La plupart des immigrants étrangers qui tentent d'intégrer le marché du travail au Canada vont connaître une trajectoire impliquant diverses contraintes. Cette étude qualitative se penche sur la problématique de l'insertion en emploi des immigrants francophones hors Québec. Elle est réalisée par le biais d'entrevues auprès de douze immigrants haïtiens dans la région Ottawa-Gatineau et vise à identifier les obstacles d’intégration en emploi et les stratégies de contournement employées par les immigrants tout au long de leur trajectoire respective. Il s'agit d'examiner comment les éléments du capital humain, du capital social et de la discrimination peuvent influencer leur insertion en emploi. Suite aux données recueillies dans nos entrevues nous avons déterminé que la non-reconnaissance des diplômes et des compétences acquises à l'étranger, la barrière linguistique due à la non-maîtrise de l'anglais, le manque d'expérience sur le marché du travail canadien, la faiblesse des réseaux sociaux et la discrimination sont les principaux obstacles rencontrés par les immigrants dans leur trajectoire d'insertion en emploi. Malgré ceux-ci, les immigrants ne se découragent pas et mettre en place diverses stratégies. Ainsi, le retour aux études postsecondaires, l'apprentissage de l'anglais, le recours aux réseaux sociaux, ne pas porter attention à la discrimination et prendre du recul face à ce phénomène sont certains des éléments qui ont favorisé l'insertion en emploi des participants de notre recherche.

This research project proposes to examine the role of religious/secular identities and spaces in processes of newcomer settlement. By focusing on how newcomer participants performed socio-spatially contingent religious/secular identities and experienced religious/secular spaces fluidly, I shed light on the importance of these negotiations of identity and space as settlement strategy. I examined these settlement strategies through participants’ navigation of religious organizations and other spatial contexts such as the workplace, school and home. Informed by their individual agency, participants were shown to perform identities and experience different spaces in such a way as to address a variety of structural constraints and settlement challenges. This thesis research was conducted using a feminist geography framework, drawing on qualitative research methods. I relied on a mixed-methods approach, using participant observation, individual semi-structured interviews and mental maps to collect data. My data collection took place in Ottawa, focusing on the settlement experiences of 11 newcomers to the National Capital Region of Canada.

Les associations porte-parole des francophones du Canada, entre les années 1960 et 2010, ont vu leurs priorités changer. Alors que de 1960 à 1980, le thème de l’immigration est absent de leurs préoccupations, celui du pluralisme était loin de faire l’unanimité. Entre 1980 et 1990, les choses commencent à changer. Les deux thèmes – immigration et pluralisme – commencent à émerger au sein des associations, et un certain flou se dessine quant à leur vision de ces thèmes. D’autres acteurs ont d’ailleurs une influence très importante sur ce changement : le gouvernement fédéral, les gouvernements provinciaux, ou encore des acteurs individuels impliqués dans les associations francophones. Ces acteurs évoluent au sein de moments clés, qui émergent du contexte politique dans lequel les thèmes finissent par s’imposer. Ainsi, entre 1991 et 2010, l’on peut constater que, pour les associations francophones du Canada, l’immigration et le pluralisme deviennent des thèmes prioritaires.

The plight of the impecunious unmarried gentlewoman is a familiar theme in Victorian social history. Historians have ransacked literary sources to demonstrate the misery of the Victorian governess and the depth of a dilemma that was sufficiently serious to generate the feminist movement. Yet there has been no systematic study of the changing fate of the Victorian "distressed gentlewoman" in the face of all the attempts by reformers and philanthropists to improve her position during the nineteenth century. The problem of writing a social history of the Victorian middle-class spinster has been aggravated by the paucity of appropriate sources. This study is based on the records of contemporary female emigration societies and Colonial Office emigration projects, and on the personal correspondence of some emigrants. It investigates the position of distressed gentlewomen from 1830 to 1914, and explains the results of one popular remedy for their dilemma: emigration. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did voluntary organizations establish facilities expressly for the emigration of middle-class women. Yet some early-Victorian gentlewomen were sufficiently hard pressed to use the facilities of working-class organizations to escape from difficult circumstances in Britain. The emigration records permit a closer analysis of the social backgrounds and careers of some Victorian gentlewomen than has hitherto been possible. Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain there was an increasing surplus of women of marriageable age. This intensified the problems of middle-class women who were without any means of financial support. The Victorian social code stressed marriage as the most respectable career for women, and for those unable to achieve that status the employment field was confined, in large measure, to the overcrowded and exploited occupation of the governess. For women with only mediocre qualifications for teaching who were accustomed to the relative leisure of the middle-class home the need to find employment could come as a rude shock, and usually involved a certain loss of caste. The economic problems of distressed gentlewomen are familiar, but it is not generally recognized that many of them suffered from what we today call alienation. Emigration, more than any possible occupation in Britain, was able to alleviate this sense of alienation by providing remunerative work in combination with secure social relations, a combination rarely enjoyed by the working gentlewoman in Britain. In the British colonies a gentlewoman could safely become a domestic servant without losing social rank and the companionship of her employers. Yet several factors prevented large numbers of distressed gentlewomen from taking advantage of emigration. The early-Victorian prejudice against female emigration, the preference of the colonists for working-class women, the rigid principles of the feminists and the insistence of British emigration organizations on expensive preliminary domestic training raised formidable barriers against the emigration of most impecunious gentlewomen. When, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, voluntary organizations used the rhetoric of the Victorian feminine civilizing mission to encourage large numbers of educated women to emigrate, it was well-trained lower-middle-class women seeking professional work who benefited most, and not the less qualified distressed gentlewomen. The latter had not profited from the late-Victorian advances in female education; rather, the resulting competition worsened their relative position in the search for employment. Neither emigration nor the achievements of the feminists could solve the problem of the distressed gentlewoman, a problem which remained acute while the Victorian social code survived. Only the decline of that social code and the mass-mobilization of the female labour force during the First World War eliminated the existence of distressed gentlewomen as an important social problem. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

