Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to Canada: The Role of Source-Country Gender Inequality

2025/02/13 Leave a comment

Interesting findings:

“A growing body of literature uses country-level indicators to examine the impact of immigrants’ source-country conditions on the home and work lives of immigrants after arrival. One measure that has attracted increased attention is gender inequality in immigrants’ countries of origin. However, little is known about the degree to which the transition from high to low gender inequality countries affects the development of connections with the receiving country and whether immigrant women and men are impacted differently. This article examines the association between source-country gender inequality and immigrants’ sense of belonging to Canada. Our regression analysis of data from the 2013 and 2020 General Social Surveys suggests a higher level of source-country gender inequality is associated with a stronger sense of belonging to Canada for both immigrant men and women. Despite concerns from some conservative critics that gender inequality in source countries hinders immigrant integration, the results show that immigrants from cultures different from Canada develop a strong sense of belonging to Canada. Our findings suggest that cultural distance does not necessarily have a negative impact on immigrant men’s and women’s self-perceived integration into their host country.”

Source: Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging to Canada: The Role of Source-Country Gender Inequality

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ICYMI: Ottawa to focus on tech-related immigration despite industry headwinds

2023/08/02 Leave a comment

Some good notes of caution by Statistics Canada experts and UBC’s David Green:

The federal government is upending its points-based system for immigrant selection this year and prioritizing candidates with experience in the technology sector, despite recent layoffs and weakening labour demand in the industry.

Since June 28, Ottawa has invited people with particular attributes to apply for permanent residency (PR), a departure from how the Express Entry system, which accounts for a large portion of economic immigration to Canada, usually works.

Candidates in that pool are assigned a score – based on such factors as age and education – and the government regularly selects those with the highest scores to apply for PR status.

Under the new approach, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is frequently sending out invitations to apply to a subset of individuals. This year, IRCC will focus on people with French-language skills or recent work experience in one of five fields, including STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and health care.

Sean Fraser, who until recently was immigration minister, said category-based selection would help Canada to bring in health care and construction workers that it desperately needs in ailing sectors of the economy.

“Realistically, we need to leverage the new flexibilities that will kick in in 2023 to do targeted draws for people who have the skills to build more houses,” he said at a press conference last November.

But the federal government will put considerably more emphasis on the recruitment of STEM workers, according to targets that IRCC shared with The Globe and Mail.

Between 28 per cent and 31 per cent of PR invitations that are issued through the Express Entry system this year will go to people with recent experience in certain STEM jobs, such as data scientists and software developers. Most applications are processed within six months of being received.

This easily exceeds the target ranges for candidates with French-language proficiency (11 per cent to 15 per cent) or those with experience in specific occupations within health care (nine per cent to 12 per cent), trades (three per cent to four per cent), transportation and agriculture (one per cent to two per cent each).

The emphasis on tech-savvy immigrants is part of a broader recruiting strategy that’s taken shape in recent weeks. This month, for example, the federal government invited skilled workers with H-1B visas in the United States to apply for Canadian work permits, hitting its cap of 10,000 applications within 48 hours of the initiative’s launch.

But this push also coincides with a challenging time for the tech sector, which has endured a series of high-profile layoffs over the past year, including two rounds of sweeping cuts at Shopify Inc.Tech-related job growth has slowed dramatically this year, while postings for some roles have plunged to below pre-pandemic levels.

There’s been “a huge shift in the job market when it comes to recruiting activity and hiring appetite,” said Brendon Bernard, senior economist at hiring site Indeed Canada.

Economists and policy experts have warned that Canada has a checkered history in matching immigrants to specific jobs.

Just under 50 per cent of STEM-educated adult immigrants in the U.S. and Canada worked a STEM job in the mid-2010s, according to a report that Statistics Canada published in 2020.

Of the remaining STEM-educated immigrants, about 50 per cent in the U.S. found a job that required a university degree, while in Canada, just 20 per cent did. “In Canada, most STEM-educated immigrants who could not find employment in a STEM occupation found lower-skilled jobs,” Garnett Picot and Feng Hou wrote in the report.

The authors noted that Canada experienced a rush of STEM-educated immigrants in the 1990s, in response to the ill-fated dot-com boom, and their ranks “have remained at high levels” ever since. “In the absence of a shortage of STEM workers, employers may prefer to hire those educated in Western countries,” the report said.

Tech companies, on the other hand, frequently say that Canada suffers from a shortage of skilled workers, making it tough to compete globally.

To date, IRCC has invited 8,600 people to apply for permanent residency over five rounds of category-based selections. There has been one round of STEM invites that went to 500 people.

IRCC will continue to select people from the broad pool of Express Entry candidates, not just those with specific attributes; if a STEM worker receives a PR invite in this manner, it counts toward the target for that category. And depending on a person’s attributes – say, a French-speaking engineer – they can be counted in multiple categories.

