Woman Immigrants and the Challenges of Successful Integration in Canada

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Woman Immigrants and the challenges of successful integration in Canada

When thinking about Canada one of the first things that come to someone’s mind is Multiculturalism and Immigration. According to Statistics Canada on average 250,000 immigrants come to Canada every year. In 2011, immigrants represented more than 20 percent of the Canadian population, which is the highest proportion of foreign-born in the G8 countries, well above the shares in Germany and the United States. (Chui, Flanders, & Anderson, Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity in Canada, 2011, pp. 6-7) In addition, diversity has always played an important role in Canada’s formative history, as it is originally inhabited by Aboriginals, but immigration began with the French and British colonization in the 17th century. Therefore there’s almost no real Canadian, as almost the whole population has its roots in Europe. Based on this facts it’s not a surprise that multiculturalism is considered the major meta-narrative of Canada. Although Canada is considered as one of the most diverse countries, as already mentioned before, immigrants still explore countless challenges and barriers, especially in the first months or years. These include language barriers, cultural shock or establishing a social network. Generally woman immigrants identified three main tasks which determine the success of integration: Firstly finding a convenient place to live in a good neighborhood, secondly taking language classes in order to obtain a high level of English or French proficiency and last but not least finding appropriate employment. Although immigrant women experienced various stresses connected to the settlement, they identified the task of finding an occupation as the most frustrating one, especially when they were trying to find a job that was consistent with their education or their prior jobs. (Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012, pp. 424-425) As one out of five women in Canada are immigrants and the above-mentioned challenges especially affect women (Chui, Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, 2011, p. 251), the purpose of this essay is to proof that finding adequate employment actually operates as the most significant barrier of the successful integration into the Canadian Society.

Various studies show that the main reasons of immigrating to Canada lie in opportunities for better education and employment, better opportunities for their children, the close proximity to the United States and also the chance to live in a country which is strongly connected with the idea of peacekeeping. (Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012, p. 423) As Canada suffers from a serious labor shortage the country needs immigrants, people assume that Canada would be a great choice to go in order to obtain a higher occupation. (Koert, Borgen, & Amundson, 2011, p. 194) Nevertheless more than one third of woman immigrants report that finding suitable employment was or still is the greatest challenge facing them. (Chui, Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, 2011, pp. 273-274) Causes for this can be easily attributed to the conditions of Canadas’ labor market. One of the major problems is that newcomers experience sort of a “double disadvantage”, which means that on one hand employers do not recognize foreign credentials and work experience and one the other hand they insist that employees must have Canadian work experience. (Malik, Cooper-Thomas, & Zikic, 2014, p. 196) To demonstrate a study found that the low-income rate of recent immigrants with a high school education increased to 50 percent between 1996 and 2001, while the rate of those who completed university increased to 66 percent. In addition, Statistics Canada observed that, although a higher proportion of women immigrants completed university compared to their Canadian counterpart, with 51.5 percent, they still have a higher rate of unemployment. (Chui, Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, 2011, pp. 269-274) This clearly illustrates that education does not facilitate access to the higher paying professions nor the mobility into higher paying positions once the immigrants are employed. (Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012, p. 421) The fact that employers already expect newcomers to have Canadian work experience creates sort of a death spiral as women are not even able to gain Canadian work experience. As a consequence many women have to take temporary positions or volunteer first in order to gain a bit of experience. (Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012, p. 425) Another result of those requirements and the non-recognition of foreign education is that women are forced to take low-paying jobs and often end up in traditional female jobs, like babysitter, cleaner or cashier (Choi, Kushner, & Mill, 2014, p. 283) For example one of the women who participated in the case study conducted by Dlamini, Anucha and Wolfe said that she sent many resumes to agencies and only got one response – it was an offer for a typical physical blue-collar job, but after one year of job hunting she was still happy, because she wanted to work anyhow. (Dlamini, Anucha, & Wolfe, 2012, p. 425)