This case study examines how the hackathon as an instrument can aid settlement sectors and governments in fostering non-profit innovation to rethinking the trajectory of taking solutions to scale. It presents one practitioner’s perspective on the outcomes of two community hackathons, one exploring migration data sets and the other on language policy innovation, co-developed between 2016 and 2019 by MCIS Language Solutions, a Toronto based not-for-profit social enterprise, in partnership with various partners.
Background
In Canada, the non-profit organizations (NPO) and settlement sectors are increasingly reexamining their responsibility for service delivery and service design. With a growing interest in understanding how to include design principles and an "innovation" mindset in addressing the long-term outcomes of social services, new instruments are introduced as a way to experiment with different modes of engagement among the various stakeholders. A recent example is the hackathon.
The aim of community hackathons or civic hacks—a derivative of tech gatherings customized to fit public engagement - is to collaboratively rethink, redesign, and resolve a range of social and policy issues that communities are facing, from settlement, the environment, health, or legal services. Although hackathons and civic hacks aspire to be democratic, relationship-driven instruments, aligned with non-profit principles of inclusion and diversity, they are also risky propositions from the perspective of the non-profit organizational culture in Canada in that they tend to lack solid structure, clear rules, and fixed outcomes. Despite the challenges, the promise of innovation is too attractive to be disregarded, and some non-profits are embarking (with or without the government’s help) on incorporating hackathons into their toolkits.
Background
A recent government of Canada surge of interest around making the case for a nationwide innovation agenda inspired some NPOs to test new models of engagement, often mimicking the tech sector design and prototyping, while hoping to understand the scope of innovation. Broadly speaking, the scope of industry innovation is loosely defined by the Oslo Manual (OECD/Eurostat, 2019), and includes four organizational areas: culture, resources, products/services, and processes. In January 2019, while gathering feedback on sector innovation, the insights provided were clearly articulated (Senate Canada, 2019). To support the culture of innovation, the sector suggested “embedding innovation” and “having the agency” of a designated role or department. Data sharing was also identified as a primary innovation resource needing to be managed by public trusts, while products/services innovation was identified as ideal opportunities for participatory design and wider collaboration (e.g., implementing hackathons or similar methodologies).
MCIS, which stands for Multicultural Community Interpreter Services, is a service delivery driven NPO that specializes in facilitating language access to critical services. Their earlier attempts to bring hackathons to fruition was due to the absence of a mandate, budgetary constraints, insufficient access to partners in the civic tech community, and relevant data sets (Trinaistic, 2018).
The purpose of a hackathon (a portmanteau of “hacking marathon”), which has been a tool of the tech industry since the early 1990s, is to explore alternatives to existing design solutions and business as usual processes while promoting collaboration. Unlike technical hackathons—seen as a recommended part of career preparation, recruitment fairs, and an exercise in demonstrated readiness of young graduates with technical backgrounds to “netWORK” (Nardi et al., 2002)—community hackathons, sometimes interchangeably used with civic hacks, are considered to be “a subset of this trend that bring together ad hoc groups under the auspices of conceiving and prototyping technologies to address social conditions and concerns” (Lodato & DiSalvo, 2016). Being less about the technology, project pitches, and semi-finished products and more about conversations and bringing together a spectrum of people with varied professional and lived experiences, these events are meant to brainstorm on and crowdsource alternative solutions and facilitate participation by making all voices count and contribute equally.
Based on the data MCIS gathered through informal interviews and the survey of hackathon participants (primarily from non-profit sector across Ontario) in 2019,1 it is apparent that NPOs are polarized in their views of hackathons/civic hacks either as “interesting” and “promising” or “confusing” and “irrelevant.” Amongst reasons for such difference in responses are generational biases, swaying between reluctance in perceiving the usefulness of this model versus excited expectations around hackathon-based style of collaborative learning. Also, some participants are inclined to reject disrupted project management flow while others embrace non-linear prototyping and experimenting. For some, the lack of clear outcomes is distressing. For others, the ambiguity of “unfinished solutions” is wholeheartedly embraced as a tool of disrupting the business as usual. For these reasons, hackathons could be a disappointing experience for participants who are used to more structured engagement and support of the academia—and of students in particular—could be crucial in creating connections between more traditional, project management-fixed, and outcomes-heavy approaches and experiment-driven, agile, and flexible opportunities.