The Immigration Department developed its list of desired occupations after a public consultation that drew 289 responses from various stakeholders, including Amazon and the Council of Canadian Innovators, a lobby group for prominent tech companies. The categories are in place for 2023 and subject to change thereafter.

The Express Entry system is being shaken up in the process. By filtering for specific job experience, the government is reaching deeper into the pool of candidates, which means that some high-scoring candidates will get passed over. (The scores correspond to their expected earnings in Canada, based on the outcomes of previous newcomers.)

“You’re going to bring in STEM workers whose points, in terms of education etc., would actually not get them in here” under the usual approach, said David Green, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia.

“It’s not like there’s an infinite number of really good STEM workers out there. There’s going to be a distribution, and by doing this, we are going down to the less competent part of the distribution.”

Source: Ottawa to focus on tech-related immigration despite industry headwinds

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Ottawa to rectify issue with massively revised temporary foreign workers data

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

Good quick response. And kudos to the Globe for uncovering the change. Hopefully the lesson learned is that any significant change must be openly and transparently communicated, preferably with advance consultations:

The federal government says it will publish a full accounting of temporary foreign work permit holders in Canada after The Globe and Mail discovered that more than two decades of data had been altered without explanation.

More than one million people held work permits through the International Mobility Program at the end of last year, according to figures that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada published in February.

However, the federal immigration department recently made significant downward revisions to those numbers, indicating there are now around 675,000 permit holders. The figures for all previous years, dating back to 2000, had also been reduced.

Several immigration researchers told The Globe that IRCC removed work permit holders whose primary reason for being in Canada may not be related to the labour market, such as students and refugee claimants.

The department said the revised numbers were not properly labelled. “When this new data set was published, the incorrect title/description was mistakenly published to accompany it,” spokesperson Matthew Krupovich said in a statement.

IRCC said it intends to publish figures on both the narrower and broader groups of work permit holders, but did not indicate when that will happen.

Some economists were frustrated with how IRCC handled the data revision and expressed concern that lowering the numbers would obscure how many temporary foreign workers are in the country.

“The data is just a mess,” said Mikal Skuterud, a professor of labour economics at the University of Waterloo.

By not counting international students with work permits, for example, “one would understate the growth of the IMP,” Feng Hou, principal researcher at Statistics Canada, said by e-mail.

The International Mobility Program accounts for a large share of temporary foreign workers in the country. Within the program are several categories of permit holders, including postgraduate workers and spouses of skilled workers.

Canada’s population is growing rapidly, in large part because of the influx of temporary residents, including workers and students. Many of those people are accruing postsecondary degrees and Canadian work experience in hopes of getting permanent residency.

The use of temporary foreign labour by Canadian employers has soared in recent years. The trend has been criticized by many economists for helping companies minimize their labour costs, among other reasons.

Source: Ottawa to rectify issue with massively revised temporary foreign workers data

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Is Canada taking the wrong approach to the labour shortage?

2023/04/29 Leave a comment

Good discussion of high vs low wage market needs. However, a discussion of productivity and per capita GDP missing, and the current immigration policies are working against increasing productivity as Skuterud and others have argued:

Does Canada need more immigrants with less education to do low-paying work, when many of their highly educated peers are already toiling in such jobs?

As employers struggle to find workers, a new report is calling into question Canada’s efforts to use immigration to deal with labour shortages.

“The labour shortages we’re seeing are mostly concentrated on the lower-skilled jobs, but we know that there’s already a very large proportion of immigrants with university education working in these jobs,” Statistics Canada researcher Feng Hou, co-author of the joint StatsCan and immigration department report, told the Star.

“It’s important for policymakers and the public to decide if we want to continue to select highly educated new immigrants to work in lower-skilled occupations or increase (the number of) immigrants with lower education levels.

“It’s a choice we have to make.”

The stakes are high and could have a lasting impact on the Canadian labour market — changing the calibre of the future workforce, suppressing wages or discouraging employers from investing in innovation and improving work conditions.

There could also be unexpected societal consequences.

“A significant move away from highly educated immigrants would weaken the tendency for the children of immigrants to attain high education levels, a major success for Canada compared to other countries,” cautions the report.

“In many countries the population generally has a more positive attitude toward highly-skilled immigrants than the lower-skilled. Any change that negatively affects Canadians’ perception of immigration could put a damper on its success.”

Canada raises immigration intake

As of March, Canada’s unemployment rate was at five per cent. Meanwhile, job vacancies have trended down 731,570 across all sectors since last June, despite a slight increase earlier this year.

The growth in unfilled jobs was in transportation and warehousing (+14,500) as well as health care and social assistance (+12,400), while the numbers dropped for professional, scientific and technical services (-6,200; -10.9 per cent), manufacturing (-4,200; -6.0 per cent) and educational services (-3,800; -14.1 per cent).

