(SOM4f) Sociology of Migration: Open Themes I

This session highlights diverse topics, but each introduces new issues that are likely to stimulate future research; each paper also introduces alternative sources of data.  The first paper continues the theme of integration but concentrates on how children struggle to integrate into the Quebec school system. A novel feature of this study is the use of multifaceted data on parents and on their parents, thus enabling the struggles perceived not only by children but also as perceived by their parents.  A second paper, on the integration of migration in small and medium Canadian centers (SMsTRAs) utilizes a multilevel framework resting on the roles of culture and incorporating local context and multilevel governance. A third paper investigates what constitutes and reinforces the precarious irregular migration of Afghan migrants who experience the “game” associated with illegal border crossings. The final topic concentrates on Chinese immigrant seniors and develops a theoretical framework through which to understand how these seniors actively practice volunteering activities and cultural capital as strategies to navigate into the local society. Tags: Migration and Immigration, Policy

Organizers: Lisa Kaida, McMaster University, Lori Wilkinson, University of Manitoba, Monica Boyd, University of Toronto; Chair: Fernando Mata, University of Ottawa

Presentations

Kathryn Barber, York University

Conceptualizing migrant integration in Canadian small and medium-sized centers (SMsTRAs)

As populations in small and medium-sized Canadian communities steadily decline, migration is increasingly seen as the solution. While programs promoting migration to smaller centres exist at both the federal and provincial levels, the long-term integration of newcomers to smaller communities remains a challenge. This tendency could be connected to the notable social, economic and political differences that have been described between larger and smaller centres which can be overlooked by theories of integration derived from empirical work conducted in larger, heavily urban centres. This article explores theories of integration and their applicability to the study of small and medium-sized centres. It suggests that the whole-of-community’s emphasis on local context, multilevel governance and dynamic view of culture provides a useful framework for theorizing integration in SMsTRA and develops a sketch of factors relevant to their study in the Canadian context.

Baran (Abu) Fakhri, Simon Fraser University

Stuck in the 'game': The multiplicities and subjectivities of Afghan 'irregular' migration journeys to Europe

The ‘game’ has become a common term among migrant communities from the Middle East to describe their attempts to cross borders ‘illegally’ in their migration journeys to Western Europe. The ‘game’ experience and practices are subject to borders, terrains and landscapes, possible modes of mobility, and different roles of people (smugglers and migrants) involved. In this paper, I take the case of ‘irregular’ Afghan migrants and look into what constitutes and reinforces their precarity in their ‘irregular’ migration journeys to Europe, and how they experience and navigate through their ‘illegality’ and perilous ‘game’ attempts. This paper draws on my ethnographic research among Afghan migrants who lived and worked in Istanbul, Turkey, and were attempting or already attempted the ‘game’ during the time of the research (May 2022 – January 2023). I used different qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography to follow them in their journeys. My research focuses on those vignettes from khod-andaz (meaning self-launched in Farsi) ‘game(s).’ In such ‘game’ attempts, migrants prepare and take their long, risky and fragmented journeys mostly on their own with little or from smugglers or their associates. A growing scholarship explores the ‘game’ through the Balkans or the “Balkan route.” This line of work finds the ‘game’ as spatial tactics enacted by migrants where they actively “reinvent” the routes in response to the changing borderscapes (Minca and Collins, 2021; Augustová, 2023). I am in conversation with these works on the ‘irregular’ migration in Europe in understanding the ‘game’ as the geographies of (border) control and counter-geographies enacted by migrants. In my research, I extend the scope of the research on the ‘game’ in three major ways: first, including those stages, spaces, and practices of the ‘game’ before reaching the ‘Balkan route;’ second, attending the heterogeneity of ethnic and social lines where different social groups—here Afghans—have different migratory experiences and trajectories; and third, how various modes of the ‘game’ with new or pre-established routers, hubs, or practices, make the ‘game’ experience different. I link the ‘game’ to migration governance and border regimes en route or what the pertinent scholarship describes as “governing through mobility” (Tazzioli, 2020). However, I show what unique, ‘game’ subjectivities are formed throughout the journey. I take Martina Tazzioli’s (2019) concept of “multiplicity” in understanding temporary, mobile, non-homogenous formations of migrants that act collectively and have unique subjectivities with moral and political claims. I follow my participants describing their lives and journeys as “wherever we go, they get entrapped,” pointing to a juxtaposition of spatial and social (im)mobility or restricted mobility. Their ‘game’ subjectivities consist of compound temporal expulsion and prolonged uncertainty. This is also about the iterative nature of the ‘game’ with high pushback, detention, or deportation chances. This makes the ‘game’ where they can get “stuck in mobility” and anticipate back to square one after each attempt. Nonetheless, their narratives highlight diverse and ambivalent experiences of time and hope in the course of the ‘game.’ To them, the ‘game’ can also be imbued with certain narratives of self, life, and political and moral claims. Blurring the boundaries of agency and control, to these migrants, the ‘game’ is not completely selected out of necessity, but can be an extension of their project of the self, showing their self-resilience and self-investment. It is where they show care for their bodies, can express their capacity to survive or save themselves from social and spatial immobility, uncertainty, and prolonged waiting that entraps them in their migration journeys. My ethnographic research also shows how the ‘game’ is a space where these migrants form networks of trust and solidarity, reform and strengthen their national, ethnic, and gender identities through the course of preparing for, attempting the ‘game,’ and failed attempts (pushbacks). It is as well where national, ethnic, and racial tensions can resurface, diverge and lead to conflict. My research contributes to this literature by pushing further the understanding of this specific mode of ‘irregular’ migration, which can give new insights into the complex nature of the ‘irregular’ migration experience, migration governance and border control.

