Labour Market Gatekeepers: The Role of Human Resource Management Professionals in Immigrant Labour Market Integration in Alberta, Canada.

Despite new immigrants having higher educational attainment and an immigrant selection policy that admits “the best and the brightest,” one of Canada’s major social policy concerns is the continued deterioration of immigrants’ economic outcomes. This paradox is illustrated by data showing immigrants suffer from higher unemployment, earn less than similarly educated Canadian-born workers, face skill underutilization, and are relegated to the secondary labour market made up of low-wage, unstable jobs, lacking protections such as unemployment benefits. The underutilization of immigrant skills is economically disastrous; it costs the Canadian economy $50 billion yearly. While many studies discuss immigrants' poor labour market integration, offering explanations such as immigrant human capital factors or macroeconomic condition factors, few explore the role of meso-level organizational social actors who decide which immigrants are recruited, shortlisted, and ultimately hired. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by exploring the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals in immigrant labour market integration in Alberta. Using interviews and critical discourse analysis of HRM textbooks and course outlines, I examine HRM professional's decision-making policies, processes, considerations and constraints when evaluating immigrant applications for jobs. The study reveals that immigrants, particularly racialized immigrants, face barriers to employment in the primary labour market because of the professional and institutional logic of strategic human resource management (SHRM). SHRM promoted in HRM professional education recommends that HRM professionals prioritize business objectives over equal treatment, consideration, and fairness in hiring. SHRM enables unequal power relations between hiring managers (team supervisors) and HRM professionals, which enables cultural racism to go unchecked in hiring. SHRM justifies organizational discriminatory and social closure practices as well as enables the denial of immigrant claims for employment. This is based on the perception that immigrants pose administrative burdens and financial risks stemming from the misidentification of immigrants as temporary migrants and possessing human capital and cultural deficiencies. Hiring decision-makers often do not rely on objective assessments like work sampling tests when making hiring decisions. Instead, when evaluating immigrant job applicants, they rely on racial cultural stereotypes and signals of White Canadian cultural competency as the basis for callbacks and selection.