Many professional and skilled Canadian immigrants suffer from de‐skilling and the nonrecognition of their foreign credentials. Consequently, they are underrepresented in the upper segments of the Canadian labour market. Rather than accepting this devaluation of immigrant labour as a naturally occurring adjustment period, I suggest that regulatory institutions actively exclude immigrants from the upper segments of the labour market. In particular, professional associations and employers give preference to Canadian‐born and educated workers and deny immigrants access to the most highly desired occupations.
Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalised cultural capital and his views of the educational system as a site of social reproduction provide the entry point for my theoretical argument. I find that the nonrecognition of foreign credentials and dismissal of foreign work experience systematically excludes immigrant workers from the upper segments of the labour market. This finding is based on data from interviews with institutional administrators and employers in Greater Vancouver who service or employ immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia.
Sanctuary cities in the USA, UK, and Canada aim to accommodate illegalized migrants and refugees in their communities. The concept of the "sanctuary city," however, is highly ambiguous: it refers to a variety of different policies and practices, and focuses on variable populations in different national contexts. In this article, I examine the international literature to show how urban sanctuary policies and practices differ between national contexts and assess whether there are common features of sanctuary cities. I uncover legal, discursive, identity-formative, and scalar aspects of urban sanctuary policies and practices. These aspects assemble in ways that differ between countries. The article concludes by raising important practical and theoretical questions about urban sanctuary.
Workplace conventions and hiring practices are barriers confronted by immigrants in the Canadian labour market. This paper considers these barriers in the context of Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The empirical research presented examines immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia in the labour market of Greater Vancouver. A statistical analysis of census data and immigrant landing records is supplemented by an analysis of interviews with community leaders, settlement and employment counsellors, and employers. Immigrants admitted to Canada for family-reunion and humanitarian reasons tend to be less familiar with Canadian labour market 'rules' than immigrants recruited for their skills and education. In response to this cultural labour market barrier, South Asian immigrants develop ethnic networks while immigrants from the former Yugoslavia mobilize other cultural resources.
The idea of neighbourhood effects implies that the demographic context of poor neighbourhoods instills 'dysfunctional' norms, values and behaviours into youths, triggering a cycle of social pathology. It is argued that neighbourhood effects are part of a wider discourse of inner-city marginality that stereotypes inner-city neighbourhoods. Reflecting upon arguments made in the existing literature, the ideological underpinnings of the idea of neighbourhood effects are revealed. Essentialist conceptions of neighbourhood culture among employers, educators and institutional staff contribute to the neighbourhood effects phenomenon. It is also suggested that researchers and policy-makers must recognise wider forces of cultural differentiation and exclusion.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.