Immigrants admitted to Canada for family-reunion and humanitarian reasons tend to be less familiar with Canadian labour market 'rules' than immigrants ...
Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 6, No. 1, February 2005
Habitus, rules of the labour market and employment strategies of immigrants in Vancouver, Canada Harald Bauder Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada Workplace conventions and hiring practices are barriers confronted by immigrants in the Canadian labour market. This paper considers these barriers in the context of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The empirical research presented examines immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia in the labour market of Greater Vancouver. A statistical analysis of census data and immigrant landing records is supplemented by an analysis of interviews with community leaders, settlement and employment counsellors, and employers. Immigrants admitted to Canada for family-reunion and humanitarian reasons tend to be less familiar with Canadian labour market ‘rules’ than immigrants recruited for their skills and education. In response to this cultural labour market barrier, South Asian immigrants develop ethnic networks while immigrants from the former Yugoslavia mobilize other cultural resources. Key words: habitus, South Asian immigrants, former Yugoslavia, Vancouver, labour markets.
Introduction Immigrants are often disadvantaged in the labour markets of receiving countries (Castles 2000; Castles and Miller 1993). They typically confront barriers related to human capital deficiencies, non-recognition of credentials, insufficient language skills, and ethnic and racial discrimination. In addition, cultural practices in the Canadian labour market keep immigrants from reaching their full economic potential. In this paper, I relate the concept of habitus to labour market rules and the employment situation of immigrants. In particular, I examine how cultural practices
in the hiring process and in the workplace disadvantage immigrant workers in Canada. Canadian immigration policy differentiates between immigrants who possess economic and human capital, who have family ties to Canada, and who are in need of humanitarian assistance. Skilled and capital-rich immigrants have an obvious advantage in the Canadian labour market. I suggest further that skilled and capital-rich immigrants tend to possess cultural competence that enables them to advance in the Canadian labour market. Immigrants admitted to Canada for familyreunion and humanitarian reasons, on the other hand, often lack familiarity with
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/05/010081-17 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1464936052000335982
82 Harald Bauder the dominating labour market rules and conventions. In response to human capital and cultural constraints, immigrants develop particular employment strategies and use the ethnic and cultural resources available to them. The empirical analysis below explores how immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia navigate the labour market of Greater Vancouver, given the constraints associated with their immigration status and varying degrees of familiarity with local practices and conventions. Statistical data from the Canadian Census and immigrant entry records provide a point of departure for a discussion of interview data collected from community leaders, employers, and settlement and employment counsellors. The results reveal that hiring conventions and workplace practices exclude immigrant groups from the labour market, and that immigrants respond to these constraints by mobilizing local ethnic networks and by choosing particular occupational niches.
Background Immigrants tend to underperform in the Canadian labour market relative to their skills and education (e.g. Ley 1999, 2003). This underperformance is structured along several dimensions, including gender (Pratt 1999; Preston and Giles 1997), ethnicity and country of origin (Hiebert 1999; Thompson 2000). Some visible minority immigrant groups, for example, cluster in low-wage occupations (Hiebert 1999; Pendakur and Pendakur 1998; Preston and Giles 1997). Other groups, such as immigrants of British, German and Italian origin, enjoy a relative advantage in the Canadian labour market (Gozalie 2002).
Immigrants confront numerous obstacles in the Canadian labour market. Their credentials are not always recognized, their skills are systematically devalued (Bauder 2003), they experience racial and ethnic discrimination (Pendakur and Pendakur 1998), and their language skills may be inadequate to compete with Canadian workers. In addition to these obstacles, practices and conventions in the Canadian labour market obstruct the economic integration of immigrants. Ley (1999, 2002, 2003), for example, notes the difficulties of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs experience in doing business in Canada. They tend to be unprepared for stringent regulations, strange business practices and peculiar consumer behaviour. Workplace conventions may be equally exclusionary. In the male-dominated financial industry of the city of London, norms and conventions often exclude women (McDowell 1997); in the restaurant industry of New York cultural norms relegate some immigrant groups to employment as dish washers and kitchen helpers (Zukin 1995). Similarly, immigrants may be unable to internalize the codes of conduct of the Canadian workplace. They may be unfamiliar with the norms and conventions of the hiring process, or unable to judge employers’ expectations. Rather than selecting the most suitable worker for a job, these norms and conventions may serve as cultural means of distinction between Canadian job applicants and immigrant job seekers (Bourdieu 1984). The norms and conventions of the Canadian labour market resemble a set of ‘rules’ that guide expectations of behaviour. The significance of these rules can be understood through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—‘a system of schemes of perception and thought’ that ‘acts . . . as an organizing principle’ of behaviour (Bourdieu 1977: 18). Bourdieu
