Immigration, Citizenship and Racialization at Work: Unpacking Employment Precarity in Southwestern Ontario

This paper examines the relationship between precarious employment, legal status, and racialization. We conceptualize legal status to include the intersections of immigration and citizenship. Using the PEPSO survey data we operationalize three categories of legal status: Canadian born, foreign-born citizens, and foreign-born non-citizens. First we examine whether the character of precarious work varies depending on legal status, and find that it does: Citizenship by birth or naturalization reduces employment precarity across most dimensions and indicators. Next, we ask how legal status intersects with racialization to shape precarious employment. We find that employment precarity is disproportionately high for racialized non-citizens. Becoming a citizen mitigates employment precarity. Time in Canada also reduces precarity, but not for non-citizens. Foreign birth and citizenship acquisition intersect with racialization unevenly: Canadian born racialized groups exhibit higher employment precarity than racialized foreign-born citizens. Our analysis underscores the importance of including legal status in intersectional analyses of social inequality

Citizenship and Employment Precarity: The Compounding Challenges of Precarious Work and Precarious Legal Status - Project Summary

This project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Living with Precarious Legal Status in Canada: Implications for the Well-Being of Children and Families

This study focused on the effects of precarious status on the well-being of fifteen participants with particular attention to their attempts to claim services, their feelings of belonging and sense of social support, and the effects of parents’ status on children. It investigates ways in which the status of one family member can affect the well-being of the entire family. Those who had children reported that the family’s status disadvantaged their children, whether they were Canadian or foreign-born, as parents’ status was used to justify denying children rights to which they are entitled by international, national, and provincial laws. The paper challenges approaches to citizenship and immigration status that fail to consider the implications of legal status for a person’s primary social units and networks.Cette étude examine les conséquences du statut précaire sur le bien-être de 15 participants, en se penchant tout particulièrement sur leurs efforts pour revendiquer l’accès aux services, leurs sentiments d’appartenance et de soutien social, ainsi que les répercussions du statut des parents sur leurs enfants. Elle examine les différentes façons par lesquelles le statut d’un membre de la famille peut affecter le bien-être de la famille toute entière. Ceux ayant des enfants ont rapporté que ces derniers, qu’ils soient nés au Canada ou à l’étranger, avaient été défavorisés par le statut de la famille, étant donné que le statut des parents était employé pour justifier le déni aux enfants de droits qui étaient les leurs en droit international et selon les lois nationales et provinciales. L’article remet en question les façons d’aborder la question de statut de citoyenneté et d’immigrant qui ne prennent pas en ligne de compte les conséquences du statut juridique sur les unités sociales de base et les réseaux sociaux pour chaque personne

Is Precarious Employment Low Income Employment? The Changing Labour Market in Southern Ontario

This paper examines the association between income and precarious employment, how this association is changing and how it is shaped by gender and race. It explores how precarious employment has spread to even middle income occupations and what this implies for our understanding of contemporary labour markets and employment relationship norms. The findings indicate a need to refine our views of who is in precarious employment and a need to re-evaluate the nature of the Standard Employment Relationship, which we would argue is not only becoming less prevalent, but also transitioning into something that is less secure

Codevelopment and citizenship: the nexus between policies on local migrant incorporation and migrant transnational practices in Spain

Over the last decade both national and local actors in Spain have picked up on international trends encouraging a policy framework of migration and development. Policies of codevelopment are tied in with issues of migration management in the sense of linking current and future migration flows with processes of development in the country of origin. However, this article demonstrates how codevelopment policies and initiatives of local governments in Catalonia also relate to migrants’ local process of incorporation in their country of residence. In so doing the article seeks to bridge and contribute to studies of migration and development as well as issues of national and local citizenship and migrant incorporation. Importantly, the article highlights the role of receiving country local governments in the nexus between migrant transnational practices and processes of incorporation

“The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundaries of Membership and Participation in the Mexican Nation”

This article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-Ied transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.This article is based on field research supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council and a Facultv of Arts Small Research Grant from York University

“Family and Collective Remittances to Mexico: A Multi-Dimensional Typology of Remittances”

The development potential of remittances has resurfaced as a topic of analysis, based in part on dramatic increases in migration and amounts of money 'sent home', and partly in the growing interest and involvement by states and nonstate actors in gaining leverage over remittances. The trend is indicative of an emerging remittance-based component of development and poverty reduction planning. This article uses the case of Mexico to make two broad arguments, one related to the importance of extra-economic dimensions of remittances, particularly the social and political meanings of remittances, and the other based on a disaggregation of remittances into family, collective or community- based, and investment remittances. Key dimensions of this typology include the constellation of remitters, receivers, and mediating institutions; the norms and logic(s) that regulate remittances; the uses of remittances (income versus savings); the social and political meanings of remittances; and the implications of such meanings for various interventions. The author concludes that policy and programme interventions need to recognize the specificity of each remittance type. Existing initiatives to bank the un-banked and reduce transfer costs, for example, are effective for family remittances, but attempts to expand the share of remittances allocated to savings, or to turn community donations into profitable ventures, or small investments into large businesses, are much more complex and require a range of other interventions