In the past decade, Canada has further institutionalized a ‘two-step’ immigrant selection process, whereby more than half of all new permanent residents are selected from a growing number of temporary residents living in Canada. Applying for permanent residence within Canada, however, requires people to demonstrate their “legibility” (i.e., official recognition) to the state as both eligible and admissible as permanent residence, while also contending with the complex and ever-changing laws, regulations, and bureaucratic processes that shape their experience as immigrants with a precarious status in Canada.
To gain a deeper understanding of complex challenges faced by immigrants who seek permanent residence in Canada, we developed an analytical framework (Larios, et al, in press) for exploring the dynamic, unpredictable, and dialectic relationships among state-centric immigration categories, state bureaucracies (e.g., immigration, labor market, education, health care), and immigrants’ informal and formal networks. Through two case studies, we also shed light on the hidden forms of legal and bureaucratic violence experienced by migrants within Canada's two-step immigration system.
To gain a deeper understanding of complex challenges faced by immigrants who seek permanent residence in Canada, we developed an analytical framework (Larios, et al, in press) for exploring the dynamic, unpredictable, and dialectic relationships among state-centric immigration categories, state bureaucracies (e.g., immigration, labor market, education, health care), and immigrants’ informal and formal networks. Through two case studies, we also shed light on the hidden forms of legal and bureaucratic violence experienced by migrants within Canada's two-step immigration system.
For the secondary qualitative analysis, we analyzed 42 qualitative interviews from eight studies. These interviews, conducted between 2010 and 2020, focussed on a range of topics including precarious employment, gender inequality, settlement experiences and pregnancy. In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (Schmidt, et al, in press), we examine the administrative burden that migrants with precarious status encounter in their interactions with state immigration bureaucracies as they try to attain permanent residence through economic programs. Among a subsample of 20 immigrants living in the Ontario, Alberta and Quebec, participants describe the stressful life consequences resulting from confusing and opaque administrative processes, unpredictable wait times, costly application fees, bureaucratic errors, and a lack of accountability. We theorize how such experiences of administrative burden can prolong migrant precarity, exacerbating the legal violence inherent in state immigration categories which deny full social rights to migrants without permanent residence.
As our collaborative research was deeply shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also writing a reflexive methodological paper to discuss the ethical, methodological, and practical challenges of engaging in secondary qualitative data analysis, while also noting the potential for collaborative, “slow scholarship” to foster community resilience among academic researchers.