What did the researcher learn?
Civic, policy, or community hackathons are both spaces and instruments of rapid and equitable innovation that leverage service users’ input with appropriate technology and that are permeated by an attitude of open mindedness, positive practicality, and radical inclusion.
Lessons learned:
The intent of this report is to provide a strategy for a brighter future for the sector - a Settlement 2.0 - one that prioritizes empowering newcomers to be agents in their own settlement journey and which builds the overall capacity of the sector to embrace innovative mindsets and more sustainably support newcomers over time. The Settlement 2.0 Project strives to understand the pre-conditions necessary for effective change, and how the sector can embrace tech and innovation in service delivery and strategic principles.
Background
The Settlement 2.0 project consisted of two phases:
Phase 1 involved the undertaking of a situational analysis of the settlement sector across Canada, which explored the effectiveness of current service delivery models and challenges to open and collaborative innovation in the settlement sector.
Phase 2 built on the findings of the phase one situational analysis to design and convene community consultations between stakeholders in the settlement sector across British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, with the goal of collecting data on how effective collaboration and promotion of innovative responses could address challenges identified in the previous phase.
What the first and second stages of the Settlement 2.0 Project accomplished can be summarized as follows: the Situational Analysis provided a national “lay of the land” to help PeaceGeeks understand the state of technology, innovation and open practices in the settlement sector across Canada. The Community Consultations held across the Lower Mainland of British Columbia bolstered the national findings and offered local examples of how innovative and collaborative practices are being implemented at the community, municipal, and regional levels. Further, the Community Consultations identified specific preconditions necessary for the settlement sector to more widely and comprehensively embrace innovation and collaboration in the future.
This final third report takes the national and local findings and presents them together to demonstrate:
The latter examples provide food for thought for IRCC to consider how to support the national settlement sector in moving toward more innovative and collaborative practices as a whole, thus bringing all phases of the Settlement 2.0 project to key focus points that can be carried forward into further conversations with more of the settlement community as IRCC moves toward a Settlement 2.0.
Recommendations
The resulting recommendations detailed in the body of this report are carefully linked to IRCC’s “CORE” Principles, as they were formally implemented into IRCC’s 2019 five-year Calls for Proposals. These CORE Principles align with the 12 Core Values of Settlement Work identified 20 years ago by the sector itself (CCR 2000).1 Language used to describe innovation (both in describing IRCC’s CORE Principles and by civic tech and other innovation actors), such as client-centric, co-creation, openness, transparency, empowering communities, addressing vulnerability, and knowledge sharing is directly connected to the immigrant and refugee-serving sector’s principles in approaches to service provision, program development, and system change. The sector’s innovation foundation is already in place.
The authors provide actionable, scalable, stakeholder-developed recommendations to IRCC and other relevant settlement stakeholders, to build on this foundation, facilitate widespread collaboration and innovative practices and technologies in the sector, to better serve newcomers now and in the future.
Additional downloads:
This study found that recent immigrants were more likely than Canadian-born workers to move out of employment in March and April mainly because of their shorter job tenure and over-representation in lower-wage jobs.
During the widespread lockdown of economic activities in March and April 2020, the Canadian labour market lost 3 million jobs. From May to July, as many businesses gradually resumed their operations, 1.7 million jobs were recovered. While studies in the United States and Europe suggest that immigrants are often more severely affected by economic downturns than the native born (Borjas and Cassidy 2020; Botric 2018), little is known about whether immigrants and the Canadian born fared differently in the employment disruption induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and, if so, how such differences are related to their socio-demographic and job characteristics.
This paper fills this gap by comparing immigrants and the Canadian-born population in their transitions out of employment in the months of heavy contraction and into employment during the months of partial recovery. The analysis is based on individual-level monthly panel data from the Labour Force Survey and focuses on the population aged 20 to 64. Immigrants are grouped into recent immigrants who landed in Canada within 10 years or less, and long-term immigrants who landed in Canada more than 10 years earlier.
