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The goal of a Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program is to fill occupational labour shortages until local workers are available. Such a program ensures that fast growing firms can hire foreign workers to avoid a slowdown or a stop in their activities. A necessary condition for such a program is to give priority to local workers in hiring. In addition, in the medium term, shortages must be eliminated by increases in local labour supply. Hence, this immigration policy involves constraints to participating firms which must be strictly respected. Since its creation in 1973, the Canadian TFW program has experienced a large number of changes which made it more accessible. Among them, in 2002, the TFW program became available for all occupations, skilled and low-skilled. There is increasing evidence that the program has had adverse impacts on some resident workers in Canada. This paper shows that this is also the case in the province of Quebec. The main shortcomings are the absence of adequate information about the labour markets and low TFW hiring costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the confidential files of the Canadian Census 1991-2006, combined with information from O*NET on the skill requirements of jobs, to show that the labor market patterns of female immigrants do not fit the profile of secondary workers, but rather conform to the recent experience of married native women with rising participation (and wage assimilation). At best, only relatively uneducated immigrant women in unskilled occupations may fit the profile of secondary workers. Educated immigrant women experience skill assimilation over time: a reduction in physical strength and a gradual increase in analytical skills required in their jobs relative to natives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the development of immigration federalism in Australia and Canada (expressed through the establishment of state/provincial/territorial immigrant selection programs) and its implications for immigrants’ rights and immigration opportunities. Given the very limited scholarship on the issue, and the lack of previous comparative studies on immigration federalism in Australia and Canada, our research is exploratory by nature. Our finding is that provincial/state/territorial programs offer some advantages to prospective applicants (such as increased immigration opportunities), but, at the same time, raise a number of concerns (such as an increased dependence on employers). As our study reveals, the costs and benefits of immigration opportunities under state/provincial/territorial programs differ for skilled and low-skilled workers, whereby the latter are given only limited access to permanent residence, and on more onerous conditions than skilled workers. Drawing on these findings, we identify areas in need of further research and policy response. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research points to a growing gap between immigrant and native-born outcomes in the Canadian labour market at the same time as selection processes emphasize recruiting highly educated newcomers. Drawing on interviews with well-educated men and women who migrated from countries in sub-Saharan Africa, this paper explores the gendered processes that produce weak economic integration in Canada. Three-quarters of research participants experienced downward occupational mobility, with the majority employed in low-skilled, low-wage, insecure forms of 'survival employment'. In a gendered labour market, where common demands for 'Canadian experience', 'Canadian credentials' and 'Canadian accents' were uneven across different sectors of the labour market, women faced particular difficulties finding 'survival employment'; in the long run, however, women's greater investment in additional post-secondary education within Canada placed them in a somewhat better position than men. The policy implications of this study are fourfold: first, we raise questions about the efficacy of Canadian immigration policies that prioritize the recruitment of well-educated immigrants without addressing the multiple barriers that result in deskillling; second, we question government policies and settlement practices that undermine more equitable economic integration of immigrants; third, we address the importance of tackling the 'everyday racism' that immigrants experience in the Canadian labour market; and finally, we suggest the need to re-think narrowly defined notions of economic integration in light of the gendered nature of contemporary labour markets, and immigrants' own definitions of what constitutes meaningful integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provisions in the Canadian Temporary Foreign Worker Program such as comparable wages and working conditions with working Canadians are meant to protect the employment of local workers. However, they appear to be insufficient to ensure that the program does not have adverse effects on unemployment. By not allowing wage increases, incentives to migrate across provinces and convergence in provincial unemployment rates are therefore decreased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A portion of the temporary foreign workers admitted for work in low-skilled occupations in Canada are subjected to major restrictions to Charter-based rights and freedoms. This administrative condition has been associated by researchers, community groups, etc. to systemic human and labour rights abuses, which points to the fact that a specific combination of alternatives policies should be given serious consideration by policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the enforcement of transnational white solidarity with focuses on Asian migration and the formation of the U.S.-Canadian borders. It states the peculiarity of the U.S. immigration law that banned the return of migrant Japanese laborers, who have migrated from the state of Washington to work in Canada for a short period of time. It tells that the Japanese migrant workers were caught in the midst of change in the North American regimes for broader spatial and social transformations, which were far from the traditional system, in an effort to regulate and discipline Asian mobility and to enforce a new racialized geographical boundary.

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Discusses a range of possible policy responses to the reduction in the real wages and total work weeks that unskilled Canadian men have experienced since the mid-1970s. Causes of the decline in unskilled workers' earnings; Trends in unskilled workers' earnings; Public employment of the unskilled; Public training or retraining programs.

Considers the role of shifts in labor demand away from unskilled workers, combined with an institutionally-generated greater labour supply elasticity in Canada, in explaining the apparent secular increase in Canadian male unemployment and the emergence of the Canada-United States unemployment rate gap in the 1980s. Reference made to wage polarization; Documentation of the divergence between cross-sectional and time series labour supply responses.

The difference in wages between Canada's skilled and unskilled workers, in percentage terms, was substantially smaller in 1965 than in 1939. In many industries the gap has halved. An attempt is made in this paper to demonstrate the nature and extent of the narrowing during the period 19091965, and to examine some of the factors responsible for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immigration of East Indian laborers to British Columbia and to three Pacific Coast states has presented the most recent problem of Asiatic immigration. The Canadian government has solved it by a series of measures resulting in the effective exclusion of East Indian laborers from Dominion territory, and the Immigration Commission of the U.S., which recently completed its work, recommends exclusion. The number of East Indians immigrating to Canada during 1905 was 48; in 1906, it was 887. These immigrants found employment chiefly as unskilled laborers on the railways, in lumber and shingle mills, and the fishing industry. Because of their strange appearance, peculiar habits, and employment at relatively low wages, much opposition was shown to them as well as to the Chinese and Japanese. An investigation by the Canadian government resulted in the restriction to which reference has been made. To prevent these hardships, to avoid race friction with its complications, and to protect the white workingmen whose standard of comfort was of a higher order, and who, as citizens with family and civic obligations, had expenditures to meet and a status to maintain which the coolie immigrant was in a position wholly to ignore, the Canadian government sought a conference with the representatives of the parent government upon whose cooperation it was dependent in meeting this problem.

In November 2007, the Temporary Foreign Worker Advocate Office, funded by the Alberta Federation of Labour, published its report titled Temporary Foreign Workers - Alberta's Disposable Workforce. This article provides a summary of some of the issues dealt with in that report as well providing some additional up to date information on temporary foreign workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has underlined the increasing feminization of migration, and how women in temporary foreign worker (TFW) programs are concentrated in lower-skilled and more vulnerable jobs traditionally considered "women's work": caregiving, domestic service, hospitality. Many developing countries look to TFW schemes as an answer to high unemployment levels. A recent report by The North-South Institute and the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of West Indies, Jamaica, looks at the linkages between Jamaica and Canada in temporary labour migration from a gender perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]