Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Politics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, Canada,
Email: lynnngyl@yorku.ca

In the past four years, as the pandemic ravages the globe in ways still unfolding, we have seen a renewed interest in topics of social justice and advocacy. Likewise, political economy of labour migration studies has witnessed broader shifts over the years, with younger generations of scholars increasingly training the field’s lens to critical race perspectives. Race and relations across the globe are diverse and dynamic but still tend to be framed around certain Western-centric (European and North American) experiences of colonialism and imperialism. As formative and crucial as colour codes are, the dominant discussions centred on especially Black/Brown/White, and other Persons of Colour (POCs) or “visible minorities” do not in fact correspond to most people’s lived experiences of racial encounters. Bringing this perspective to labour market discrimination, I call on colleagues to unpack the growing complexity of the social constructions of skills in our midst as these are politically manipulated and deployed – in adverse ways – against professional immigrants.

I speak from current research engagements with the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC) in Ottawa, Canada, where a dedicated team of socially engaged analysts and community practitioners are looking at labour market information gaps. This project focuses on Foreign Credential Recognition (FCR) processes in Canada, a broad umbrella of degree and qualification conversion or ‘translation’ procedures that international students and skilled immigrants must undergo as a part of their settling-in requirements. Some key findings are not new realizations and are extensively researched; prevalent mismatch of skills and job requirements; deskilling and devaluation of immigrant credentials; widespread un/underemployment and overqualification; employer discrimination on the grounds of lacking a so-called “Canadian Experience” and/or cultural suitability; and outright racism that has little to nothing to do with established skills assessment frameworks. Other humanistic, sociological aspects of inequity and injustice in FCR, however, are not as widely publicized and understood. What else is there other than plain market economics? What of the uncountable human costs, cognitive and psychological, of the emotional labour of resilience in the face of social humiliation?  

I trust that my colleagues at LMIC are not alone in their impassionate pursuit of labour market information gaps that remain largely obscure to the general public’s awareness. In and beyond Canada, issues of skills discrimination tend to be discussed around national priorities of economic growth, industrial longevity, and demand-and-supply issues of concern to the domestic labour market. But in an increasingly migrant world of work, researchers are beginning to realize a growing gap between the existing (statistically or numerically driven) data and qualitative reports of people’s life stories. The details in focus group narrations and lengthy interviews are typically glossed over or simply ignored in impersonal, large-scale reports of economic integration wellness. We know that international medical graduates (IMGs) and licensed physicians from abroad cannot practice in their field and are even coerced to take up domestic caregiving occupations in the informal, unregulated economy. Canada’s live-in caregiver program (LCP) has conventionally been a Filipino-majority migrant labour pool, most of whom have university degrees and practicing licenses yet are resigned to ad-hoc, minimum wage jobs. There are signs, though, that the profile of care service occupations are changing and diversifying in ways that outpace our analytical speed. Personally, I know of more than a couple of international graduate student counterparts in Canada who get by on piecemeal caregiving jobs due to a lack of relevant opportunities. 

The list of deskilling and devaluation examples is by no means exhaustive. Labour market analysts point to the changing composition of an aging workforce globally (Future of Work) and the need for more information about implications of automation/artificial intelligence, among other trends, in potentially displacing both native-born and immigrant labour. Ongoing conversations of Understanding Skills, in that vein, necessarily involve digging into its myriad social constructions, political manipulations of verbally pleasing principles (e.g. equality, fairness, and meritocracy), and the proliferating, novel ways that powerful actors apply a vital labour market value to unjust ends.  

As a broad collective, political economists have come a long way in coming to terms with apparently innocent or neutral-sounding terms, such as “skills”, that mask ongoing colonial legacies of racial prejudice. Labour market integration has never been a fair playing field and the world is witnessing ever yet creative strategies of legal while unjust power plays. I join other researchers and colleagues at LMIC in reiterating that it is imperative to garner stories about people’s lived experiences with race and relations in skills devaluation that often go unheard of in mainstream news. It has been encouraging to see a growing number of conference panels and public speaker events taking interest in such complicated issues. 

What else about “skills” is not being said? And where does that leave us? Now is a timely moment to offer some parting thoughts in the form of possible directions for future and further research. I call on colleagues in political economy to delve deeper into the banal, mundane aspects of social constructions of skills that exert more emotional energies from unduly discriminated people than mainstream society likes to realize. 

ENDNOTES:

1. Sweetman, A., McDonald, J. T., & Hawthorne, L. (2015). Occupational regulation and foreign qualification recognition: an overview. Canadian Public Policy, 41(S1), S1-S13

2. Li, P. S. (2008). The role of foreign credentials and ethnic ties in immigrants’ economic performance. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 33(2), 291-310.

3. Chatterjee, S. (2015). Skills to build the nation: The ideology of ‘Canadian experience’ and nationalism in global knowledge regime. Ethnicities, 15(4), 544-567.

4. Wang, Y., Das, R. L. V., Lapa, T., Marosan, P., Pawliuk, R., Chable, H. D., & Lofters, A. (2023). Career development of international medical graduates in Canada: status of the unmatched. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-7.