There are reasons to expect immigrants to be more negatively affected by the economic fallout of the pandemic. Recent immigrants tend to have shorter job tenure than the Canadian born, and workers with short tenure are more susceptible to layoffs during an economic downturn (Chan, Morissette and Qiu 2020). For instance, in February, before the impact of the pandemic, 31% of employed recent immigrants had been in their jobs for less than one year, compared with 15% of Canadian-born workers. Furthermore, recent immigrants are often much more likely to work in lower paying jobs than Canadian-born workers, and the employment losses in March and April were heavily concentrated among lower paying jobs (Lemieux et al. 2020). In February, 22% of recent immigrants were in low-wage jobs (with hourly wages less than two-thirds of the 2019 annual median wage of $24.04/hour), compared with 12% among Canadian-born workers.Note More broadly, recent immigrants often have difficulty transferring their educational and job qualifications to the labour market and finding steady, good paying jobs.
Findings
Female recent immigrants experienced the largest increase in the rate of transition to non-employment during the contraction. Almost 20% of those employed in March were not employed in April, 7 percentage points higher than among Canadian-born women.
These gaps for female recent immigrants became even larger after taking into account their differences with Canadian-born women in terms of age, education, and geographical location. These gaps were likely driven by differential employment growth between recent immigrant and Canadian-born women by industrial sector and wage level. From April to July, recent immigrant women lagged behind Canadian-born women in employment growth in the accommodation and food service sector (4% versus 72%), although they had similar rates of employment growth in other major industrial sectors. Over the same period, employment in low-wage jobs grew much slower (11%) among recent immigrant women than among Canadian-born women (36%), while their growth rates in higher-wage jobs were similar. It remains to be seen whether these differences will disappear as the economy further improves.
The higher share of recent immigrant men with shorter tenured jobs accounted for 30% of their 3 percentage-point gap with Canadian-born men in March, while their higher shareholding lower-wage jobs and living in the three largest metropolitan areas each accounted for another 15% of the gap.
This report suggests that fair treatment of Canada’s agricultural workers requires several urgent and significant reforms at both the federal and provincial levels. However, as United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Canada has asserted on multiple submissions to the federal government, Canada does not need a robust temporary foreign worker program. Canada desperately needs a more inclusive, protective, and healthy immigration system. In addition, UFCW has pointed out that an expanded Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) should not be viewed as the solution to labour challenges facing Canada’s agri-food system. A broader labour strategy is needed for this crucial sector.
Background
In the mid-1960s, in an attempt to meet the seasonal labour needs of Canadian agricultural producers, the federal government created the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), turning to the Caribbean for a temporary stream of foreign workers.The SAWP now falls within the primary agricultural stream of the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program administered by Employment and Services Development Canada (ESDC).
Initially, this was intended to be a last resort and only a temporary solution; however, over 50 years later, this has become a central part of Canada’s primary agricultural industry.Seasonal work by migrant workers now accounts for half of Canada’s paid agricultural workforce. The workers arrive from Mexico or one of the other 11 participating Caribbean countries.Canada has seen a continuous expansion of the migrant and temporary foreign workforce incorporate agriculture under federal programs that deliver migrant workers to employers, and then essentially abandon them to fend for themselves. In 2012 the ESDC issued 39,700 permits for migrant farmworkers. In 2019 that number had risen to 72,000.
Discussion
65% of migrant agricultural workers are subject to the terms and conditions of the SAWP program, which is negotiated between the participating governments. However, the terms and conditions of employment, as well as other workplace rights and entitlements for agricultural workers, are subject to provincial workplace legislation.Yet, the labour and workplace rights of agricultural workers are far too often expressly excluded, making migrant agricultural workers more vulnerable than the general Canadian workforce, as their legal rights and entitlements are fewer.
As a result, Canada’s migrant agricultural workers work in conditions where exploitation and abuse are common. This is also fuelled by the fact that workers who are hired through the SAWP and TFW are only allowed to work for the specific employer who hired them. Their “closed” work permit and the exclusion from collective bargaining rights of agricultural workers in Ontario, where about 40% of temporary migrant agricultural workers are employed, puts these workers in a vulnerable position where the employer has all the power over the employee.
In June 2019, the federal government’s response to this was the introduction of the open work permit for vulnerable workers’ program. This program grants an open work permit of one year to migrant workers under the SAWP and TFWP who have experienced or are experiencing any type of abuse, such as physical, psychological, sexual, or financial. However, as these permits are only temporary, they do not address the long-term need of workers for protection and fair labour.