Yidan Zhu, Texas State University

Aging, Volunteering, Culture and Community Development: Chinese Immigrant Seniors in a Canadian Volunteer Program

Previous studies on volunteering and community development focus on professional agents and actors in developing volunteering programs for community engagement (Millora, 2023; Brown and Green, 2015), yet, not so many studies focus on immigrant seniors as active actors contribute to the volunteering activities and community development. This paper explores the intersection of community development, cultural capitals, and the volunteering and learning activities of Chinese immigrant seniors in Canada. This paper takes the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005) as a theoretical framework to understand how Chinese immigrant seniors actively practice volunteering activities and utilize cultural capitals as strategies to navigate into the local society. The CCW theory, developed by Yosso (2005), provides deficit-based models for assessing the success and potential of individuals from historically marginalized communities. The CCW theory identifies six forms of capital that contribute to the success and resilience of individuals, including aspirational capital, navigational capital, social capital, linguistic capital, familial capital, and resistance capital. Adopting the CCW theory, this paper aims to understand how these cultural capitals, including the aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resilience capitals contribute to Chinese immigrant seniors’ volunteering practice in community development. It further helps to understand the challenges and resilience embedded within Chinese immigrant seniors’ volunteering practices and community engagement. The study seeks to examine the dynamics of volunteering within a community context. Drawing insights from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 Chinese senior immigrants, the research sheds light on the challenges faced by immigrant seniors in their volunteering activities and explores avenues for providing support to enhance community-based volunteer programs. The research team worked closely with the Chinese Volunteer Association in Canada (CVAC) in Montreal, which is a non-for-profit organization that organized various learning forums and activities, employing platforms such as Zoom courses, public education events, internet articles, a YouTube channel, and WeChat groups. These activities garnered support from numerous organizations and volunteers, spanning academics, educators, service agents, professionals, and policymakers, not only from Canada but also from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and China. With the assistance from the CVAC, we recruited 21 participants who participated in the virtual volunteering program and conducted individual interviews with them. To diversify the sample, we adopted a purposive sampling strategy to recruit participants with different age cohorts, roles and responsibilities in the program, etc. The data were analyzed following a grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). This approach was chosen because of the exploratory nature of this study. A grounded theory analytic approach allowed us to understand the data without pre-existing assumptions (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). Research team members read the transcripts independently and discussed the transcripts and coding strategies. Then, two coders engaged in open coding independently (Corbin and Strauss, 2015) and met regularly to review the codebook. The study highlights language, culture, family and community practices as crucial elements influencing immigrant seniors’ volunteering and learning activities. This paper provides practical insights for organizers and policymakers to create sustainable environments for engaging immigrant seniors in community-based volunteer programs. This paper concludes that understanding the role of culture in volunteering and community development not only contribute to a more deeper understanding of their volunteering dynamics but also offer practical insights for organizers and policymakers to develop culture-related community-based volunteer programs for enhancing immigrant seniors’ practice of volunteer, learning and settlement.