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In this dissertation, the effectiveness of three Polish return migration programs will be analysed against a combination of return migration theories and economic channels. It will examine the motivations behind their conception, and the services, grants or initiatives implemented with the aim of addressing the needs of new and existing migrants, improving communication channels, and most importantly, developing the environment, means and incentives that will attract migrants to return to their homeland. Any failures to properly identify and address the needs, desires and aspirations of migrants with the structure of the return migration programs greatly delimit the success of the respective program through lesser participation and diminished societal impact.

The H-1B visa program was initiated in 1990 to temporarily hire highly-skilled foreign workers. The H-1B visa program has changed several times since its initiation. One of the most important changes occurred in 2001 when the 21st Century Act exempted individuals employed by institutions of higher education and nonprofit and government research organizations from the H-1B visa cap increasing the number of visas available for foreign high-skilled immigrants. To analyze the impact of policy changes affecting the H-1B program on highly-skilled workers, we study the behavior of foreign-born Ph.D. students who graduated from institutions in the United States over the 1990-2013 period. We estimate logit models to quantify the impacts on their stay rates and placement patterns. Our model shows that the exemption policy increased the probability of staying among STEM graduates, Chinese and Indian graduates, and among graduates from universities ranked as high research by Carnegie. These findings suggest that the labor market for non-STEM graduates was near its competitive equilibrium before the exemption policy came into effect. The exemption policy, which could potentially increase the quantity supplied of jobs, did not change the equilibrium quantity in this market, suggesting that the cap of H1-B visas was not binding among this type of graduates. Intuitively the exemption policy can increase or decrease the proportion of Ph.D. graduates in exempted positions. The proportion of graduates in exempted jobs increases as the number of visas for those types of jobs is excluded from the cap (direct effect). Conversely, if the number of candidates willing to take exempted jobs, or if the number of positions opened by exempted institutions are unchanged after the policy change, the increase in the availability of visas for non-exempted positions can increase the proportion of graduates in those types of jobs (indirect effect). The overall effect depends on the magnitude of the direct and indirect effect. Our findings also show that the exemption policy pushed doctoral degree recipients into higher education or affiliated research employment positions. Ph.D. recipients in STEM fields, and graduating from low-rank universities were more likely to go into exempt employment post-policy than before.

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Immigration and ethnic issues are currently present in political discussions in the U.S. It is important to understand how immigration as a whole helps historians understand U.S. history. An issue that involves immigration debates in the South is the idea of Latinization introduced by Raymond Mohl in his article "Globalization, Latinization, and the Nuevo New South". He defines Latinization as a low-wage and low-skill labor market emphasizing Spanish speaking Latin American workers in manufacturing, construction and agriculture. He focuses primarily on Mexican-born immigrants and their influence on the labor force of Alabama's rural and urban economy. By extending this idea, scholars should also look at the role of non-Spanish speaking Latin Americans within Latinization. For instance, the Brazilian immigrants could also fit into Latinization in geographic terms. Brazilians are Portuguese speakers from a Latin American country with multi-ethnic backgrounds that could be included into Latinization. It is crucial that a brief historiography of ethnic history in the U.S. is introduced first in this research for a complete understanding for an analysis of Brazilian immigration in Florida within the context of Latinization.

The dominant discourse in Korea is that Canada is a multicultural country wherein no racial discrimination exists. This significantly contributes to making Canada their first choice of destination. The purpose of this study was to explore the barriers faced by Korean skilled immigrants in the Canadian labour. This thesis presents the findings of a qualitative study. Six participants were interviewed, who have lived in Canada for at least three, and using a semi-structured interview guide. Interviews were conducted in Korean, transcribed and later translated for analysis. Critical Race Theory and Democratic Racism were used as theoretical frameworks. This informed a critical review of major theoretical concepts, data collection and analysis. The findings indicate that structural exclusion was a significant barrier faced by the participants. Structural exclusion includes lack of recognition of international knowledge; conventional hiring practice in Canada; accented English; and settlement services not meeting the needs of skilled immigrants. Also, it was found that as their state of unemployment or underemployment continued for a long time, they experienced loss of identity and low self-esteem. Furthermore, how they respond to such exclusion was too a significant finding. While some of the participants sought to take additional Canadian education in order to overcome the barriers, others gave up efforts to integrate into the mainstream or were planning to go back to Korea. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)