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver (1977, 1984, 1998) observes that habitus is class and group contingent, and that specific habitus shapes a particular set of rules of engagement within a given group. The ability to follow these rules signifies a person’s membership to the group, and the skill to ‘play’ by the rules guides a persons’ status within the group. Extending Bourdieu’s ideas to the context of Canadian immigrants, it can be argued that immigrants embody a habitus of a foreign place (Casey 2001), and that this habitus may not match with the rules of the labour market in Canada. Being unfamiliar with the rules of the Canadian labour market, immigrants may fail to navigate the labour market effectively or may even inadvertently communicate to Canadian employers that they are not culturally competent for an advertised job. Bourdieu (1977: 16 – 22; 1998: 130 – 134, 141 – 145) is careful to note that the relationship between rules and habitus is not of a necessary (or deterministic) nature. Rather, rules are strategic ordering principles that benefit those who create and obey them. Thus, immigrants who are unable to follow the proper rules of the Canadian labour market are not competitive with Canadian workers who know and observe the rules. Canadian immigration policy categorizes immigrants into so-called immigrant classes. The capacity to observe Canadian labour market rules likely differs by immigrant class. The business class requires immigrants to invest in the Canadian economy, and the skilled-worker class selects immigrants based on their skills and levels of education. Immigrants in these two classes probably have a good understanding of Canadian business and labour market conventions. In the family and refugee classes, on the other hand, immigrants are selected for reasons unrelated to occupational skills, education or
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monetary wealth. In these two classes, immigrants are likely to be less familiar with Canadian labour market and business rules. Immigrants develop particular individual and collective employment strategies in response to labour market constraints they confront in their places of destination. For example, facing credential devaluation and racial discrimination, ethnic and family networks become a significant resource to newcomers in the USA (Waldinger 1986, 1996) and Canada (Walton-Roberts and Hiebert 1997). Ethnic and family networks tend to produce employment opportunities in particular occupational segments and industrial niches (e.g. Bailey and Waldinger 1991; Granovetter 1973; Light, Bernard and Kim 1999; Portes and Bach 1985). Habitus may shape immigrants’ capacity to develop and use these networks. Bourdieu (1977) shows, for example, that habitus guides kinship relationships among the people of Kabyle, Algeria. Similarly, habitus can strengthen family networks among immigrants and facilitate employment. For example, the networks of Hong Kong Chinese are cultivated through guanxi, a strategy associated with habitus, that involves a series of network-building practices (Mitchell 1995; Wong and Salaff 1998). Processes of immigrant integration have been conceputalized in the context of structure – agency duality (Sarre, Phillips and Skellington 1989). Kalra (2000) applies the structure – agency duality to the employment situation of immigrants and finds that labour market and immigration circumstances provide the structural context within which immigrants negotiate their positions in the labour market. For example, Canadian immigrants may decide to become entrepreneurs not because it is their first choice of employment, but because opportunities in the waged
84 Harald Bauder labour sector are blocked (Li 1997, 2000). Other Canadian immigrant entrepreneurs may seek to enjoy Canada’s leisure life-style and send their children to Canadian schools (Ley 1999, 2003; Waters 2002). Although researchers have recently applied Bourdieu’s ideas to the labour market situation of immigrants (e.g. Nee and Sanders 2001), a gap in the literature is the lack of empirical research on the role of habitus in linking labour market circumstances, cultural practices and the employment strategies of immigrants. The empirical analysis below therefore examines two broad research questions. First, how do Canadian labour market rules and workplace conventions constrain or enable immigrant groups to integrate into the Canadian labour market? Second, how do immigrants respond to the labour market constraints and opportunities they encounter?
Research design The empirical analysis is based on a study of immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia who settled in Greater Vancouver. These two groups differ regarding their contexts of migration, immigration class, regional origins and perception of labour market rules. Thus, they are situated in different labour market circumstances and likely respond with different employment strategies. I use quantitative data from the Longitudinal Immigration Data System (LIDS 2001) to describe some of the labour market circumstances of the two groups. This database consists of individual landing records of all immigrants who entered Canada between 1980 and 2000. It contains the personal information and settlement intentions which immigrants revealed to the Canadian authorities at the time of entry to
Canada. I limited my sample to immigrants who last resided in a country in South Asia or the former Yugoslavia, and who declared that they would settle in one of the municipalities of Greater Vancouver. Unfortunately, this data does not permit tracking immigrants after they crossed the border into Canada. Therefore, I supplement this data with information from the 1996 Public Use Microfile (PUMF). I build upon this quantitative analysis with a qualitative analysis consisting of personal interviews with local experts on the immigrant communities of South Asians and former Yugoslavians in Greater Vancouver. In particular, I interviewed administrators of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide settlement and employment services to the two immigrant groups. I also interviewed employers who use ethnic and immigrant networks in the recruitment of their workforce. I obtained the sample from the local Redbook of Services, the Directory of B.C. Multicultural, Anti-racism and Immigrant Service Organizations, ethnic business listings and through word-of-mouth. The interview sample included twenty respondents who service or employ members of the South Asian immigrant community, fifteen respondents who deal with immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and four respondents who work for organizations that target both groups. I chose to interview service providers and employers because of their in-depth knowledge and their broader insights into labour market barriers and strategies of immigrants. In addition, many respondents are immigrants themselves and thus were able to speak of their own experiences. Some of the interviewees were involved in other community functions and could be described as community leaders. Separate interview guides were developed for NGO administrators and employers.
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver A focused interviewing technique enabled the interviewer to depart from the interview guide. Interviews were audio-taped, but if the interviewee was uncomfortable with taping notes were taken. To analyse the interview data, I followed a variation of Strauss’ (1987) grounded theory approach, whereby data collection and analysis, as well as theory building and empirical verification, partially overlapped.
Immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia in Vancouver An initial analysis of LIDS and PUMF data reveals some of the basic immigration circumstances and labour market characteristics of the two groups. Of all South Asians who came to Canada between 1980 and 2000, 13.1 per cent settled in the Vancouver area; of all immigrants from the former Yugoslavia 8.7 per cent settled in Greater Vancouver (LIDS 2001). The annual numbers of immigrants who settled in the Vancouver area over the last two decades reveal important differences between the two immigrant groups (Figure 1).
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Few immigrants from the former Yugoslavia came to Vancouver prior to 1991, but following the political turbulences in the Balkans immigration levels skyrocketed and peaked in 1994 with almost 1300 immigrants. Thereafter numbers levelled off to 549 immigrants in 2000. Annual immigration from South Asia declined during the early 1980s, followed by a sharp increase in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The peak occurred in 1996 with roughly 5400 immigrants. The disaggregation of the two groups by last permanent residence and immigration class reveals further differences (Table 1). Roughly half of the immigrants from the former Yugoslavia who settled in Greater Vancouver were refugees, and another 38 per cent came under the skilled-worker class. Very few were admitted under the family or business classes. The majority of immigrants from BosniaHerzegovina came as refugees, while immigrants from ‘Yugoslavia’ (Serbia and Montenegro) came as skilled workers. Most South Asians who settled in the Vancouver area entered Canada as family-class immigrants. Skilled workers comprised less than 15 per cent of all South Asian immigrants; few were refugees.
Figure 1 Annual landings in the Greater Vancouver area. Note: different scales on the vertical axes. Source: LIDS (2001).
86 Harald Bauder Table 1. Landings by immigrant class and country of last permanent residence in Greater Vancouver, 1980–2000 Family Former Yugoslavia Croatia Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) Slovenia Bosnia-Herzegovina Macedonia Albania Total South Asia Sri Lanka India Pakistan Bangladesh Nepal Fiji Maldives Total
Refugee
Business
Skilled worker
Other
Total
105 729 9 65 6 5 919
484 510 12 2,597 1 34 3,638
0 14 0 3 0 0 17
240 2,220 30 223 14 44 2,771
2 25 0 0 0 1 28
831 3,498 51 2,888 21 84 7,373
601 40,085 1,191 157 34 6,844 0 48,912
451 616 231 91 0 18 2 1,409
5 354 243 24 5 142 0 773
570 4,868 1,541 538 77 1,353 1 8,948
62 556 56 31 0 873 0 1,578
1,689 46,479 3,262 841 116 9,230 3 61,620
Source: LIDS (2001).
Immigrant class can be cross-tabulated with educational attainment (Table 2). In both groups family-class immigrants and refugees are more likely to have low education (none to nine years) and few have university degrees. Overall education levels are higher in the business and skilled-worker classes, where human capital and economic potential are major selection criteria. The fact that spouses
and dependent family members are included in the skilled-worker category likely accounts for the relatively large share of skilled workers with nine years of education or less. The finding that immigrant class reflects the education levels of immigrants is no surprise since immigrant selection procedures apply varying education standards to different immigrant classes. The data also show that,
Table 2. Landings by education and immigration class in Greater Vancouver, 1980–2000 (%) Level of education Former Yugoslavia 0– 9 years 10–12 years Some university, certificate, diploma University degree Total South Asia 0– 9 years 10–12 years Some university, certificate, diploma University degree Total Source: LIDS (2001).
Family
Refugee
Business
Skilled worker
Other
31.6 24.2 27.6 16.6 100.0
35.1 19.7 28.9 16.4 100.0
17.6 35.3 29.4 17.6 100.0
30.4 11.0 22.6 36.0 100.0
14.3 32.1 42.9 10.7 100.0
46.5 31.5 10.8 11.1 100.0
45.1 30.1 16.9 7.9 100.0
34.2 25.5 16.9 23.4 100.0
32.9 14.9 14.3 37.8 100.0
45.9 37.1 11.9 5.1 100.0
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver
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Table 3. Landings by intention to work and immigration class in Greater Vancouver, 1980–2000 (%)
Former Yugoslavia Intend to work—employed Intend to work—not identified Intend to work—self-employed Student Do not intend to work Total South Asia Intend to work—employed Intend to work—not identified Intend to work—self-employed Student Do not intend to work Total
Family
Refugee
Business
Skilled worker
Other
25.2 22.7 0 7.2 44.8 100.0
42.9 18.6 0 21.3 17.1 100.0
35.3 5.9 23.5 29.4 5.9 100.0
54.8 11.2 0 14.2 19.8 100.0
3.6 67.9 0 14.3 14.3 100.0
9.2 30.6 0 15.4 44.8 100.0
4.3 51.3 0 28.2 16.2 100.0
8.4 3.8 22.0 42.5 23.2 100.0
45.2 8.8 0.1 22.2 23.8 100.0
3.0 61.0 0 21.4 14.6 100.0
Source: LIDS (2001).