To tame the tight labour market, the federal government has raised the annual intake of new immigrants, with a goal of bringing in 500,000 a year by 2025, relaxed the rules to usher in foreign workers and passed a new law to prioritize potential immigrants in targeted sectors, including those in lower-skilled jobs previously ineligible for permanent residence.

A one-time program was also launched to grant permanent residence to 90,000 international students and foreign workers in essential jobs in Canada — many in the low-skilled spectrum of the caregiving and food production and distribution sectors — to ease the crunch.

Concerns have been raised regarding the extent to which immigration should be geared toward filling higher or lower-skilled jobs, and whether the country is on the right track.

How are newcomers to Canada faring?

Based on census and the government’s immigration database, the new study examined how newcomers who came under different programs fared and if they were employed in jobs at par with their education and skill levels. Although the analysis was based on 2016 data, Hou believes the findings would be similar today.

Among all immigrants aged 20 to 64, 60 per cent were in higher-skilled jobs and 40 per cent in lower-skilled positions, comparable to the ratio among their Canadian-born peers, at 64 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively.

(Higher-skilled jobs are defined as requiring a minimum of two years of post-secondary education and above; lower-skilled jobs only require some high school education and on-the-job training.)

Although immigrants played a key role in the labour market at all skill levels, accounting for 24 per cent of all employment, they also are more likely than their Canadian-born peers to be at the bottom of the ladder. 

According to the 47-page report, 34 per cent of immigrants selected via the economic category (including principal applicants, spouses and dependants, and in Canada since 1980) were employed in lower-skilled jobs.

Even among longer-term economic immigrants who have been in Canada for more than a decade, 31 per cent were in lower-skilled positions. 

This group of immigrants, selected for their higher education and skills, is a major provider of lower-skilled labour. It accounted for 53 per cent of all adult immigrants, and almost half (46 per cent) of the immigrant labour force in lower-skilled jobs.

Economic immigrants who were chosen under the Provincial Nomination Program, which allows provinces to select their own permanent residents, had the largest share in lower-skilled jobs, at 40 per cent. That compared to 28 per cent among those in the federal skilled worker program and 15 per cent in the Canadian Experience Class.

“Traditionally, economic immigrants in particular have been selected based on a ‘human capital model,’ which orients immigration towards higher educated individuals,” said the report. “However, not all economic immigrants occupy higher-skilled jobs.”

Cyclical factors are driving labour market conditions

The study referred to the many factors contributing to the pandemic-induced labour market conditions: worker fatigue; concerns among workers about COVID-19 infection; strong government financial support to individuals; the decline in immigration levels; and a possible desire to change jobs.

Given most of these drivers were cyclical, it recommended the temporary foreign workers program may be a more reasonable solution to the labour crisis amid current economic uncertainty.

However, critics say the solution is not about bringing in fewer low-skilled immigrants but focusing more on credential recognition in order to make the best use of all immigrants’ skills.

“The business cycle has not led to fewer temporary foreign workers. The use of temporary foreign workers through different immigration streams continues to go up,” said Naomi Alboim, who served senior federal and provincial government roles in immigration and labour.

“They say they hope it will resolve itself when the pandemic abates. But the pandemic is still with us. It’s not necessarily good for our economy just to continue to bring in temporary foreign workers, nor is it good for the temporary foreign workers.”

The report cited the boom and bust of the higher-skilled tech and oil sectors as examples of the temporariness of cyclical labour market, but Alboim said it failed to recognize the “ongoing needs” for lower-skilled workers in areas such as skilled trades and health care that can’t be easily replaced by automation and technology. 

“Even if the high interest rates result in a reduction of economic growth and perhaps less people being required, we know that there are sectors at the lower end where we are going to continue to need people,” said Alboim.

“I’m not saying the majority of people coming into the country should be selected on the basis of lower skills. We should just have a little bit more of a balance so we don’t have a bifurcated immigration system that says, ‘Higher-skilled. Permanent. Lower-skilled. Temporary.’”

‘We do need … a mix’

The success of the economic immigration program comes down to the match between newcomers’ skills and the jobs that need to be filled, said Rupa Banerjee, Canada Research Chair of economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canada’s immigrants.

It’s an irony that low-skilled immigrants in many ways actually have employment appropriate to their education and skill levels while their highly educated and skilled peers struggle to get compatible jobs and become disillusioned with the decision to come to Canada.

“What’s really important is to look at this through a more nuanced viewpoint. It’s not as cut and dry or black and white as simply we don’t need as many low-skilled immigrants,” said Banerjee.

“We do need to have a mix of different skill levels coming into Canada, but we still have this problem of job skill mismatch and that continues to be a major challenge that we need to continue to work on.”

