'immigrant soit un homme ou une femme. Des différences intragroupes apparaissent toutefois en fonction de la région de provenance, avec un net avantage pour les immigrants de l'Europe de l'Ouest et des États-Unis. L'accès au premier emploi (sans distinction pour les qualifications) et le salaire révèlent, quant à eux, des différences sur la base du genre, avec un désavantage pour les femmes. Chez ces dernières, l'insertion en emploi se fait de façon similaire entre les groupes régionaux, alors que les groupes d'hommes sont plus hétérogènes. D'ailleurs, certaines caractéristiques individuelles, comme la connaissance du français et la catégorie d'admission, affectent différemment les immigrants et les immigrantes dans l'accès au premier emploi.
Quebec’s retrospective survey on selected workers (Enquête sur les travailleurs sélectionnés) was used to analyze the relationship between education and employment for immigrant women, arrived as primary movers. The analysis also offers a perspective on their integration in the labour market, as compared to that of their male counterparts. A special attention is placed on the effect of gender and the region of origin, as well as the interaction of these two variables for access to employment. Semi-parametric Cox models highlight how individual characteristics, as well as training in the host country, affect the hazard rates of first employment corresponding to pre-migration levels of education. Linear regressions are then used to show the determinants of wage after a two-year residence period in Quebec. The results reveal no differences regarding access to qualified employment for women and men. Differences appear, however, when looking at the country of origin, with a clear advantage for migrants from Western Europe and the United-States. Gender based distinctions are therefore shown on access to first employment and wages, with female doing worst in these two outcomes. Among this group, almost no distinctions appear according to their region of origin, whereas when looking at male immigrants, the group proofs to be more heterogeneous. Moreover, individual characteristics, such as French knowledge and the admission category, have been found to have different effects on women and men regarding access to first employment.