Not a single story: trajectories and experiences of racialized francophone immigrants in Canada


Shirin Shahrokni, York University, Glendon Campus; Estelle Ah-Kiow, York University; Fanny Teissandier, McGill University

“Canada wants us for its statistics, but once we are here, we feel unwanted. We are not numbers. We are humans with real lives”. These are the poignant concluding words of Heba, an Algerian woman who, in early 2023, after a three-year-long application process, fulfilled her dream and migrated to the province of Ontario, with her spouse. This migration project which she spent over a decade financially and administratively preparing, has so far been met with repeated barriers and a resulting sense of disenchantment and loss. Despite countless job searches, language and employment workshops, and already, an experience of internal migration within the province, the highly-skilled engineer in her late thirties pains to secure a job interview, let alone a stable position. As a practising Muslim wearing the headscarf, Heba further notes that she cautiously navigates francophone networks, avoiding physical and digital spaces in which she senses hostility. Drawing on ethnographic and in-depth interviewing methods with approximately 40 highly-educated, francophone immigrants coming from European, North and West African countries, who settled in Canada outside of Quebec over the past five years, this paper documents highly differentiated trajectories in a range of social sites, not least in the labour market. In a context in which, in recent years, the federal government has sought to increase francophone migration outside of Quebec with the aim of offsetting the “demo-linguistic decline” of French-speaking communities across its provinces, gaining a fine understanding of the unique resources and barriers differentially shaping the lives of members of these new migrant populations and appreciating the inequalities structuring their pathways becomes politically vital. To do so, building on critical race and postcolonial approaches, the paper unpacks the relationship between migration regimes, racialization, and imperial logics, through a close examination of the trajectories of members of three subsamples of francophone migrants: 1. racialized migrants coming from Europe, particularly France; 2. their white counterparts from these same countries of provenance; 3. racialized migrants coming from North and West African countries. Far from representing an internally homogeneous group, it indeed suggests the migrants’ geopolitical locations of departure within the francophone world and their locations within domestic hierarchies of race, significantly shape their trajectories, particularly in the realm of work, presenting members of each sub-group with a set of specific resources, opportunities, and structural barriers. From the operation of opaque educational credential assessments to the issue of lacking “Canadian experience” to more covert exclusionary logics from employers and/or recruitment agents, the paper thus uncovers the multiple mechanisms which contribute to creating differential access to decent and fair employment, and more broadly to decent living conditions, among the respondents. Further, it shows that these stratifying forces do not only structure post-migratory experiences. Rather, distinct migration regimes place migrants in different channels from pre-migration stages, notably through the differential recruitment politics Canada establishes across francophone regions, placing European francophones at a significant advantage via greater exposure to informational and relational resources than their African counterparts, such as year-long Destination Canada Forum Mobility’s workshops organized across European cities and the multiple migration programs such as the Work Holiday Permits (WHP) through which young Europeans may temporarily migrate and gain educational and work experience in Canada. Drawing on the concept of racial capitalism and its entanglement with migration regimes, in its discussion section, the paper therefore points to the differentiated costs of migration, material, relational, and emotional, across these three subgroups, and delves into the range of strategies – internal migration, professional retraining, family separation, exit from francophone communities, among others - many have engaged in to find a place in their new society. In its concluding remarks, the paper notes that while racialization processes continue to shape their experiences in Canada, for many racialized francophone migrants, first-hand experience of, and/or knowledge about racism in Europe, through the increasing normalization of far-right anti-migrant and racist public discourse and policies in countries like France, has in fact constituted a central motivation to contemplate, and embark on migratory to Canada, a country that has so far succeeding in creating and circulating globally the image of a tolerant, open, and racially inclusive society. Yet, to many, the migratory journey has revealed deep-seated gaps and contradictions between this widespread national narrative and the exclusions shaping their experiences.

This paper will be presented at the following session: