Search results

This paper aims to examine ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the USA.

The paper examines five classic components of ethnicity – country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion – among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the USA in 2003, as principals in the three main employment categories (EB‐1, EB‐2, and EB‐3), using data collected in the US New Immigrant Survey.

The visa categories have distinctive ethnic configurations. India dominates EB‐2, European countries and Canada EB‐1. The ethnicity portfolio contains more languages than religions. Language is shed before religion, and religion may not be shed at all, except among the ultra highly skilled of EB‐1. Highly skilled immigrants are mostly male; they are not immune from lapsing into illegality; they have a shorter visa process than their cohortmates; smaller proportions than in the cohort overall intend to remain in the USA. Larger proportions in EB‐2 and EB‐3 sent remittances than in the cohort overall. A little measure of assimilation – using dollars to describe earnings in the country of last residence, even when requested to use the country's currency – suggests that highly skilled immigrants are more likely to “think in dollars” than their cohortmates.

The paper is like an aerial reconnaissance. It is necessary to now go under the ledges and into the caves.

The data used are the first ever collected on a probability sample of new legal immigrants to the USA. It is expected that many researchers will use these data to generate valuable new knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to understand why high‐skilled immigrants from a developing country (Colombia) are returning to their home country to create businesses instead of starting up in their host country (Spain).

A case study methodology was used to present the experiences of three high‐skilled immigrants. All subjects presented had migrated from Colombia to Spain, held degrees from a Colombian university, had a university background in entrepreneurship and intended to run a business in Colombia instead of in Spain.

This study shows how the expectations of highly‐skilled immigrants can influence their decision to return to their home country to set up in business. Because of their skills and international experience, these individuals have good professional prospects in their home countries and a lower tolerance of the barriers and difficulties encountered in the host country than immigrants with other profiles.

In exploring the high‐skilled immigrants' reasons for returning home, future research should pay more attention to personal motivations and cultural differences.

The findings will enable policy makers in developing and developed countries to improve policies for attracting or retaining highly‐skilled immigrants or emigrants, especially those with entrepreneurial intentions.

In a group of immigrants whose skills and talents could offer considerable added value either to their host country or to their home country, this paper examines some of the key processes that influence their decision of where to locate their entrepreneurial activity.

The foreign-born skilled immigrant population is growing rapidly in Canada but finding a job that utilizes immigrants’ skills, knowledge and experience is challenging for them. The purpose of this paper is to understand the self-perceived health and social status of skilled immigrants who were working in low-skilled jobs in the service sector in Ottawa, Canada.

In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews with 19 high-skilled immigrants working as taxi drivers and convenience store workers in the city of Ottawa, Canada were analysed using a grounded theory approach.

Five major themes emerged from the data: high expectations but low achievements; credential devaluation, deskilling and wasted skills; discrimination and loss of identity; lifestyle change and poor health behaviour; and poor mental and physical health status.

The study demonstrates the knowledge between what skilled immigrants expect when they arrive in Canada and the reality of finding meaningful employment in a country where international credentials are less likely to be recognized. The study therefore contributes to immigration policy reform which would reduce barriers to meaningful employment among immigrants reducing the impacts on health resulting from employment in low-skilled jobs.

This study provides unique insights into the experience and perceptions of skilled immigrants working in low-skilled jobs. It also sheds light on the “healthy worker effect” hypothesis which is a highly discussed and debated issue in the occupational health literature.

This study aims to clarify the labor market participation of highly educated Turks who moved or were exiled to the Western countries after the July 15th, 2016 Coup attempt in Turkey. These recent Turkish flows create a compelling case for researching higher education connections and the administration of justice in migration policies/practices related to highly educated people's job market participation. This study aims to expand the discussion on migration policies, practices, job market participation, how highly skilled migrants perceive them in various contexts and understand the complexity of highly educated migrants' incorporation into destination countries and their perspectives and lived experiences with policy practice.

The primary source of the data is the semi-structured 30 interviews with the highly educated Turkish immigrants and refugees in Western countries, which enables comparative data from individuals of the same origin. The qualitative data have been transcribed, coded and analyzed according to the grounded-theory design from this vulnerable community. The high education was determined as graduation from 4-years colleges, which was recognized by destination countries. Our methodological tools were driven by the obstacles to collect data from politically sensitive, forced, or exiled migrants.

First, this article challenges the assumption that incorporating job market participation is a smooth process for highly educated migrants who moved to Western countries. Second, highly educated immigrants tried to reach their previous statuses and life standards as fast as possible by working hard, making sacrifices and developing innovative strategies. The immigrants in Europe have faced greater obstacles with policies while participating in the job market. Third, the importance of networking and the active usage of social media platforms to communicate with other immigrants in similar situations facilitated the job market participation and job preferences of highly educated migrants. Fourth, while fast job market participation experiences of immigrants in Northern America were increasing their positive feelings regarding belonging, people who have similar skillsets in Europe experienced more problems in this process and felt alone.

The research results may lack generalizability due to the selected research approach. Further studies are encouraged to reach more population for each country to compare them.

Consequently, higher education may be a more vital decision point in migration policies and practices. This study contributes to a better understanding of these factors by showing the perspectives and experiences of highly educated migrants comparatively. Thus, it broadens the discussion about migration policies and job market participation of highly educated migrants.

Building on this work, the authors suggest more studies on the temporary deskilling of highly educated migrants until they reach re-credentialing/education or training to gain their former status.