next to class, place of origin shapes the educational characteristics of immigrants. Immigrants from the former Yugoslavia tend to have higher educational attainments than immigrants from South Asia, especially in the family and refugee categories. Immigrant class also relates with immigrants’ intention to work in Canada (Table 3). As expected, the intention to work in waged employment is highest in the skilled-worker class. The intention to work (employed and not identified) is also high among refugees. The intention of becoming self-employed is, as expected, high among business-class immigrants. In both origin groups, 45 per cent of family-class immigrants have no intention to work at all. Table 3 also reveals important differences between origin groups. For example, family-class immigrants and refugees from the former Yugoslavia are more likely to declare that they intend to work as waged employees, while South Asians in the same classes did not identify their preferences for employment or self-employment. To test for the statistical significance of these differences, I conduced a series of Chi-square Goodness-of-fit
tests comparing the observed and expected frequencies between immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and South Asia in each of five immigrant classes. These tests revealed that among family-class, refugees, business-class and skilled-worker classes, the relative distribution across the five intention-to-work categories differ between the two origin groups at a 0.01 significance level. Only among the immigrant class ‘Other’ does no significant difference between the two origin groups exist. The information presented above examines the characteristics of immigrants at the time of entry to Canada (a limitation of LIDS data). Census data contain information on the circumstances immigrants face once they have settled in Canada. The majority of recent immigrants (1986 – 1996) in both origin groups worked in 1996 (Table 4). However, male South Asian immigrants are more likely to work than male immigrants from the Balkans.1 Among women, immigrants from the Balkans are more likely to work than South Asian immigrants. While among Balkan immigrants the gender gap in the categories ‘worked’ and ‘not in labour force’ is small, this
88 Harald Bauder Table 4. Labour force participation by gender and ethnic origin, 1986–1996 immigrants (%)
Balkan Male Female South Asian Male Female
Worked
Unemployed
Not in labour force
Total
71.0 69.8
6.5 2.3
22.6 27.9
100.0 100.0
81.5 64.4
7.8 6.3
10.8 29.3
100.0 100.0
Source: 1996 PUMF.
gap is larger among South Asian immigrants. Chi-square tests confirmed that for both men and women the patterns of labour force participation statistically differ between Balkan and South Asian immigrants at a 0.01 significance level. Recent Balkan and South Asian immigrants share many characteristics regarding their occupational segmentation (Table 5). For example, men in both groups are disproportionately represented in recreational service (i.e. Service supervisors, attendants in recreation) and clerical occupations (i.e. Clerical occupations and clerical supervisors). Women tend to cluster in management (i.e. Other management). There are also important differences between the two origin groups. Male immigrants from the Balkans are more likely to work in food preparation occupations (i.e. Chefs, cooks, food and beverage services) than male South Asian immigrants. Female immigrants from the Balkans are more likely to be in trades and transportation (i.e. other trades; transportation and equipment operators), while South Asian women are strongly represented in clerical occupations (i.e. Clerical occupations and clerical supervisors). Chi-square tests confirmed that the occupational distributions for both men and women statistically differ between Balkan and South Asian immigrants at a 0.01 significance level. The statistics presented in this section described the basic immigration and labour
market circumstances of immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia groups in Vancouver, and they uncovered decisive differences in labour market outcomes between the two groups. The qualitative analysis in the next section examines the link between these quantitative patterns and habitus, rules and strategic responses of immigrants.
Interview results Rules of the labour market A major obstacle to the economic integration of immigrants are Canadian labour market conventions and practices. In particular, refugees from the former Yugoslavia and family-class immigrants from South Asia encounter unfamiliar ‘rules’ in the Canadian labour market. For example, a settlement counsellor and recent immigrant remarks that newcomers are surprised that they are expected to attend so-called job-finding clubs in which they learn about basic communication norms and inter-personal conventions: You have to go to [a] job-finding club. That’s very strange for our people; they don’t know the rules. For example [if a] man who is working with wood products, and he needs a job, he has to go to
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver
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Table 5. Occupation (based on 1991 Standard Occupations Classification [soc91]) by gender and ethnic origin, 1986–1996 immigrants (%) Balkan Male Senior management Other management Professional business & finance Financial, secretarial & administrative Clerical occupations & clerical supervisors Natural & applied sciences Professional health, nurses & supervisors Technical, assisting & related health Social science, government & religion Teachers, professors Arts, culture, recreation & sport Wholesale, insurance, real-estate, sales, retail Retail supervisor, salespersons/clerks Chefs, cooks, food & beverage services Protective services Child care, home support services Service supervisors, attendants in recreation Contractor, trade/transport supervisor Construction trades Other trades Transportation and equipment operators Trades, construction, transport labourers Occupation unique to primary industry Supervisors, machine operators & assemblers Labourers in processing, manufacturing Total N (weighted)
6.7 16.7 3.3 10.0 6.7
South Asian
Female
Total
6.8 11.4
4.1 6.8
6.8 2.3 2.3
2.3
1.4 6.8 2.7 4.1 1.4
6.7
4.5 4.5 9.1 13.6 13.6 2.3 4.5 6.8
13.5 2.7 5.4 8.1 8.1 1.4 2.7 6.8
100.0 1,584
100.0 1,080
100.0 2,664
6.7 6.7 10.0
26.7
2.3 6.8
2.7 6.8 5.4 4.1 4.1 1.4
Male
7.3 1.6 6.9 17.1 1.2 5.7 5.3 2.8 1.6 2.0 1.2 8.1 4.9 1.6 19.1 0.4 1.6 0.4 0.8 1.6 6.5 2.0 100.0 10,908
Female
Total
2.0 14.9 5.3 1.3 10.6 4.3 1.0
1.1 11.5 3.6 3.8 13.5 2.9 3.1 2.4 2.6 1.6 1.5 3.5 5.8 2.7 0.5 0.7 13.7 1.1 1.5 4.6 3.8 2.0 1.6 8.4 2.6 100.0 19,764
2.3 1.7 1.0 5.3 4.0 1.0 1.0 9.2 1.7 2.6 6.9 6.6 3.0 1.7 9.9 3.0 100.0 8,856
Source: 1996 PUMF.
a job-finding club. But he is not a worker in an office. For them that’s problem, you have to go to school. Everything is different. [In the former Yugoslavia] you don’t need to write a re´sume´, a thank [you] letter. That’s a problem for our people, they don’t know how to write re´sume´s. They have to go to school three months for that. For people who [seek work in a trade] it’s very strange to write a re´sume´.
Another settlement counsellor notes a similar unawareness of the significance of credentials among her clients from the former Yugoslavia:
I know some women, they applied for a cleaning [job] at UBC [University of British Columbia], and [the employer] asked them if they have completed a course of six months for cleaning. They were very disappointed and confused: what is this school for cleaning? In Europe, we don’t have a school for that.
One respondent, who settled in Canada in the mid-1990s, explains that the rules of the job search were different in the former Yugoslavia: In our country we had not that type of [job] interview. I remember when I started working [in the former Yugoslavia], it was completely
90 Harald Bauder different. They just gave me one test, I did it, and the next step was they show me [the workplace] and just ask: ‘do you know what is this?’ I said yes. ‘Do you know how to use this, this, this?’ I said yes I know. Thank you, that’s all. And then they decided. It wasn’t so much conversation as here, not so many questions. [It was] always in written form. Here is everything much more serious.
These quotes illustrate how the habitus of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia is not that expected of participants in the Canadian labour market. Consequently, a wide range of settlement and employment services, including job-finding clubs, are being made available to immigrants precisely to address such difficulties. Family-class immigrants from South Asia confront similar problems of being unfamiliar with Canadian labour market rules and conventions. Perceptions of gender roles in the workplace, for example, often differ between South Asian workers and Canadian employers. An employment counsellor recalls a situation in which one of her clients from South Asia lost his job not because he was incompetent to do the job, but rather because of his interpretation of proper gender roles in the workplace differed from that of his employer: [My client] was working in a nursery and his supervisor gave him some work [planting] flowers in a field. He saw the girl working with those heavy big pots and load them on the truck, right? He thought, ‘hey she is a little girl and the work is heavy’, he just switched with her. And the supervisor came after two hours, and he saw the switching, and naturally he was mad with them. And there is a difference of opinion . . . And [the South Asian immigrant] was fired from the job. He is new to the system, he is not aware of the Canadian working atmosphere. He’s right from his
culture, he did a favour for that girl, he helped her. But from the workplace’s point of view, he was totally wrong.
In this example, a conflicting perspective of gender roles (or what Bourdieu 1977: 89–95 calls the ‘sexual division of labour’) between the habitus of the immigrant and the expectations of the workplace led the immigrant worker to violate the rules of the workplace. Employers expressed similar concerns that newly arrived family-class immigrants and refugees may be quite competent in terms of job skills, but that many of these immigrants lack cultural competence to advance in the workplace or business world. One employer, for example, remarked that the immigrants he hires from the former Yugoslavia are highly skilled in their trades and many know more about the product and the production process than he does. However, his ‘advantage’ is that he knows the ‘Canadian system’. His knowledge of Canadian workplace rules and business conventions positions him in the labour market above his immigrant employees.
The significance of immigrant class The previous statistical analysis showed that immigrants in the skilled-worker class tend to be more educated and more committed to working in Canada than family-class immigrants and refugees. The interviewees addressed these class differences. A settlement counsellor who works with South Asian immigrants distinguishes between skilledworker and family-class immigrants: ‘I believe that these two categories have distinct and separate issues which they [need to] address when they arrive in Canada’. He observes that for skilled workers the ‘main objective is to get suitable employment . . . whereas the family
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver class, they come here to live with their sponsors. If at all they seek employment, it has to be either as a farm worker or to work in a restaurant’. According to the respondent’s experience, family-class and skilled-workerclass immigrants seek employment in different segments of the labour market.2 Respondents noted similar immigrant-class differences in the case of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia. An immigration lawyer has witnessed three immigration waves from the former Yugoslavia passing through his praxis. In the first wave, the Canadian Embassy in Belgrade recruited skilled workers from the high-tech industry. Immigrants of this first wave have generally been successful in the Vancouver labour market, and many are now high-ranking programmers and software developers in Vancouver-based companies. The second wave consisted of refugees from Bosnia and Croatia who fled the civil war. 3 The informant remarks that immigrants in this wave ‘are looking for security, they’re risk adverse, and they’re looking for employment that secures them a benefit that’s very tangible’. Desired jobs include unionized janitorial work for the Vancouver School Board, and residential building manager, which often includes a free apartment. The third and smallest wave— still ongoing at the time of the interview—are refugees from Serbia and Montenegro, whose labour market situation is similar to immigrants of the second wave.4 Immigrants’ degree of familiarity with Canadian labour market rules varies with immigration class. Many immigrants in the skilled-worker class were employed in professional occupations in the former Yugoslavia, in which business conventions were attuned to international standards. In addition, many of these workers came from Belgrade, a cosmopolitan city, in which habitus was shaped by the intermingling of
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people of different origin. Most refugees, on the other hand, come from remote areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Table 1), which were more secluded from Belgrade. An interviewee implies that especially older Bosnian refugees harbour outdated perspectives of work: Most Bosnians worked for the same employer for twenty, twenty-five years. That was not uncommon. Young people, who just as things started to open up in Yugoslavia in the two or three years before it collapsed, are used to more entrepreneurial culture, who were starting their own businesses . . . These people tended to have a maybe easier time of it, because they don’t see their employer as a lifetime guarantor of security and of welfare.
Services, such as job-finding clubs, cater mainly to refugees and family-class immigrants, who tend to be less able to cope with Canadian labour market rules than skilledworker-class immigrants. Although almost 38 per cent of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, and 15 per cent of South Asian immigrants are skilled workers (calculated from Table 1), employment and settlement workers rarely counsel those immigrants because many members of this group are already familiar with the rules of recruitment in Canada. One respondent explains: ‘The vast majority of skilled people never see a settlement counsellor . . . They don’t see what they could do here. My experience is that the immigrants who integrate the best never seek settlement services’. Apparently, they embrace a habitus that is more compatible with Canadian labour market expectations.
Responses to labour market constraints Labour market rules and immigrant class are important barriers for the integration of
92 Harald Bauder immigrants into the Canadian labour market. Immigrants respond to these barriers with individual and collective employment strategies. One particular strategy used by South Asian family-class immigrants is the mobilization of ethnicity-based networks. An employment counsellor notes: Immigrants, especially from South Asian countries, who are coming here, had a great network right from their neighbour to their own extended family. Everybody around them helps each other . . . They keep themselves busy, they network and find out other information, and sometimes they get together and invite speakers to get further information, what’s available around them. And you know, it’s one of the things that networks help.
The reliance on ethnic networks is often a response to the exclusion from the labour market due to an inability to interpret and follow Canadian norms of behaviour. For example, a South Asian entrepreneur recalls the difficulties he had in gaining access to a network of Canadian business people because be did not follow the ‘proper’ rules of networking: If I don’t look the same, if I don’t talk the same, socially, and I don’t follow the Vancouver Canucks, in other words I don’t follow ice hockey, I follow cricket, all those things are differentiators between us [i.e. Canadian business people and South Asian immigrants].
According to this same respondent, a network of South Asian entrepreneurs has provided alternative business opportunities for him. What makes ethnic networks attractive and beneficial to South Asian immigrants is that they share a common habitus within the network. Walton-Roberts and Hiebert (1997) already noted that networks among South
Asian immigrants in Vancouver draw on shared language, mutual comfort levels and a common understanding of trust. Several respondents confirmed that South Asian immigrant workers benefit from working along side co-ethnic colleagues with whom they can communicate in Punjabi and who observe similar rules of engagement. The ethnic networks of South Asian immigrants tend to produce employment opportunities in particular occupations. An employment counsellor explains that many South Asian immigrants find jobs in the Punjabi community. A lot of the lower-level educated people would be looking for warehouse jobs [and] more manual, more physical, labourintensive type of jobs. For instance dishwashing, where it doesn’t require a lot of computer skills and to be very articulate. [The character of their work] is physical, it’s not multi-task.
The occupational concentrations of South Asian immigrants is perhaps best illustrated by the ‘taxi-driver phenomenon’, which refers to the high proportion of South Asians in the taxi business.5 A South Asian taxi-business operator proclaims proudly: ‘We are the people that drive taxis’. Immigrant service organizations claim that they do not channel South Asian immigrants into the taxi business: ‘They have their own network’. The taxibusiness operator also remarks that he does not actively recruit South Asian drivers. Rather, his drivers come to his company through referrals from their own ethnic network. Other South Asian drivers ‘tell their friends that “we assist you”,’ if they join their ranks as taxi drivers. These personal referrals circumvent the formal recruitment process, including re´sume´ writing and job interviews. In addition, a critical mass of co-ethnic workers enables the use of rules of conduct
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver shared by the South Asian community. The shared habitus between management and drivers may further facilitate the attraction of South Asian immigrants to the taxi industry and contribute to the concentration of South Asian immigrants in this business. As an employment counsellor notes: ‘If you look at who owns most of the taxi business, you’d find a lot of South Asians which own a lot of the taxis, so [the high concentration of South Asians] is probably tied to [the] ownership’. Unlike many South Asians, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia lack strong family networks because they arrived as skilled workers or refugees (not as family-class immigrants). In addition, their ethnic community is smaller (Figure 1) and fragmented because of the civil war in the Balkans. Consequently, their social and ethnic networks are not as developed as that of South Asians. A settlement counsellor and immigrant from the former Yugoslavia explains: ‘We are not organized in Canada, we don’t have any club, just Croatian people they have the Cultural Center, but Muslim people, Serbian people they do not have that’. Consequently, relatively few immigrants from the former Yugoslavia find jobs through ethnic and social networks. Employers confirmed that they rarely receive job applications through referrals from co-ethnic workers. Moreover, the interviews revealed that networking is an unfamiliar concept to many newcomers from the former Yugoslavia, particularly among refugees. Hiring practices that existed in the former Yugoslavia typically relied on formal qualifications and institutional networks, rather than personal and social networks. Once in Canada, immigrants are reluctant to draw on their personal contacts to secure employment. One interviewee notes that newcomers question the validity of personal references: ‘Here people
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ask you: “do you have [a] reference?” We wouldn’t do that in our country . . . you shouldn’t say that you know somebody (who will vow for you)’. Apparently, in the eyes of many immigrants from the former Yugoslavia the use of personal references violates the rules of proper labour market engagement. Another respondent explains that humility and modesty, rather than personal advertisement, are seen as appropriate behaviour: We don’t know how to sell ourselves, . . . present ourselves in a good way. This is totally out of our culture, you are not allowed to say something nice about yourself. If you are nice, I will say that. You don’t have to tell me. If you have to tell me, obviously you are not. It is a shame to say ‘yes I am good, I have good computer skills’.
Another respondent agrees: ‘Nobody networked in that same sense in Yugoslavia. You had much more of a system of [professional] connections. And you developed a network based on that, as opposed to a network based on social relationships that could get you into [a] position’. While ethnic networks are unlikely to segment immigrants from the former Yugoslavia into particular occupations, personal preferences related to habitus are the more likely to enter into the segmentation process. For example, several interviewees noted that immigrants from the former Yugoslavia actively seek employment as building managers.6 For many refugees from the former Yugoslavia, employment benefits are more appealing than independence, professional status or career advancement. According to one respondent, the building manager occupation offers many attractive features: In smaller towns [of the former Yugoslavia] it’s absolutely unheard of that you own your own apartment. Your company owns the apartment.
94 Harald Bauder So, if you work for your whole life for the car manufacturing plant, say, in Zenica, or Tuzla, you’ve gotten your apartment through them, you have your health care covered through them, you have your children’s education guaranteed to some degree from that state enterprise, so you’re getting tangible benefits apart from remuneration from the company. So, even though your pay may be bad, you have other benefits that you’re looking at. So, if you come from that sort of culture and you come to a city where rent is typically high, [like] here in Vancouver, [a job in which] you get free rent, guaranteed, as a benefit, that’s very attractive right away.
While place of origin guides initial employment preferences, respondents explained that these preferences often change with the length of time spent in Canada. An immigration worker remarks that many building managers from the former Yugoslavia ‘attend courses in English or in some computer courses, and after a while, probably five years or something, they get another job’. They also attend job-finding clubs to master the rules of recruitment and interview processes to be able to move into other occupations. Building manager becomes a transitory occupation as immigrants upgrade their credentials, internalize local habitus and familiarize themselves with the rules of the Canadian labour market.
Conclusion My interest in this paper was to investigate how cultural practices constrain immigrants’ access to employment. I did not attempt to account for the influence of racial discrimination in the Canadian labour market, although this force of exclusion should not be underestimated since immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and from South Asia are
probably racialized differently. I instead concentrated on cultural practices associated with habitus and rules as an explanatory framework. I found evidence that the unfamiliarity with the rules of the Canadian labour market is an important employment barrier for newcomers. Interestingly, this barrier is highly contingent on place of origin and immigrant class. Rigid conventions in the application and interviewing processes, for example, exclude especially refugees and family-class immigrants who tend to be less familiar with the rules of proper labour market engagement. Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1998) concept of habitus provides a useful framework for understanding these cultural processes that deny some immigrant workers access to the full spectrum of labour market opportunities. Immigration classes, for example, differentiate between immigrants who are likely to succeed in the Canadian labour market and immigrants who fulfil Canada’s international commitments and obligations to families who settled in Canada at an earlier time. This differentiation also tends to separate immigrants who can culturally navigate the Canadian labour market from immigrants who lack this ability. In response to constrained opportunities in the labour market, family-class immigrants from South Asia and refugees from the former Yugoslavia tend to pursue different employment strategies. These strategies can again be linked to differences in habitus between the two origin groups. While South Asian immigrants employ ethnic networks to advance in the labour market, immigrants from the former Yugoslavia are reluctant to use personal references in their job search. In addition, many immigrants seek employment in occupations which they associate with favourable attributes, such as providing free housing. Again, habitus provides
Employment of immigrants in Vancouver a framework for conceptualizing these preferences. Group-particular employment strategies play an important role in concentrating immigrant groups in certain occupations and industries. The two examples frequently mentioned by the interview respondents were taxi drivers from South Asia and building managers from the former Yugoslavia. Through shaping ethnic networks and through producing distinct occupational preferences, habitus contributes to the ethnic segmentation of immigrant labour. The findings from this case study have wider implications for the general conceptuatization of immigrant integration and labour market processes. The strategies deployed by ethnic immigrant groups are probably not unique to Greater Vancouver. The ‘taxi-driver phenomenon’, for example, is also known in other Canadian and even British cities (Karla 2000: 179 – 195). Such cross-national similarities raise important questions about the general role of habitus in constraining and creating labour market opportunities for immigrants, and in shaping group-particular labour market strategies. Future research could explore similarly constraining cultural processes in different geographical contexts.