Recommendations
The authors suggest that meaningful reform is necessary. Not only do Temporary Foreign Workers experience higher rates of wage theft and workplace abuse, but they are also dependent on the moods of their employers to be able to stay in Canada.
Federal reforms recommended:
Provincial reforms recommended:
The effectiveness of resettlement initiatives on refugee assimilation in Canada is assessed using the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) to follow refugee income variations between 1982-2015.
Background
To determine the short-and-long term variations in the labour integration process for different refugee sponsorship types, government-sponsored refugees (GARs) and privately-sponsored refugees (PSRs) are analyzed using an unconditioned and conditioned mean approach for 1, 3, 7, 10, and 15 years after landing in Canada. The impact of the Resettlement Assistance Program (RAP) on GARs’ conditioned mean incomes one and three years after migration is also assessed using the annual Public Accounts of Canada expenditure data in combination with the IMDB. Refugee assimilation is compared to federal skilled worker (FSW) class immigrants, the control group, to account for period effects. The results show that both PSR and GAR earnings converge to FSW in-about 15 years after migration. Furthermore, we find that higher RAP income support amounts have deterring effects on labour decisions, thereby delaying the labour integration process in comparison to the lowest years.
Findings
The results show that both PSR and GAR earnings converge to FSW in-about 15 years after migration. Furthermore, the authors find that higher RAP income support amounts have deterring effects on labour decisions, thereby delaying the labour integration process in comparison to the lowest years.
Refugee assimilation takes longer than five to ten years. PSRs assimilate more quickly GARs, due to the social capital that private sponsors offer and pre-arranged employment. Since all refugees assimilate over the long-term, the fact that PSRs economically integrate faster is of significance.
The authors recommend 3 actionable changes to the RAP funding composition, which should help ease the labour integration process for GARs:
This study focuses on the economic immigrants who were selected under Canada's Express Entry system in 2015 and 2016. It compares the degree to which Canadian work experience before immigration and pre-arranged employment at the time of application predict the initial labour market outcomes of these economic immigrants.
Background
The two-step immigration selection process—the selection of economic immigrants from among temporary foreign workers—has been expanding since the 2000s. From 2000 to 2018, the share with pre-immigration Canadian earnings among economic principal applicants increased from 12% to 59%. Thus, the majority of recent economic immigrant principal applicants were selected from former foreign residents who had worked in Canada (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020a). This is a significant development. Immigrants who had Canadian skilled work experience before obtaining permanent residency tend to have higher initial employment rates and earnings than immigrants who are admitted directly from abroad (Hou and Bonikowska 2018; Hou and Picot 2016).
A key feature of two-step selection is the important role played by employers. In the first step, it is mostly employers who make the decisions on the hiring and retaining of temporary foreign workers. In the US employer-selection system, employers further sponsor temporary foreign workers for the application of permanent residency. In comparison, in Canada’s points-based system, it is generally the government that sets up rules and criteria to determine how many and which temporary foreign workers can transition to permanent residency. However, Canada, as well as other countries with a points-based system, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, have incorporated the input of employers by awarding points for job offers (Papademetriou and Hooper 2019; Hiebert 2019). Indeed, depending on the importance assigned to job offers, employers can play a decisive role in the selection of economic immigrants. When Canada’s Express Entry (EE) system was first introduced, a job offer essentially guaranteed an applicant’s success in applying for permanent residency. Two years after implementation, the points awarded for a job offer were dramatically reduced. However, a job offer is compulsory in some Provincial Nominee Programs (Papademetriou and Hooper 2019).
Since it would be relatively easy for temporary foreign workers to obtain a job offer for their immigration application, most applicants with a job offer are likely former temporary foreign workers. It is conceivable that a job offer can significantly boost a low-skilled temporary foreign worker’s chance to pass the application screen. However, high-skilled temporary foreign workers with favourable human capital factors may not have to rely on a job offer to qualify for permanent residency. Given that Canadian work experience and job offers are important selection criteria and they overlap to a large extent, this article asks whether a pre-arranged job results in the same economic advantage as pre-landing Canadian work experience.
This is the fifth article of a series on the increasing importance of temporary foreign workers in the selection and labour market outcomes of immigrants. Previous articles in this series provide an overview of the advantages and potential risks of two-step immigration selection (Crossman, Hou and Picot 2020), document the recent expansion of two-step immigration selection in Canada (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020a), examine the effect of this expansion on immigrants’ labour market outcomes (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020b), and explore whether two‑step selection explains the variation in labour market outcomes by admission class (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020c). Following a review of the evolution of job offers and Canadian work experience as selection criteria for economic immigrants, this article compares their relative importance as predictors of economic immigrants’ initial labour market outcomes.
