Precarious modes of incorporation: Immigrant labour in Toronto


Cynthia Cranford, University of Toronto; Yang-sook Kim, Florida Atlantic Univeristy

This paper extends the longstanding modes of incorporation tradition in the sociology of migration to consider the dynamic process whereby migrant workers are incorporated into an economy characterized by the growth and spread of precarious employment. To do so it draws on several threads of critical migration scholarship, namely analyses of precarious employment, including studies of how racialization and precarious legal citizenship funnel people into precarious work; of ethnic economies and migrant social networks as mechanisms of exploitation; and of gendered transitions in homes, labour markets and workplaces through migration. The qualitative analysis is based on in-depth migration and work history interviews with immigrant workers in the Peel region of the Greater Toronto Area collected between 2016 and 2019. The Peel Migration and Employment Dataset includes immigrant workers from a variety of countries who were in Canada legally at the time of interview and who arrived through different pathways. In this paper, we focus on those who arrived as adults as primary and secondary applicant economic immigrants, sponsored spouses and refugees, resulting in a sample of 57 interviews. Our methodology traces the mechanisms that shaped immigrants entry into first and subsequent jobs in Canada, and barriers to entering other jobs; we also compare the quality of jobs in Canada and country of origin. We assess precariousness of job(s) along multiple dimensions including employment status (self-employed employer, own-account self-employed, employee), employment form (permanent/temporary, full-time/part-time), occupational status (recognized skill level), wage level and wage satisfaction, benefits, regulatory protection, and control (through a union or professional association). We also analyze dynamics like entry into a declining manufacturing sector, or a downgraded service sector, use of temporary agencies to get jobs, lay-offs, and period effects with sweeping effects on immigrant employment like 9/11. Our analysis focuses on how citizenship differentiation, racialization and gendering intersect to fuel precarious modes of incorporation. Immigrant entry pathway shapes the mode of economic incorporation in ways inflected not just by class origin and extent of racialization in broader society, as recognized in classic mode of incorporation theory, but citizenship, class and race intersect in complex ways with gendered processes. We consider labour market racialization through institutionalized devaluation of credentials from origin countries for professionals, employer discrimination, which often trigger ethnic economy mobility strategies, and employer preferences for immigrants in marginalized niches. We consider problematically racialized interactions with customers, clients or co-workers in the labour process. Racialization generates precarious modes of incorporation, yet feminization exacerbates these processes while male privilege can be a resource for men to mitigate precarious incorporation. Entry into the most precarious jobs is shaped by a household economy defined by women’s greater responsibilities for children and housework. Often, but not always, this results in women’s location in feminized paid work, that is female-dominated care or service work, which is highly associated with multiple dimensions of precariousness, while men are incorporated into masculinized work, whether manual, craft, professional or entrepreneurial. We illustrate precarious modes of incorporation as ideal typical processes, through case studies of individual migrants whose histories crystalize the contours of a given mode; and we offer analytical comparisons to showcase the mechanisms at work to heighten, or lesson, precariousness. We compare racialized, masculinized and racialized feminized versions of incorporation into professional and working-class mainstream economies, and into ethnic economies, extending mode of incorporation scholarship to include gender as an analytical category. We also uncover alternatives to precarious modes of incorporation, and the mechanisms behind them, including pan-ethnic immigrant economies of professionals, and “caring” or “public” modes encouraged by the growth of the public sector and unions’ successful organizing there. Overall, our analysis confirms recent arguments for moving beyond outcome-oriented studies of immigrant incorporation to include non-linear trajectories, such as “reverse incorporation” (Jones) and movement up and down through chutes and ladders (Goldring and Landolt 2013), but we extend this work to include a broader group of migrants who experience a wider array of precarious modes of incorporation fueled by racialization and feminization. Jones, Jennifer. 2019. "From open doors to closed gates: Intragenerational reverse incorporation in new immigrant destinations." International Migration Review 53(4): 1002-1031.

This paper will be presented at the following session: