Search Results (8)

As global migration continues to expand, the diversity of migrant populations increases. This includes a growing number of highly educated individuals from lower-income countries who face significant economic and mental health challenges in attempting to integrate into new communities. Despite extensive education and experience, their expertise is often unrecognized, with many resorting to unskilled labor alternatives. While substantial research exists on the immigration experiences of physicians and nurses, little is known about other professionals, such as dentists. This case study seeks to gain an in-depth understanding of the post-migration experiences of Iranian-trained dentists in Canada, identifying barriers and facilitators to their successful integration. Using a qualitative approach, this study is based on eleven interviews with dentists trained in Iran who recently immigrated to Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom in English. A thematic analysis was performed using the 2021 Dedoose software program. Barriers to successful integration were categorized into two main themes: “socio-cultural” and “institutional” impediments. The findings show that participants faced significant challenges integrating into Canadian society. Beyond the many socio-cultural obstacles, the negative economic and mental health impacts of attempting to navigate the credential recognition system were substantial, largely due to what appears to be a systematic and institutionalized bias against foreign-trained individuals built into the credentialing system. As a result, their skills often remain underutilized, benefiting neither themselves nor their new country. Findings will inform policy and practice and propose practical recommendations that include reducing institutional barriers for credential assessment, providing mental health support, and offering financial support during assessment of international education. Full article

Agricultural employment in advanced economies has been suggestively described as a “short and step” pyramid with only limited opportunities for workers to climb to higher positions, especially when they belong to the most vulnerable categories, such as migrants. The presence of poor jobs and living conditions for temporary agricultural workers reported by mass media, trade unions, NGOs, and international observers contrasts dramatically with the idea of a modern and thriving sector, as the Italian agricultural sector should be, and it represents a challenge for the social concerns that have been alongside environmental ones in the definition of sustainability since the Brundtland Report released in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). Even mechanisation does not necessarily facilitate better working conditions. In fact, where the workforce is largely replaced by machineries, the remaining opportunities for paid workers are mainly for unskilled, physically demanding, and seasonal jobs. This has brought about the so-called “paradox of prosperity”, where the gap between farm and nonfarm workers in economically advanced countries has widened in terms of wages, benefits, and prospects for upward mobility. This in turn triggers a vicious circle with a structural lack of available workforce for the sector, which has been increasingly provided by migrants with very little bargaining power. On the other hand, the adoption of new technologies and digitalisation in agriculture is leading to an increasing demand for skilled workers, which often remains uncovered because of the low conditions offered. Against this background, the aim of our work is twofold. First, we characterise the role of the foreign workforce in relation to the structural changes in Italian agriculture and considering territorial differences. Second, we examine the main policy instruments to facilitate recruitment and tackle undeclared work and more specifically the Quality Agricultural Work Network (Rete del lavoro agricolo di qualità) launched in Italy in 2016 to tackle undeclared work and exploitative labour. We do so by conducting a literature review and semi-structured qualitative interviews with 16 farmers in Italy carried out in 2022 within the project Rural Social ACT funded by the Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund (2021–2027). The results show that even though foreign workers are a key resource for agriculture in Italy, there remain severe recruitment issues and segregation in low-skilled and precarious jobs. Overall, it is necessary to improve the awareness of the key role of work in agriculture and to strengthen the effectiveness of tools to enhance the visibility of compliant farms. So far (January 2024), only 6600 farms have joined the Quality Agricultural Work Network, with an overall modest enthusiasm from the farmers interviewed about its current effectiveness. Other instruments are explored such as employee sharing contracts, and there clearly emerges a need for public support of professional training through the Common Agricultural Policy to improve both the bargaining power of foreign workers and the productivity of the sector. Full article

Itinerant Roma migrants travelling from Eastern European countries have featured across the European Economic Area (EEA) since the European Union’s eastward expansions in 2004 and 2007. Being unskilled, many Roma migrants engage in casual work and street work such as playing music, selling magazines, collecting and recycling bottles and cans, and begging, making them conspicuously visible in countries with public welfare services and low poverty levels. Citizens of EEA countries can enter and stay legally in other countries in the EEA for up to three months, after which they must register as workers or jobseekers, and generally leave. It is well documented how the countries Roma citizens of EEA countries travel to have enacted migration control measures, often in the form of complex and fine-grained regulations, that exclude them from public welfare services. This is also true of the Nordic countries, such as Norway, where they coincide with universalistic welfare states aiming to cover everyone living in their territories with the same benefits and services. In the Nordic countries, as in other countries, service provision for Roma migrants is largely in the hands of non-governmental organisations, many of them diaconal organisations running emergency shelters, soup kitchens, and other humanitarian services to alleviate suffering for people at the margins of the welfare state. The diaconal organisations also engage in case work and advocacy work to ensure the realisation of the Roma migrants’ rights. Many of the organisations depend on public grants, making their relationship to the welfare state ambiguous. This article investigates Christian social practice in the form of diaconal engagement for Roma migrants in Oslo, Norway at the intersection of migration control, the universalistic welfare state, and the theological underpinnings of the organisations. Full article