Findings
Canadian work experience and pre-arranged employment are both important criteria in Canada’s Express Entry system of economic immigration selection. While pre-arranged employment may more directly reflect employers’ preference than Canadian work experience, the latter can better capture the “realized market values of skills in Canada” when it is measured by levels of pre‑immigration Canadian earnings. Among prime-aged principal applicants selected through the EE system, having pre-immigration Canadian earnings was associated with a large advantage in employment incidence in the first two years after immigration, while having a pre-arranged job made no difference in employment when common immigrant characteristics are taken into account. With otherwise similar characteristics, immigrants with a pre-arranged job earned 15% more than those without a pre-arranged job in the first two years after immigration, while immigrants with high pre-landing Canadian earnings earned almost twice as those without pre‑landing Canadian earnings.
Immigrants with medium and low pre-landing Canadian earnings had no earnings advantage relative to those without pre-landing Canadian earnings after immigration. Overall, the level of pre-immigration Canadian earnings was a strong predictor of post-immigration earnings, while having a pre-arranged job accounted for little of the variation in post-immigration earnings among economic principal applicant immigrants selected through the EE system.
It is not surprising that pre-immigration Canada earnings are a strong predictor of post‑immigration earnings because past performance tends to be strongly associated with future performance. Such an association does not negate its potential relevance for the selection of economic immigrants. After all, the main purpose of the selection process is to identify which applicants are most likely to do well in the labour market. A high level of pre-immigration Canadian earnings is a very useful identifier if a selection goal is to choose prospective immigrants with the best earnings potentials.
This article examines the role of two-step selection in explaining differences in the short-term and medium-term outcomes of economic immigrants in four major admission programs: FSWP, PNP, QSWP, and CEC. These programs are devised to meet various national, regional and sectoral economic needs. The labour market outcomes of economic immigrants in these admission programs are of policy interest because they are often used as indicators of a program’s success. More importantly, the knowledge of which factors underlie the success of one program can help inform the improvement of other programs.
This is the fourth article of a series that provides a broad overview of the increasing importance of temporary foreign workers in the selection and labour market outcomes of immigrants. The first article provides an overview of the international and Canadian literature on the advantages and potential risks of two-step immigration selection (Crossman, Hou and Picot 2020). The second article documents the recent expansion of two-step immigration selection in Canada (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020a). The third article examines whether the expansion of two-step selection accounts for most of the recent improvement in immigrants’ employment rates and entry earnings (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020b). This article starts with a review of previous studies on immigrant economic outcomes by admission program. It further provides an updated analysis of how the level of two-step selection affects the labour market outcomes by admission class of economic immigrants.
Background
The expansion of the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) and the introduction of the Canadian Experience Class (CEC) have been a driving force for the development of two-step immigration selection—the process of selecting economic immigrants from among former temporary foreign workers. Under this two-step migration process, temporary foreign workers will gain Canadian work experience, and their skills and qualifications are evaluated and tested by Canadian employers. Their work experience increases their chances to qualify for economic immigration through the Federal Skilled Worker program (FSWP), Quebec Skill Worker (QSWP), and particularly PNP and CEC. While the CEC specifically targets temporary foreign workers with skilled work experience in Canada, low-skilled temporary foreign workers often rely on the PNP to transition to permanent residence (Hou and Picot 2016; Lu and Hou 2017). Since the early 2010s, the PNPs have evolved, and now place an emphasis on human capital criteria similar to that of the FSWP (IRCC 2017).
Previous studies show that immigrants who were selected through the PNP and CEC tended to have better initial labour market outcomes relative to other economic immigrants (Hou and Picot 2016; Lu and Hou 2020; Pandey and Townsend 2013). One possible explanation for the variation in economic outcomes across admission programs is their different use of the two-step selection approach. Virtually all CEC immigrants are skilled temporary foreign workers, because at least one year of skilled Canadian work experience is required for this program. Starting from the mid-2000s, the PNP has selected relatively much more immigrants from temporary foreign workers than the FSWP and QSWP (Hou, Crossman and Picot 2020a). Since immigrants who were former temporary foreign workers have higher employment rates and earnings than immigrants who were admitted directly from abroad (Hou and Bonikowska 2018; Hou and Picot 2016; Sweetman and Warman 2014), an admission program with a higher share of former temporary foreign workers would have better average labour market outcomes. Differences in human capital and source region composition could also result in different outcomes across admission programs.