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Non-presenting authors: Weijia Tan, University of Toronto; Liuxi Wu, University of Oxford; Jingyi Hou, University of Toronto; Jingjing Yi, University of Toronto; Weiguo Zhang, University of Toronto

Övgü Ülgen, Université du Québec à Montréal

Non-citizenship as practice: The case of precarious lives of asylum-seeking mothers in Quebec

In 2017, there had been an increase in the number of asylum seekers coming to Canada, to a large extent to Quebec, Manitoba and British Colombia, that became a public concern through social media coverages, triggering an interest in researching this mobility (Lawlor and Paquet 2022, Zahid 2023, 10). In 2017, more than 18,000 asylum seekers among over 20,000 claimed asylum in the small town of Lacolle, Quebec (Duncan and Caidi 2018). In 2017-2018, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), 54,660 people applied for asylum in Quebec and the majority of them came from Caribbean, Latin America and Africa (Hanley et al. 2021, Cénat, Charles, and Kebedom 2020). Asylum seekers in Canada live in conditions of precarity marked by the absence of permanent residence, work and residence permit, and citizenship rights such as access to public health assurance (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard 2009, 240-241). Since they have no recourse to human rights protections available to permanent residents and citizens following their exile, asylum seekers, especially asylum-seeking women, offer an interesting case study to explore how they experience human rights violations at the hands of the neoliberal state (OECD 2023). The significance of racialized motherhood and what mothering exercises constitute have extensively been studied and debated in the literature (Suerbaum and Lijnders 2023; Erel 2002; Collins 1994, 2000; Scheper-Hughes 1992; hooks 1991). As an analytical tool to investigate through gender lens, on the other hand, the concept of legal precarity has remained marginal and contested in academic discussions, which is a limit and a resource for further explorations (Suerbaum and Lijnders 2023, 196). In the Canadian literature, previous studies have focused on detention of asylum-seeking children and adults through post-migration stressors and housing problems and economic hardships that asylum seekers and refugees encountered (Cénat, Charles, Kebedom 2020, Cleveland et al. 2018, Goldring and Landolt 2013, Kronick, Rousseau and Cleveland 2015, Rose and Ray 2001). However, little is known about the relationship between motherhood, single motherhood in particular, and immigration in Canada that begs for further investigation (Lam, Collins and Wong 2020, Zhu 2016). In order to fill this gap in the literature and given the fact that the majority of the participants of this study were single mothers, this article aims to answer the following questions: To what extent asylum-seeking mothers’ status affect their labour market participation and what is the impact of this status on their well-being in Quebec? What strategies do these mothers, especially single mothers, develop for their own survival and how can we make sense of their agency within the framework of a system that marginalizes them? The article explores the interplay between motherhood and post-migratory trajectory of asylum-seeking women through factors such as legal precarity caused by unemployment and hurdles to access to health services, linguistic identity, resilience, and resistance within neoliberal multiculturalism and racial capitalism. The results discussed in this study were collected as part of a larger project examining the experiences of asylum seekers in the labour market, parents’ and children’s psychological wellbeing, networks, and how they met the challenges of isolation in Quebec. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and questionnaire with 12 asylum-seeking mothers who participated in the principal project followed by two focus groups with 16 actors from two school service councils, the article shows that despite Canada markets itself as raceless society open to immigration, its asylum policies employ a gendered racializing logic that hierarchizes its population along non-citizenship and that these divisions can be seen in labour recruitment practices, access to health services and linguistic discrimination.

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Non-presenting author: Université du Québec à Montréal