ABSTRACT
Canada has always been an important destination for immigrants, as it demonstrates an open interest in an ethnically diverse population from around the world (Simmons 1990). In fact, the Canadian labour market has always depended on the labour, skills and knowledge that immigrants bring with them to the host country (Lochhead and MacKenzie 2005). However, a problematic aspect of the Canadian labour market is that the needs of this market and the means by which such needs are fulfilled, are often structured around complex race, class and gender lines: Caribbean or Filipino women as domestic workers, Chinese or South Asian women as garment workers (Jamal 1998; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Man, 2000). The relegating economic integration process as well as the systematic deprofessionalization experienced by immigrants of colour in Canada bear evidence to the fact that the presence of a gendered and racialized labour market prevents immigrants of colour from successfully integrating into the mainstream labour market (Basran and Zong 1998, Reitz 2004). In particular, immigrant women of colour, despite possessing high education and work experience (Akbari 1999) make up a large pool of the low wage, low income sectors in Canada (Sassen 1998; Galabuzi 2001; Kunz et. al. 2000; Jackson 2002) and are lumped into jobs that are considered ‘peripheral’ and ‘low status’ to the mainstream labour market. Immigrant minority women usually have lower average earnings (Tastsoglou and Miedema 2000) and experience the highest levels of unemployment and poverty in Canada (Ornstein 2000). Continuous research efforts have been made to uncover the reasons
obstructing the labour market entry of non-white immigrant women. Two distinct themes emerge from the literature as to why these women are recurrently unable to enter high paid, eminent jobs in Canada. First, scholars refer to several individual barriers (PROMPT 2004) such as inability on the part of the individual to meet occupational entry requirements (Ornstein and Sharma 1983) or period of residence in Canada (Basavarajappa and Verma 1985) to explain the under-employment of immigrant women of colour. These individual barriers are often also dependent on certain ‘human capital skills’, such as education, work experience, training etc (Glenn 1986) that an immigrant needs to possess. Together with human capital skills, reference has also been
made to an individual’s potential to capitalize on ‘social capital’ (Coleman 1988), such as resources like family, friends, community etc. To sum up, immigrant women’s under-employment in the host country has been explained as lack of possession of either human capital or social capital skills. Second, many scholars argue that the lack of the above-mentioned skills are
not as important as the institutional and structural barriers prevalent in Canada, commonly known as system-level barriers (PROMPT 2004) that immigrants deal with in getting employment in spite of possessing excellent education, experience and skills (Salaff and Greve 2003, 2004). One of the major system-level barriers is the devaluation of credentials and experience that immigrant women, particularly professional immigrant women of colour, face in Canada, that pose difficulties in terms of entering the Canadian labour market (Tastsoglou and Miedema 2000). As Boyd (1985, 2000) argues, the Canadian-born receive a greater return for their education and experience compared to the foreign-born because of the difficulties of ‘transferring educational skill across national boundaries’ (Boyd 1985: 405). Credentialism has also been discussed in literature as a means of monitoring entrance to mainstream labour markets. Jackson (2002) shows that visible minority immigrants experience ‘high rates of unemployment and high levels of under-employment in low-wage jobs which often do not match their skills and formal credentials’ (Jackson 2002: 2). Accent discrimination, is another frequently mentioned system-level obstacle. According to Boyd (1990), the knowledge of one of Canada’s official languages has a direct relevance to foreign-born women’s ability to obtain employment in Canada. This is particularly pronounced in the case of women coming from non-English speaking countries (Basavarajappa and Verma 1990; Boyd 1990; Jeea 2000). These barriers are part of the systemic forms of discrimination or racism based on the assumed ethnic ‘inferiority’ of certain ‘foreign-born’ women and the assumed ‘inferior’ quality of educational systems in their country of origin. These different forms of ‘social closure’ and gate-keeping hinder the employment and social mobility of immigrant women in Canada (Tastsoglou and Miedema 2000) and often provide the context of the ‘choice’ for immigrant women of colour to settle for some non-secure, poorly paid, low-tier, flexible employment (Tastsoglou and Miedema 2000; Maitra and Shan 2007) resulting in significant wastage of human resources in the present knowledge economy. Given the kind of closure experienced, there has been an increasing interest
in studying how minority women use entrepreneurship to facilitate their economic mobility and labour market integration (Chan 2005). Studies on ethnic economy, ethnic enclave and ethnic entrepreneurship argue that, in the face of the disadvantages endured by immigrant women of colour in the host country, many women take up business endeavours to advance their careers instead of working in low-paid, part-time, devalued feminized sectors of the labour market (Light and Bonacich 1988; Light et al. 1993; Portes and Bach 1985; Wilson and Portes 1980; Zhou and Logan 1989; Dallalfar 1994). In particular, scholars have noted the role played by the ‘double yolk’ of racism
and sexism in motivating immigrant women to start their own business (Smith 2000; Phizaclea and Ram 1995; Dhaliwal 1998). On the other side, non-white women’s involvement in entrepreneurship is also demeaned as a mere extension of domestic work, and a source of cheap, unpaid female labour to family enterprises (Dallalfar 1994). What remains under-studied is how immigrant women of colour negotiate between family, racism, sexism and economic life in their everyday lives and learn to use various resources to start their own business. Based on James Scott’s conceptualization of ‘everyday forms of resistance’,
this paper explores how immigrant women of colour cope with the gendered and racialized barriers in their labour market integration processes, through the social practice of ‘informal learning’. By looking at the experiences of South Asian immigrant women entrepreneurs working from home, the paper further argues that these women are involved in a constant process of negotiation and learning to develop knowledge, skills and attitudes to not only survive in a very discriminating and precarious labour market but also to create their own niche as entrepreneurs in the Canadian economy.
