We analyse the experiences of international students living in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of transnationalism that understands mobility as broadly uninterrupted, continuing and taken-for-granted, and international student migration (ISM) literature. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people had to contend with sudden border closures and stringent restrictions on all forms of travel. International students are regarded as the archetypal trans-migrants with frequent mobility and often multiple attachments to place. We interrogate these assumptions of mobility by drawing on interview data from 13 international students in Ontario from April to June of 2020. We found that international students experienced the pandemic transnationally and faced increased challenges, which heightened their reliance on support from transnational families, and generated anxieties about their future career and mobilities. We bring transnational theories into conversation with ISM literature to better understand international students' lived experiences in Canada during a pandemic.

This article is based on an exploratory study of the implicit gender norms in work–life balance (WLB) rhetoric in ten Canadian information and communication technologies (ICT) organizations. Interviews with human resources (HR) managers and preliminary company website analysis revealed a masculinist and heterosexist bias in the implementation of WLB practices, legitimized by the gender composition of the workforce and the demanding yet inherently rewarding nature of the ICT sector. Participants deliberately separated care (read: childcare) from WLB (read: flexible hours and working from home), reproducing the assumption that an ‘ordinary’ worker is a man with a female partner who assumes primary responsibility for the reproductive realm. The study concludes with: (i) recommendations to increase HR's role in providing functional support for WLB practices and (ii) three future directions for research. This article contributes to a general call in feminist scholarship to apply a gendered lens to WLB practices.

Changes to Canada’s immigration and refugee determination policies made since 2012 have increased the occurrence and persistence of temporariness in Canada, contributing to the systematic exclusion of a growing number of non-citizens, who live and work on the territory, from a wide range of rights. From the perspective of temporariness, I illustrate the striking similarities in the state’s approach to two seemingly distinct groups of non-citizens (based on their rationale for admission): low-skilled temporary foreign workers and refugee claimants. Both groups occupy a low rung in the hierarchy of rights and entitlements to citizenship in Canada, inevitably affecting their social and economic outcomes in the host society. In conclusion, I argue that there is still much to be gained by viewing these distinct groups of temporary migrants as theoretically and experientially linked, in order to design effective policy and deter Canada from repeating its dark and exclusionary migratory past.

Canada's current immigration, refugee, citizenship and temporary migration polices facilitate the production and maintenance of multitude forms of temporariness. The designation of temporary and precarious status means limited rights, conditionality and increased risk of abuse and exploitation. It also shapes persons’ access to rights and services and their sense of belonging. The special section includes four original articles that employ a range of qualitative methods to delve into the issue of temporariness and its implications for migrants, Canadians, and the future of migration management in Canada. The authors call for repeals, amendments and the creation of innovative programmes that leads to pathways to permanent status. The contributions are intended to provide active, pointed, and practical recommendations that would eventually lead to an immigration programme that is efficient, secure, and complies with international human rights standards while eliminating instances of abuse and exploitation.

This article brings a new, theoretically minded approach to weighing the relative utilities and harms of Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) without dismissing the agency of SAWP enrollees or arriving at an abolitionist argument to end Temporary Migrant Worker (TMW) programmes in Canada. Building on the anti-trafficking debate within feminist migration studies, we evaluate the availability and exercise of consent, choice, and coercion among SAWP workers. We draw on extensive documentation by scholars across disciplines to contextualize the SAWP within a socio-economic history that engendered and continues to legitimize the "success" of the programme in both Mexico (the largest sending state) and Ontario (the largest provincial recipient of workers). Our analysis suggests that, while grievous, the SAWP's structural injustice ought not to preclude individuals from migrating and earning wages. The article concludes with recommendations to create a fairer avenue for Mexican workers into, through, and out of the SAWP.

Research into media constructions of migrant crises has noted when, where, and how migrants become illegalized, criminalized, and securitized, exposing the relationship between media, migration, and state power. News media, through narratives and lexicon, can portray some migrants as a threat to the fabric of society. This article applies the framework of policing the crisis (Hall et al., ) to discuss the discursive construction of Temporary Migrant Workers (TMWs) in Canadian media and policy. Content and textual analysis of front‐page coverage of newsprint on the Moratorium on TMWs implemented in 2014 demonstrates this process of collective problematization. The Moratorium responded to a concern of replacing Canadians, which was largely unsupported by data. Since then, news coverage has shifted their representation of TMWs from a threat to victims, signalling a critical moment to reimagine TMWs and re‐direct discussions towards granting substantive citizenship rights.

PurposeDespite immigrant-receiving countries' need for skilled professionals to meet labour demands, research suggests that many skilled migrants undergo deskilling, downward career mobility, underemployment, unemployment and talent waste, finding themselves in low-skilled occupations that are not commensurate to their education and experience. Skilled immigrant women face additional gendered disadvantages, including a disproportionate domestic burden, interrupted careers and gender segmentation in occupations and organizations. This study explores how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic impacted skilled newcomer women's labour market outcomes and work experiences.Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw on 50 in-depth questionnaires with skilled women to elaborate on their work experiences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsThe pandemic pushed skilled immigrant women towards unemployment, lower-skilled or less stable employment. Most study participants had their career trajectory delayed, interrupted or reversed due to layoffs, decreased job opportunities and increased domestic burden. The pandemic's gendered nature and the reliance on work-from-home arrangements and online job search heightened immigrant women's challenges due to limited social support and increased family responsibilities.Originality/valueThis paper adds to the conversation of increased integration challenges under pandemic conditions by contextualizing the pre-pandemic literature on immigrant work integration to the pandemic environment. Also, this paper contributes a better understanding of the gender dynamics informing the COVID-19 socio-economic climate.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with exchange and international students during the COVID-19 pandemic, we elaborate on the role of Imaginative Metaphor Elicitation (IME) to generate knowledge about participants’ experiences while helping them make sense of and cope with a difficult situation. Imaginative metaphors allow participants to explore feelings, assumptions, and behaviors in non-threatening ways and facilitate introspection and self-awareness. We propose that imaginative metaphors help participants make their experience tangible and accessible, identify problematic assumptions, behaviors, as well as resources available to them. Some reported gaining a renewed sense of empowerment. Simultaneously, IME provides an opportunity to collect rich data while co-creating solutions for and with participants. We contribute to calls for embedding social impact in the research design by highlighting the value of IME in gaining deeper access to participants’ experiences while supporting them in taking an active role in their situations.