This study examines the effect of remittances on selected recipient countries’ financial development. Using weights for bilateral remittances from 1990 to 2015, this study calculates the weighted gross national income per capita of remittance-sending countries. This study then uses the weighted gross national income as an instrument to address the endogeneity between remittance and financial development. Using the instrument variable (IV) model, this study finds that remittances from low-skilled migrant-abundant sending countries have different effects than the highly skilled labor-abundant sending countries. Assuming the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as a source of low-skilled and the Group of Seven (G7) as the source of high-skilled labor-abundant sending countries, remittance from relatively low-skilled emigrants has a greater impact on financial inclusion in the recipient countries than their high-skilled counterparts. In contrast, remittance from high-skilled countries has a greater impact on the development of the stock market. Similar types of effects of remittance on financial development have also been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that policymakers should provide better foreign employment opportunities and improved transaction and investment policies in the home financial markets. Full article

Occupational illnesses, such as cancer, cause more deaths each year than occupational accidents. Occupational carcinogens include physical, chemical, biological and organizational hazards. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), migrant workers account for 80% of labor. Being sometimes employed as unskilled workers and more willing to work in demanding jobs, their vulnerability and exposure may be increased. This study aimed to estimate the prevalence of occupational exposure to workplace carcinogens among migrant workers in the UAE. A sample of employees working in construction, cleaning, dry cleaning, mechanic workshops and hair salons were recruited and interviewed. Using OccIDEAS (an online assessment tool), participants were asked questions about their demographics, work history and regular tasks. Exposure to various carcinogens was estimated using the in-built algorithms of OccIDEAS. A sample of 1778 workers was included. The sample consisted of workers from Bangladesh (19.2%), India (31%), Nepal (4.7%), Pakistan (29.9%) and the Philippines (4.8%), with the rest from other nationalities. Overall, the prevalence of probable exposure was considerable, with the highest among drivers (96%) and the lowest among laundry workers (52%). Moderate to high exposure was found to 20 different carcinogens. Self-rated health among those who were exposed to carcinogens was significantly lower than among those not exposed (AOR = 0.783, 95% CI [0.638–0.961]). Exposure to several different carcinogens is relatively common in the UAE among migrant workers. Further strengthening policies and the implementation of tailored interventions are needed to prevent exposure to occupational carcinogens and, consequently, to combat occupational cancer in the UAE. Full article

Since 2008, thousands of young Galician graduates have left their country looking for the job opportunities they cannot find at home, with the UK (particularly London) as their main destination. A noticeable feature of this movement is the increase of women migrants, who have sometimes occupied unskilled, low-paid jobs despite their university qualifications. Starting in the second decade of the 21st century, a corpus of narrative texts written by Galician women authors (Alba Lago, Anna R. Figueiredo, María Alonso, and Eva Moreda) has given visibility to these experiences. Lago’s, Figueiredo’s, and Alonso’s characters express anger and frustration as a way of denouncing the precariousness of their situation and the material conditions that led to their departure from Galicia. Combining different theoretical approaches from migration studies (Morokvasic; Nail; Kędra), criticism of global neoliberalism (Bourdieu; Bauman; Sassen), and affect theory (Ahmed), I propose an analytical framework for reading these texts as expression of a “poetics of expulsion” with four thematic axes: expulsion, exploitation, (dis)connection, and repossession. I finish by considering Moreda’s novel as illustrative of a different view of migration, focusing on the migrant’s agency and on migration as a personal choice (Silvey and Lawson). Full article

Migrant workers commonly face many health disparities when they relocate to a foreign work environment. Many workers migrating to Thailand are young unskilled workers from Myanmar. In this study, we examine factors associated with Myanmar migrant workers’ smoking status and characterized smoking-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in one seafood factory in Thailand. This descriptive study utilized person-to-person interviews among 300 Myanmar migrants in one seafood factory in Thailand, of which 94.3% were young males between 18 and 39 years of age. Results demonstrated that 90% were current daily smokers, over 90% smoked 30–60 times per month, and 95% spent less than 500 baht (US $16) per month on smoking. About 70% of current smokers had 6–10 friends who smoked, compared with 40% of non-smokers (chi-square, p-value ≤ 0.07). Among this sample of mainly male migrant workers, smoking is very common, in part driven through social contact, but levels of dependence appear relatively low. The results suggest potential intervention approaches to reduce high smoking prevalence among this population, such as targeting young males and addressing their concerns about negative attitudes by peers to tobacco use and the unhealthful exposures of women and children in their families and the larger community. Full article

Rental housing unaffordability has been widely used to assess the housing poverty problem among immigrants in the developed and developing countries. China is experiencing an unprecedented urbanization process, with two-thirds of its 250 million migrants now being sheltered in private rental housing in the host cities. In this paper, we aimed to examine the rental housing unaffordability problems faced by migrant workers in urban China and provide policy recommendations for a more accessible and affordable migrant housing provision system. We used the household data on China’s Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey (MDMS), released in 2016, across China’s 329 prefecture-level cities and above to look into the sociality and spatiality of migrant rent expenses and rent-income ratio at the prefecture-level cities and above. The statistical tests were conducted to examine the socio- and spatial-variance of these rent stress indexes, and it was found that educational level is a significant and quite powerful indicator in predicting who will or will not assume the heavier rental housing pressure. We then continued to reveal the different spatiality of high-rent-stress migrants across the high- and low-skilled categories. An agglomeration of the high-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was witnessed in the coastal growth engines of urban clusters, while a more spillover-like pattern among the low-skilled high-rent-stress migrants was reported in our study. An ordinary least square and spatial regression analysis was conducted to explain their respective mechanisms. Full article