First, while most studies on immigrants' labor market participation and highly educated immigrants focus on voluntary migrants, this study examines underrepresented groups of involuntary migrants, namely forced migrants and exiled people, by focusing on non-Western Muslim highly educated Turks. Second, the trouble in the Middle East continues and regimes change softly or harshly. There is a growing tendency to examine these topics from the immigrants' perspective, especially from these war-torn areas. This article adds to this discussion by stating that rather than forced migration due to armed conflict, the immigrants from Turkey – the non-Arab Muslim state of the Middle East – are related to political conditions. Lastly, drawing on the relationship between social change in the origin country and migration and addressing the lack of reliable and comparative data, this study focuses on same origin immigrants comparatively in eight different countries.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of obstacles to socioeconomic integration faced by highly-skilled immigrant women (HSIW) to Quebec, followed by a discussion of Quebec’s socio-political context and interculturalism, in an effort to better situate these obstacles. With these in mind, implications for diversity management are discussed.

The paper is largely based on a review of the immigrant integration, interculturalism and diversity management literatures pertaining to the socioeconomic integration of highly-skilled immigrants. It focusses on the socioeconomic integration of HSIW in the Quebec context.

The authors find that researchers should continue to examine aspects of the social and political contexts in which immigrant integration and diversity management take place when conducting studies in these areas. The authors also encourage continued research pertaining to specific groups, as these may bring to light-specific dynamics that can lead to exclusion.

This paper includes implications for diversity management in organizations seeking to foster inclusive practices with regards to ethnic minorities and immigrants in general, and HSIW in particular.

The paper sheds new light on immigrant integration and diversity management in Quebec by bridging the gap between three areas of study that are interconnected but seldom discussed together: socioeconomic integration of immigrants, interculturalism and diversity management in organizations.

Educational institutions are investing heavily in the internationalization of their campuses to attract global talent. Yet, highly skilled immigrants face persistent labor market challenges. We investigate how immigrant academics experience and mitigate their double precarity (migrant and academic) as they seek employment in higher education in Canada.

We take a phenomenological approach and draw on reflective interviews with nine immigrant academics, encouraging participants to elaborate on symbols and metaphors to describe their experiences.

We found that immigrant academics constitute a unique highly skilled precariat: a group of professionals with strong professional identities and attachments who face the dilemma of securing highly precarious employment (temporary, part-time and insecure) in a new academic environment or forgoing their professional attachment to seek stable employment in an alternate occupational sector. Long-term, stable and commensurate employment in Canadian higher education is out of reach due to credentialism. Those who stay the course risk deepening their precarity through multiple temporary engagements. Purposeful deskilling toward more stable employment that is disconnected from their previous educational and career accomplishments is a costly alternative in a situation of limited information and high uncertainty.

We bring into the conversation discussions of migrant precarity and academic precarity and draw on immigrant academics’ unique experiences and strategies to understand how this double precarization shapes their professional identities, mobility and work integration in Canadian higher education.

Not just in low-wage and low-skilled jobs but also further up in the corporate ladder, Australian corporations have culturally diverse workforces. Due to talent shortages in fields such as medicine, engineering, and education, the Australian economy is reliant on skilled immigrants. As a result, the demand to increase and diversify the workforce is growing, and Australia’s government has focused its efforts on attracting a diverse pool of skilled immigrants. As Australia’s ethnic diversity grows, businesses that want to stay competitive will find that having a diverse workforce provides them an advantage.

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.

Drawing on embeddedness theory, we examine how skilled immigrants' perceived brain-waste affects their social embeddedness. Social embeddedness facilitates the acquisition of host country-specific human capital, which, in return, can accelerate the transfer of immigrants' human capital in the workplace.

In total, 397 skilled immigrants in Australia participated in this study. We applied a set-theoretic approach to decode the complexity and interplay among the key concepts used in this study.

We found the impacts of psychological workplace wellbeing and workplace discrimination on social embeddedness differ between skilled immigrants who experience perceived brain-waste and skilled immigrants whose skills were recognized by employers. The results suggest that job satisfaction is the most critical factor contributing to social embeddedness among skilled immigrants who did not report brain-waste. Furthermore, we found that married skilled male immigrants who reported brain-waste still could embed socially if they did not directly experience workplace discrimination.

The majority of previous studies have compared skilled immigrants with their local-born colleagues, but we compared two groups of skilled migrants in the current study. We adopted fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to test how unique configurations of several variables can ease their social embeddedness into the host society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether natives’ attitudes toward immigration is associated with an influx of high- and low-skilled immigrants. The current research focuses on selected 20 OECD countries as destination countries.

A pseudo-panel based on age cohort is constructed to control for the potential unobservable individual characteristics. The random effects and within estimators (where applicable) are applied in the panel-data setting.

Regression results indicate that natives’ attitudes depend on their labor market exposure and skill type. Low-skill immigrant inflows are negatively associated with natives’ attitudes, but the magnitude is reduced proportionally to their share of the high skilled. The association between immigrant flows and attitudes is particularly strong for the prime-age cohorts, which can be explained by the labor market competition mechanism.

Given the data limitations, not all destination countries could be analyzed but only selected OECD countries. However, this situation has resulted in the sample destination countries sharing similar characteristics with advanced economies.

Although the majority of previous studies are based on survey questions on attitudes toward immigrants with respective skill type, the current study focuses on the effects of the actual immigration flows. Natives’ attitudes respond sensitively to the actual changes in the number of migrants. The selection of OECD countries makes the characteristics of the destination countries substantially homogeneous.