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This article addresses the claim, particularly popular in the 2000s and implicitly resting on a segmentation view of the labour market, that a flexible labour market-driven immigration policy (within the EU as well as from outside), often associated to a ‘Canadian model’, would respond to the economic needs of continental European countries.

A comparative historical approach is applied, including analysis of historical series of unemployment and migration data and a qualitative analysis of secondary sources on Germany, Spain and Canada, selected as best representatives of different labour market and immigration regimes. The research asks to what extent, and how, immigration has been used as a ‘buffer’ for labour market uncertainty.

Against ideas of a ‘Canadian’ model advertised in Europe (e.g. Germany), the historical and quantitative analysis shows that Canada itself has moved from short-term labour market-driven immigration policies to more long-term approaches. In fact, there has been a stronger labour market-migration link in Spain, but not without problems,

The article is a small-N comparison of critical cases, that is most different labour market models. Major demographic and geographic differences exist between the three countries, which raises even more scepticism about the suitability of a Canadian model in Europe.

The policy implications are centred on the detected paradox of labour market-driven immigration policies: in order to be sustainable, they need to have a long-term orientation and involve some degree of social integration policies.

The article adds to comparative studies of migration policies through a stronger link to labour market analysis and in particular issues of uncertainty and segmentation.

This paper examines how changes in immigration policy levers actually affect the skill characteristics of immigrant arrivals using a unique Canadian immigrant landings database. The paper identifies some hypotheses on the possible effects on immigrant skill characteristics of the total immigration rate, the point system weights and immigrant class weights. The “skill” characteristics examined are level of education, age, and fluency in either English or French. Regressions are used to test the hypotheses from Canadian landings data for 1980–2001. It is found that (i) the larger the inflow rate of immigrants the lower the average skill level of the arrivals, (ii) increasing the proportion of skill-evaluated immigrants raises average skill levels, and (iii) increasing point system weights on a specific skill dimension indeed has the intended effect of raising average skill levels in this dimension among arriving principal applicants.

This chapter presents a comparative perspective on international education in Canada and Australia in the light of recent federal proposals for improving international education programs. The study provides an account of the multiple benefits of international education and introduces the concept of public sector entrepreneurship (PSE) as a necessity for creating and administering comprehensive programs, aimed at increasing Canada’s share of the international education market. The chapter compares Canadian and Australian international education policies with a special emphasis on the entrepreneurial approach applied in Australia. Moreover, the chapter discusses potential contributions to Canadian human capital through attractive immigration policies for international graduates. The findings reveal that Canada needs centralized management of international education programs. Following the Australian model, the establishment of a specialized agency to administer programs at federal level and to coordinate activities at provincial level is essential for success. PSE is represented by applying a market approach and revising residency and immigration strategies. Further research is required for a more detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of necessary capital investments and implications of changing the policy framework governing skilled migration.

The purpose of this paper is to critically look at how immigrants to Canada are informed and educated about how to become productive members of society. The authors adopted a postcolonial framework to unveil the underlying assumptions embedded in the messages that are conveyed to “teach” and “prepare” immigrants for the Canadian workplace. In particular, the authors focus on non-white immigrants because they form the majority of immigrants to Canada and at the same time data show that they experience particular socio-economic obstacles in their settlement process that European immigrants did not.

The authors apply postcolonialism as the theoretical framework. This approach allows the authors to analyze the relationship between the local subject and the encounter with the non-local other, in this case the immigrant who is from a non-European background. The authors conduct a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis on selected texts that serve as information sources for immigrants. These texts include government documents, immigrant information brochures, and workplace information books and booklets.

The analysis shows ideological positions that reveal discursive messages representing the non-white immigrant in binary terms. Such immigrants are represented in opposing (and inferior) terms to the local (largely white) Canadian citizen. By adopting a postcolonial lens, the analysis shows that the messages to acculturate immigrants reveal assimilationist features.