Source: Is Canada taking the wrong approach to the labour shortage?

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Immigrant acculturation and wellbeing in Canada: John Berry and Feng Hou

2016/12/02 Leave a comment

Another informative study by John Berry and Feng You showing that an acculturation and integration strategy that involves a strong sense of belonging both to Canada and the country of origin tends to result in higher levels of well-being:

Consistent with much of the research on acculturation strategies, we found that the integration strategy (in the present case, a strong sense of belonging to the two countries) was by far the most preferred strategy. This general preference for integration has been found in many previous studies (reviewed by Berry, 1997). This preference for integration is observed even when the assessment of these strategies is operationalised in very different ways (Berry & Sabatier, 2011; Snauwaert, Soenens, Vanbeselaere, & Boen, 2003). However, both these authors also found that that these differing operationalisations provided varying estimates for the extent of preference for each strategy. In the present study, even when using only the two dimensions of sense of belonging, and having only one question for each dimension, this approach seems to have provided results that are consistent with much of the research literature: integration is by far the most preferred strategy.
The relationship between the two belonging dimensions was examined by a simple correlation. We found this to be .13, which, while significant, does not indicate that they assess the same phenomenon. Berry et al. (2006), using two cultural identities (ethnic and national) in their study of immigrant youth, found a similar positive correlation between these two identities. In the 13 countries in the sample combined, the overall correlation was .17, ranging across societies of settlement from highs of .32 to a low of .28. The overall pattern was for positive correlations to be in “settlement societies” (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) and negative in all other societies. This is a well-established finding in the acculturation literature, particularly in traditional immigrant-receiving countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States (e.g., Benet-Martinez, 2011; Berry, 1997; Berry et al., 2006; Costigan, Su, & Hua, 2009; Snauwaert et al., 2003).
Having created these four acculturation strategies, we attempted to assess what factors might be related to each of them. With integration taken as the control, we found patterns of demographic and social factors that are associated with each of the other three strategies.
  • Those in the assimilation group: had resided longer in Canada, had immigrated earlier in their lives, were more likely to be in the labour force, had lower bonding with their own cultural community, and were more likely to be divorced or separated. These latter two associations seem to represent a way of living in Canada that is one of living alone, and not being linked to their cultural community.
  • Those in the separation group resided in Canada for a shorter period of time; this could well represent a lag in coming to learn about and feel part of their new society. Previous research has shown this phenomenon both longitudinally (Ho, 1995) and cross-sectionally (Berry et al., 2006). Those pursuing separation were also more likely to have experienced discrimination; this finding may be an example of the phenomenon of “reactive identification” (which was referred to earlier), where individuals who feel rejected reciprocate this feeling and reject those who are the source of discrimination. This seems to represent a way of living in Canada of turning inward toward one’s own group, at least in the short term.
  • Those in the marginalisation group were more likely to be underemployed and have a lower income, were very likely to have come to Canada in the family or dependent class, and more likely to be widowed or never married. This seems to represent a way of living in Canada that, while being initially tied to a family, they now are more alone in both their economic and family situation. These patterns of association between acculturation strategies and demographic and social factors are the most common ones to be found in the literature (see Sam & Berry, 2016 for an overview).

The main focus in this study is on the wellbeing of immigrants, and whether their wellbeing can be associated with their acculturation strategy, as well as with these demographic and social factors.

First, we found that in keeping with much of the previous literature, including numerous individual studies (e.g., Berry et al., 2006) and a metaanalysis (Nguyen & Benet-Martinez, 2013), the integration acculturation strategy was associated with higher levels of wellbeing (both life satisfaction and mental health) compared to the other three strategies. This remained the case when the scores were adjusted for the demographic and social control variables that also have impact on wellbeing.

Also in keeping with much of the research literature, marginalisation was associated with the poorest levels of wellbeing.

This pattern adds to the growing evidence that when immigrants remain attached to their heritage culture, and also become involved in their new society, they achieve a greater level of wellbeing. In sharp contrast, when they are disengaged from both cultures, lacking bonding and bridging capital, they have poorer outcomes.

The present study confirmed that integration is associated with higher wellbeing. This pattern shows that being involved in both the heritage culture and in the larger society (by way of integration) promotes life satisfaction.

The research carried out on the relationship between social interactions and wellbeing in a variety of samples (Jetten, Haslam, Haslam, & Branscombe, 2009; Jetten et al., 2015) provides a broader context within which to interpret this relationship: Being engaged in and identifying with many social groups provides a basis for wellbeing. This consistent finding with immigrant samples seems to be a specific example of this general pattern.

Of particular important is the finding that the effects of acculturation strategy was larger than the social and demographic factors that are often held to account for wellbeing (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2016).

Immigrant acculturation and wellbeing in Canada

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