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A dark side of global mobility is that many immigrants have negative work outcomes. Studies have analyzed the antecedents to poor work outcomes from the immigrants’ point of view or from that of host country nationals. The purpose of this paper is to propose a relational model, which applies terror management theory to address how the economic mobility beliefs of immigrants and host country nationals interact and how these different combinations of beliefs affect the self-esteem of immigrants.

This theoretical model considers the impact of the social interactions between immigrants and host country nationals when immigrants’ mortality is salient.

In hostile environments that make immigrants’ mortality salient, lack of confirmation of immigrants’ beliefs about economic mobility from host country nationals can lead to a decrease in immigrants’ self-esteem and therefore to negative work outcomes.

As the number of immigrants grows, so do concerns about their ability to contribute to the economy. Lack of confirmation of their beliefs in a context in which their mortality is salient, is likely to lead to lower self-esteem and perhaps other negative outcomes.

This paper is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to use terror management theory to advance our understanding of the outcome of a lack of confirmation from host country nationals of immigrants’ beliefs on economic mobility under conditions of mortality salience.

This paper aims to examine perceived barriers and paths to success for Latin American immigrant professionals in the Canadian job market.

Findings are based on 20 semi‐structured interviews with Latin American graduates of Canadian MBA programs. Interviews were analyzed for emergent categories and common themes.

Despite their strong educational backgrounds, participants perceived several challenges to their success in the Canadian workplace, specifically, language barriers, lack of networks, cultural differences and discrimination. They also identified factors that influenced their professional success in Canada, such as homophilious networks and their Latin American background.

By investigating stories of Latin American immigrant professionals, the study explores subjective views of immigration experiences and discrimination in this unique and rarely examined group. A larger sample will increase the confidence of the study's findings and future studies should examine dynamics of these issues over time.

This paper presents insight onto the labor market experiences and coping mechanisms of the currently understudied group of Latin American immigrant professionals in Canada. The study's qualitative approach enabled the examination of challenges experienced by immigrant professionals beyond those typically studied in this literature (e.g. devaluation of foreign credentials) and led to the finding that being Latin American can act both as a disadvantage in the form of discrimination and as an advantage as it differentiates immigrant professionals from other job seekers.