Disposable Qualifications, Disposable Lives: Examining the Labour Market Experiences of Foreign-Educated Racialized Immigrant Women

This qualitative research study examines how the Labour Market Integration (LMI) site constitutes a site of ongoing colonial violence and spirit injury, where race plays a central role in legitimizing the politics of credential recognition, in which Foreign Educated Racialized Immigrant Women (FERIW) are evicted from the category “qualified” in Canada. My analysis draws upon concepts of racial capitalism and structural violence to locate the acts of eviction that FERIW are subjected to within the LMI space in Canada and the consequences and impacts of this eviction. I argue that racialized immigration on the move to Canada represents the human face of Canada’s ongoing nation-building and economic policy agenda. The LMI space reinforces and reproduces the colonial racial hierarchical order in Canada. Based on qualitative interviews with 12 FERIW, I explore how within the LMI space, racialized immigrant women are stripped of their foreign credentials, discursively framed as unqualified and deficient, and repurposed as a source of cheap labour within the political economy. Delegitimization carries severe material and socio-economic consequences. The intersectionality of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and immigrant status results in FERIW becoming “ghettoized” into low-paying, precarious, low-end jobs, and, for many of these women, low income and poverty. This work represents a decolonial work articulated through anti-colonial and feminist anti-racist theory, to present a nuanced historical account of the experiences of gendered racialized immigrant labour within global and local structures that look very similar to the old structures of colonialism.

Accepted: 2024-11-08T16:57:10Z