Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Abstract

Under-employment and unemployment of immigrants has often been attributed to immigrants' lack of human capital skills and/or cultural and social capital endowments. Few studies have addressed the fact that despite these possible 'capital' disadvantages, immigrant niches are occasionally made in professional fields. Based on an institutional ethnographic study, this article sheds light on this phenomenon. Specifically, it traces some of the hiring practices found within the engineering profession in Canada from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers. It unveils a hard versus soft skill discourse that ideologically relegates minoritized immigrants to the bottom of the hiring queue. It also maps a project-based and network-dependent hiring schema that paradoxically renders immigrants without 'desirable' skills simultaneously dismissible and indispensable. It further argues that the skill discourse revealed constitutes a rationalizing mechanism through which racialization and capitalist pursuit of maximum surplus value interact to produce differential opportunities for immigrants at different places and times.

The feminisation of migration and the migrants VET policy neglects: the case of skilled women secondary migrants in Australia

“…However, gender, ethnicity, country of origin and stage in life can make a significant difference to the settlement experiences of those who enter Australia with no guaranteed employment. Disrupted careers, deskilling and downward occupation mobility, even if only temporarily, are common experiences of both women and men who enter Australia without a job offer thereby confirming and extending much existing literature (Colic-Peisker 2011;Devos 2011;Iredale 2005;Shan 2013). But ethnicity and gender also cut across these experiences creating inequalities between migrants.…”

“…Turning to what is known about skilled migrant women, a small, but growing, number of studies of this phenomenon have tended to highlight the negative impact of migration on women's careers (Colic-Peisker 2011;Devos 2011;Ho 2006;Iredale 2005;Man 2004;Shan 2013). Downward occupational mobility, and re-orientations away from previous professional careers to new positions of immersion in the family and caring for children reveal the difficulties skilled women migrants face in making their way in the gendered and racialised orders they find in the host countries.…”

“…Gender, ethnicity, language and global hierarchies of education and qualifications are some of the contingent relationships that have been shown to mutually shape the unequal opportunities and outcomes and multiple identities of migrants. For example: the highly skilled non-western and other eastern European women migrants to Norway (Fossland 2012); women from non-English speaking backgrounds in Australia and New Zealand (Pio 2005;Syed and Murray 2009); Chinese women in Australia (Ho 2006); Chinese (women and men) engineers in Canada (Slade 2004;Shan 2013) women from the Asia-Pacific region recruited to the care sector in Britain (Cuban 2013); and women from the Indian Punjab in Britain (Qureshi et al 2012).…”

Complicating the entrepreneurial self: professional Chinese immigrant women negotiating occupations in Canada

“…They range from immigrants' lack of English proficiency (Boyd 1990), cultural capital (Bauder and Cameron 2002) and social capital (Xue 2008), to the devaluation of immigrants' credentials and experience (e.g., Guo 2010; Ng and Shan 2010; Shan 2009a), demands for Canadian work experience (e.g., Chakkalakal and Harvey 2001;Sakamoto, Chin, and Young 2010;Slade 2012) as well as institutionalised racism and sexism (e.g., Ng 1988;Man 2004). With few exceptions (Ng and Shan 2010;Shan 2009aShan , 2009bShan , 2012Shan , 2013, little attention has been paid to how immigrants try to manage their employment after immigration. This paper contributes to this void of the scholarship by examining how a group of Chinese immigrant women professionals rebuild their careers and status after migration.…”

Romanian Roma: An Institutional Ethnography of Labour Market Exclusion

“…Hence, the fear of being discriminated becomes a barrier in itself. Shan (2013) argues that this kind of 'network-dependent hiring schema' hampers immigrants' employment outcomes, because their social networks tend to be familyand ethnicity-based. Although Roma individuals could not be regarded as immigrants in the European states they reside in, they share some of the problems when it comes to inclusion in work and society (Costi, 2010).…”