Findings
Over the 2009 to 2016 period, economic principal applicants selected through both the PNP and CEC programs had higher levels of entry (in the first full year) earnings and higher entry employment incidences than their counterparts selected via the FSWP. Much of this difference (between 43% and 100%) was due to a higher proportion of PNP and CEC immigrants having medium or high levels of pre-immigration Canadian earnings.
Five years after immigration, PNP and CEC immigrants continued to have employment incidences superior to those of FSWP immigrants. Again, these employment rate gaps were mostly accounted for by differences among admission programs in the share with pre-immigration Canadian earnings. When differences in the share with pre-immigration Canadian earnings were taken into consideration, CEC and FSWP immigrants had similar earnings five years after immigration. Put differently, FSWP immigrants would likely approach the success of CEC immigrants if they had the same level of pre-immigration Canadian earnings, even though they went through different selection processes. However, PNP immigrants had significantly lower earnings than FSWP immigrants five years after immigration. One possible explanation is that PNP immigrants may be more likely to be selected into low- or medium skilled jobs that tend to have slow earnings growth. These results support the argument of some previous research that it is not simply having pre-immigration Canadian work experience, but having high-skilled pre-immigration Canadian work experience that is a key indicator for post-immigration superior labour market outcomes (Hou and Picot 1996; Hou and Lu 2017).
Overall, immigrants are found to be healthier upon their arrival to Canada than the Canadian-born population—a phenomenon referred to as the healthy immigrant effect (HIE). However, this initial health advantage seems to disappear over time, partly because of stress and other integration challenges.
This study addresses three research questions:
To answer these questions, the authors also looked at socioeconomic factors and individuals’ sense of belonging.
Background
The Canadian government’s Immigration Levels Plan stipulates that almost 1 million immigrants will be admitted to Canada between 2018 and 2020, and immigrants to Canada will increase from 7.5 million to more than 12 million by 2036 (almost 30% of the Canadian population). Because of the growth in Canada’s immigrant population, it is important to monitor the health—including mental health—of immigrants. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on mental health, this study can provide a baseline for future studies on the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on immigrants’ mental health by immigrant category.
Whether this HIE and its deterioration also apply to mental health is an area of ongoing research. Past mental health research on immigrants in Canada, typically based on a small sample of recent immigrants or refugees from various war-torn parts of the world, found that immigrants in Canada had a mental health disadvantage. By contrast, recent studies based on nationally representative surveys found that immigrants had a mental health advantage over their Canadian-born counterparts in terms of both SRMH and more specific mental health disorders. However, these studies were not as consistent on whether and when immigrants’ mental health advantage dissipates the longer they live in Canada.
An important dimension to examine when studying immigrants’ health is admission category. Because immigrants are selected through admission classes (mainly economic immigrants, family-class immigrants and refugees), each with distinct pre-migration experience and immigrant selection requirements, post-migration mental health outcomes may differ by admission category. Few studies have examined the mental health of immigrants to Canada by admission category compared with the Canadian-born reference group. One key barrier to studying immigrant health by admission category is the lack of sizable datasets that include detailed immigration-related variables. Exceptions include provincial studies that link immigrant records from recent landing files to provincial health records, such as hospital and laboratory records for Ontario.
Typically, these studies do not have a well-defined Canadian-born comparison group, as the non-links in these record linkage projects include both Canadian-born individuals and more established immigrants. Furthermore, a study based on the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC) found that refugees had a greater mental health risk than other immigrant subgroups. However, the LSIC did not provide a Canadian-born reference group for comparison.
Linking the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) to the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) provides opportunities to study the SRMH outcomes of immigrants across admission categories at the national level with a well-defined Canadian-born reference population. This study, based on the linked CCHS–IMDB database, fills an information gap by examining the SRMH of immigrant and Canadian-born survey respondents, controlling for confounding factors. In addition, the mental health of immigrants was examined by three immigration-related dimensions—admission category, source world region and duration since landing. It is important to look at duration since landing to evaluate whether the perceived mental health advantage changes over time. Source world region is important because immigrants’ post-migration mental health outcomes are influenced by differences in language, culture, institutions and politics between Canada and their source country.