The authors acknowledge that the authors’ own personal socio-political, intellectual, and ideological locations influence the approach, logic, research process, and the interpretation of the findings. For future research, other textual sources should be analyzed with regard to the messages they convey to immigrants as a form of education to see what kind of acculturation is conveyed.

This paper sheds light on the necessity to develop policies that not only aim to acculturate immigrants using integration strategies but also to carefully communicate and educate newcomers through messages that that do not stem from colonial assumptions.

This research points out the taken-for granted and oftentimes invisible forms of discriminatory practices in the workplace that appear non-discriminatory on the surface but are rooted in colonial thinking. Consequently, the authors challenge “mainstream” management theories concerning diversity in the workplace by questioning the underlying messages portrayed to immigrants.

While many consider court involvement in immigration matters a given, in liberal nation-states, there is actually a substantial degree of variation. This chapter revisits two “critical junctures” in the early immigration histories of Canada and Germany to show that institutions and policy legacies are not just historical backdrop, but actually shaped the strategies of political actors, subsequent institutional configurations, and policy options for long periods of time, thereby revealing unintended consequences, as well as alternative paths that the involvement of the courts (and other actors) could have taken.

In 2017, 22% of the Canadian population are foreign-born immigrants and one in five is a visible racial minority. Canadian schools and classrooms mirror the diversity of the society and are populated with more and more immigrant and refugee students from diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds each year. Uprooted from their home countries and familiar environments, immigrant and refugee students experience barriers and challenges in new living and educational environments. The increasing number of immigrant and refugee students and their unique educational needs and challenges have called building welcoming and inclusive schools a priority in Canadian education system. This chapter addresses the urgent need for high-impact policies, practices and praxis to build welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students through cross-sector community engagement. Based on several empirical studies, critical and extensive literature review and authors’ professional reflections, this chapter introduces a theoretical framework of building welcoming and inclusive schools for immigrant and refugee students and introduces the promising strategies of engaging community stakeholders, including educators, students, parents, governments and community organizations and agencies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine disjunctures between the ways in which Canada’s Parent and Grandparent Supervisa is framed within policy documents and press releases, and how it is actually experienced by older adults and their adult children from the Global South who engage in intergenerational care exchanges once they reunify.

A case study involving qualitative interviews with a married couple (adult children), and official texts from Citizenship and Immigration Canada were analyzed, and subsequently categorized according to themes.

The findings of this paper first demonstrate how policies such as the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa and the revamped Family Sponsorship program are ostensibly made to alleviate the significant backlog of family reunification applications, but in reality streamline and categorize older adults from the Global South as visitors who are given minimal state entitlements. Second, the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa reinforces forms of structured dependency by placing the responsibility and burden of care onto sponsors who must provide financial, social, and health care to their older parents. Finally, official statements on the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa and restructured Family Sponsorship program ignore the complex intergenerational exchanges that take place to ensure the survival of the family unit.

Given the nature of the case study’s design, the study’s findings speak to the experiences of Analyn and Edwin; adult children who sponsored an older parent under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. Given the recency of the program, the issues highlighted provide a much-needed starting point in examining the Supervisa’s impact on families from the Global South. Moreover, future studies could critically assess how the highly gendered nature of care is experienced under Canada’s temporary reunification programs.

The study highlights the everyday challenges of sponsoring a parent under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. These issues are particularly important for policy makers and practitioners to assess and understand how such policies transform dynamics of care for families from the Global South. The unbalanced power dynamics raises questions on how to best support overburdened adult children, and vulnerable older parents who have no access to state resources.

The findings of this paper further the understanding of how families from the Global South provide and receive care under the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa. These experiences, however, are neglected within official state policies which frame older newcomers as visitors who are managed, and denied entitlements to state resources. Revealing disjunctures between policy and lived experiences can assist service providers, professionals, and policy makers to recognize how programs like the Parent and Grandparent Supervisa overburden the family unit, and exacerbate conditions of poverty and marginalization.