Acknowledgements This project was funded by the Vancouver Centre of the Metropolis Project, RIIM, and the researcher held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship while collecting the data. I thank David Ley, Randy McLeman and two anonymous referees for comments, and Emilie Cameron for outstanding research assistance.
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Notes 1 The 1996 Canadian Census uses the category ‘Balkan’ rather than ‘former Yugoslavia’. 2 Although, deskilling may eventually push even skilled immigrants into the secondary labour market (Bauder forthcoming). 3 These waves of immigration are consistent with the information presented in Table 1, revealing disproportionate numbers in the skilled-worker class from ‘Yugoslavia’ (Serbia and Montenegro), and refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. 4 It is a misconception, however, that Canada’s immigration procedures apply economic criteria only to the skilled-worker and business classes. An interviewee who entered Canada several years ago as a Croatian refugee explains that her young age, skills and personal motivation helped her qualify as a refugee. Her father, who suffered from the same political circumstances, was too old to qualify for refugee status in Canada. Nevertheless, educational credentials among refugees and family-class immigrants still lag behind those of skilled-worker immigrants. 5 In cross-referencing the validity of this stereotypical ethnic industry, I was surprised that only 0.4 per cent of all male South Asian immigrants worked as transportation and equipment operators (Table 5). Several explanations for this low number can be provided: first, the PUMF is based on 1996 data, while the interviews were recorded in 2001. Perhaps the ‘taxi-driver phenomenon’ emerged only in the last five years. Second, the taxi industry is relatively small compared to the total South Asian immigrant population, enabling a relatively small share of the South Asian immigrant population to dominate the industry. Third, the taxidriver business is an occupation that is highly visible to the general public and therefore receives a disproportionate share of public and media attention. 6 The 1996 PUMF statistics displayed in Table 5 show that male immigrants from the Balkans indeed concentrate in the occupational category (service supervisors, attendants in recreation), which includes building manager.
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Abstract translations Habitus, les re`gles du marche´ du travail et les strate´gies de recherche d’emploi d’immigrants de Vancouver, Canada Dans le marche´ du travail canadien, les immigrants font face a` des obstacles tels que les conventions re´gissant le lieu de travail et les pratiques d’embauche. Cet article envisage ces obstacles en fonction du concept d’Habitus de Bourdieu. La recherche empirique pre´sente´e ici porte sur des immigrants originaires de l’Asie du Sud et de l’exYougoslavie qui se retrouvent sur le marche´ du travail de la re´gion me´tropolitaine de Vancouver. Une analyse statistique des donne´es de recensement et des dossiers d’immigration accompagne une analyse de contenu d’entrevues mene´es aupre`s de leaders communautaires, de conseillers spe´cialise´s en matie`re d’immigration et de recherche d’emploi, et d’employeurs. Les immigrants admis au Canada a` des fins de re´unification familiale ou pour raison humanitaire ont tendance a` eˆtre moins familiers avec les «re`gles» du marche´ de travail canadien que les immigrants recrute´s en raison de leurs compe´tences ou de leur formation. Devant cette barrie`re culturelle lie´e au marche´ du travail, les immigrants d’Asie du Sud de´veloppent des re´ seaux a` base ethnique, tandis que les immigrants de
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l’ex-Yougoslavie misent sur l’exploitation d’autres ressources culturelles. Mots-clefs: habitus, immigrants d’Asie du Sud, exYougoslavie, Vancouver, marche´ du travail. Habitus, normas del mercado laboral y estrate´gicas de empleo de inmigrantes en Vancouver, Canada´ Convenciones de trabajo y me´todos de contratar son barreras que los inmigrantes en el mercado laboral de Canada´ tiene que enfrentar. Este papel considera estas barreras en el contexto del concepto de Bourdieu de ‘habitus’. La investigacio´n empı´rica aquı´ presentada examina inmigrantes del Sur de Asia y del antiguo Yugoslavia, los cuales forman parte del mercado laboral del gran Vancouver. Adema´s de un ana´lisis estadı´stico de datos del censo y de documentos de llegada de inmigrantes, hay un ana´lisis de entrevistas con lı´deres comunitarios, consejeros de asentamiento y empleo, y empleadores. Los inmigrantes concedidos permiso a entrar en Canada´ por razones humanitarias o para reunificacio´n familiar, tienden a estar menos familiarizados con las ‘reglas’ del mercado laboral canadiense que aquellos inmigrantes contratados por sus habilidades y formacio´n profesional. En respuesta a esta barrera cultural del mercado laboral, los inmigrantes del Sur de Asia van desarrollando una red de conexiones e´tnicos mientras que los inmigrantes del antiguo Yugoslavia hacen uso de otros recursos culturales. Palabras claves: habitus, inmigrantes del Sur de Asia, antiguo Yugoslavia, Vancouver, mercado laboral.