Findings
This study provides new evidence on immigrants’ mental health. First, there is no significant difference in the unadjusted prevalence of high SRMH between Canadian-born respondents and immigrants overall. When examined by admission category, this finding held true for economic immigrants, but family-class immigrants and refugees were less likely than Canadian-born respondents to have high SRMH. This is consistent with studies that found that economic immigrants tended to have better health outcomes than refugees and—to a lesser extent—family-class immigrants.
Similar proportions of Canadian-born (72%) and immigrant (71%) respondents had high SRMH. Heterogeneity was observed among immigrants across admission categories, compared with Canadian-born respondents. In particular, economic immigrants had high levels of SRMH (72%) similar to their Canadian-born counterparts, but family-class immigrants and refugees were significantly less likely to report high SRMH (69% and 68%, respectively). A higher percentage of recent immigrants had high SRMH (74%), compared with a significantly lower proportion of established immigrants (68%).
The gap in SRMH is significant across immigrants from different source world regions. Across source world regions, significantly fewer immigrants from the Middle East and Western Asia (65%), and East Asia (62%) had high SRMH, while a significantly higher percentage of immigrants from the United States+ (77%) had high SRMH.
Immigrants’ mental health does not improve with time spent in Canada. Recent immigrants have higher unadjusted SRMH than both Canadian-born respondents and established immigrants, reflecting and corroborating evidence of deterioration of the HIE in self-reported health, as well as in mental health outcomes.
What is this research about?
All newcomers, regardless of age, face a compounded variety of barriers, risks and challenges that are exacerbated by their immigrant status. However, newcomer youths face some of these same issues with heightened vulnerability, often with a lower level of visibility or opportunity to reap the benefits bestowed by immigration policies or federally-funded programming.
The Centre for Newcomers (CFN), an immigrant-serving organization that has for more than 30 years been providing services to Calgarian newcomers, has identified several substantial gaps within these parameters. This article explores some of the most pressing gaps in Canadian immigration policy in relation to the following inter-connected and fundamental issues facing newcomer youth in Canada:
The article then contextualises these policy gaps with reference to CFN’s Real Me programme... to provide evidence- and practice-based policy recommendations.
What do you need to know?
According to Statistics Canada, in 2016, close to 2,2 million children under the age of 15, or 37.5% of the total population of children had at least one foreign-born parent. StatsCan projects that children with an immigrant background could represent between 39% and 49% of the total population of children in 2036.
The researchers suggest that "it is imperative for the immigrant youths of today, as well as those of the future, that Canadian politicians and policy makers, as well as other stakeholders, re-centre the needs of both refugee and immigrant youth within their policies and practices."
They also write: "While the scope of data will rely upon Canadian data, and utilise best-practice examples from the Calgary-specific programming of the Centre for Newcomers (CFN), these learnings may be applicable to immigration policies beyond the confines of the Canadian context. That said, the three most fundamental and interconnected gaps that will be developed are the following: protracted and ongoing status issues; educational barriers; and poverty. Each of these barriers falls within the social determinants of health framework, by which marginalised groups, including newcomers, are more likely to be affected by than their Canadian-born counterparts..."
What did the researchers do?
The report is not entirely clear about methodology, but it appears that the researcher reviewed Real Me documentation, reports, and research along with "other youth-related data."
What did the researchers find?
The researcher suggests that this is program that can and should be replicated in other cities: "...while the Real Me programme was created for the specific needs of at-risk immigrant youths in Calgary, its techniques can be tailored to bridge the gaps that immigrant youths in other locales may face, in Canada and abroad. While adopting an IBWI methodology that honours an individual’s cultural background and fosters an interpersonal vision of accountability is no easy task, it can provide a foundation for collaborative programming, practices as well as transformative policies."
When it comes to policy, the author made four broad policy "recommendations towards procedural policy and actionability improvements":
How can you use this research?
It may be of interest and useful for others working with newcomer youth to connect with CFN to learn more about the program and what could be replicated in their city and community.
Policy-makers will find the broad recommendations of interest.
Related research:
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