This pan-Canadian study examines the information practices of STEM-trained immigrant women to Canada as they navigate workfinding and workplace integration. Our study focuses on a population of highly skilled immigrant women from across Canada and uses an information practice lens to examine their lived experiences of migration and labour market integration. As highly trained STEM professionals in pursuit of employment, our participants have specific needs and challenges, and as we explore these, we consider the intersection of their information practices with government policies, settlement services and the hiring practices of STEM employers.

We conducted a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with 74 immigrant women across 13 Canadian provinces and territories to understand the nature of their engagement with employment-seeking in STEM sectors. This article reports the findings related to the settlement and information experiences of the immigrant women as they navigate new information landscapes.

As immigrants, as women and as STEM professionals, the experiences of the 74 participants reflect both marginality and privilege. The reality of their intersectional identities is that these women may not be well-served by broader settlement resources targeting newcomers, but neither are the specific conventions of networking and job-seeking in the STEM sectors in Canada fully apparent or accessible to them. The findings also point to the broader systemic and contextual factors that participants have to navigate and that shape in a major way their workfinding journeys.

The findings of this pan-Canadian study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. Through interviews with these STEM professionals, we highlight the barriers and challenges of an under-studied category of migrants (the highly skilled and “desirable” type of immigrants). We provide a critical discussion of their settlement experiences and expose the idiosyncrasies of a system that claims to value skilled talent while structurally making it very difficult to deliver on its promises to recruit and retain highly qualified personnel. Our findings point to specific aspects of these skilled professionals’ experiences, as well as the broader systemic and contextual factors that shape their workfinding journey.

Immigration has been a subject of intense historical and contemporary debate in US political life. Proponents of immigration cite the important contributions immigrants have made and continue to make to the USA’s national development and evolution. Advocates of more restrictive immigration policies stress concerns over the USA’s ability to support immigrant residents and whether newer immigrants threaten the US national identity and social cohesion. Proponents and opponents of current US immigration policy will use figures from the 2000 census to justify their respective arguments in upcoming debates on this subject. This article examines a variety of immigration literature resources such as scholarly books, government documents, and Websites and seeks to emphasize the subject’s complexities and contradictions along with US and transnational perspectives.

This paper presents an analysis of how health intersects with the experience of housing insecurity and homelessness, specifically for migrant women. The authors argue that it is important to understand the specificities of the interplay of these different factors to continue the advancement of our understanding and practice as advocates for health and housing security.

An exploratory, qualitative, methodological approach was adopted, using a broad definition of housing insecurity: from absolute homelessness (e.g. residing rough) to invisible homelessness (e.g. couch surfing) to those at risk of homelessness. In total, 26 newcomer (foreign-born women who came to live in Canada during the previous ten years, regardless of their immigration status) women were recruited in Montreal, Canada. Participants were recruited directly through advertisements in public places and in collaboration with community organizations (women’s centers, homeless shelters, crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, immigrant settlement agencies and ethnic associations) and they self-identified as having experienced housing insecurity. Efforts were made to include a diversity of immigrant statuses as well as diversity in ethnicity, race, country of origin, family composition, sexual orientation, age and range of physical and mental ability. Women were engaged in semi-structured, open-ended interviews lasting approximately 1 h. Interviews were conducted in English or French in a location and time of participants’ choosing.

The findings are presented around three themes: how health problems instigate and maintain migrant women’s housing insecurity and homelessness; ways in which women’s immigration trajectories and legal status may influence their health experiences; and particular coping strategies that migrant women employ in efforts to maintain or manage their health. The authors conclude with implications of these findings for both policy and practice in relation to migrant women who experience or are at risk of housing insecurity and homelessness.

Intersections of women experiencing migration and housing insecurity in Canadian contexts have rarely been examined. This paper addresses a gap in the literature in terms of topic and context, but also in terms of sharing the voices of migrant women with direct experience with housing insecurity.