Refugee economic integration and its Implications for Social Justice in Canada
Start Date
10-2-2021 11:15 AM
End Date
10-2-2021 12:15 PM
Proposal Type
Presentation
Proposal Description
Refugees--unlike non-refugee immigrants--are forced to flee from their homes, seek protection and navigate potential options for refugee settlement. At post-migration stage, refugee challenges continue as they seek integration in their new setting. While the successful integration of newcomers is expected by newcomers and their host nations, many host countries, governments, and citizens are concerned about how refugees fare economically. With the pre-migration experiences of forced displacement, dispossession, and violence caused by war or other protracted conflicts, government assisted refuges (GARs), as well as privately sponsored refugees (PSRs), blended visa office referred refugees (BVORs) or refugee claimants (asylum seekers) have travelled to Canada to make a new home. Economists, sociologists and the government have paid significant attention to the economic integration of immigrants, yet very few studies have focused exclusively on refugees. Existing literatures demonstrate the poorer economic outcomes of refugees in compared to immigrants and native-born in Canada. This centered in peace and conflict studies (PACS) examines the economic experiences of resettled refugees exclusively employing the 2016 Canadian Census dataset using a social justice framework based on three overlapping theoretical constructs --- structural violence, segmented assimilation, and structuration. The study analyzes employment income, employment status, and education-job mismatch based on a sample of GARs and PSRs within 25-64 years of core working age who have been admitted between1980 and 2016. This paper contributes to the broad Canadian immigrant and integration literature and fills the void in the PACS literature on social justice and refugee integration as most studies are from sociologists and economists.
Refugee economic integration and its Implications for Social Justice in Canada
Refugees--unlike non-refugee immigrants--are forced to flee from their homes, seek protection and navigate potential options for refugee settlement. At post-migration stage, refugee challenges continue as they seek integration in their new setting. While the successful integration of newcomers is expected by newcomers and their host nations, many host countries, governments, and citizens are concerned about how refugees fare economically. With the pre-migration experiences of forced displacement, dispossession, and violence caused by war or other protracted conflicts, government assisted refuges (GARs), as well as privately sponsored refugees (PSRs), blended visa office referred refugees (BVORs) or refugee claimants (asylum seekers) have travelled to Canada to make a new home. Economists, sociologists and the government have paid significant attention to the economic integration of immigrants, yet very few studies have focused exclusively on refugees. Existing literatures demonstrate the poorer economic outcomes of refugees in compared to immigrants and native-born in Canada. This centered in peace and conflict studies (PACS) examines the economic experiences of resettled refugees exclusively employing the 2016 Canadian Census dataset using a social justice framework based on three overlapping theoretical constructs --- structural violence, segmented assimilation, and structuration. The study analyzes employment income, employment status, and education-job mismatch based on a sample of GARs and PSRs within 25-64 years of core working age who have been admitted between1980 and 2016. This paper contributes to the broad Canadian immigrant and integration literature and fills the void in the PACS literature on social justice and refugee integration as most studies are from sociologists and economists.