The Impact of Precarious Legal Status on Immigrants' Economic Outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Immigrants' precarious legal status and exposure to questionable employment practices can negatively affect the economic outcomes of even those immigrants who become permanent residents.Le statut juridique precaire et le fait d'etre expose a des pratiques d'employeurs douteuses peuvent avoir une incidence negative sur la situation economique des immigrants, meme de ceux qui obtiennent la residence permanente.SummaryThe incorporation of immigrants into Canadian economic life is a complex process with longterm consequences for immigrant workers, their families and Canadian society as a whole. This study calls for a reframing of the study of immigrant economic incorporation to pay closer attention to the relationship between migration status, legal status trajectories and employment outcomes, measured by job quality and not just by employment rates and earnings.Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt's conceptual framework redefines the migrant labour force to include permanent and temporary workers. It also recognizes that there are various legal status pathways that lead to migrants' long-term settlement in Canada. The authors use their original Index of Precarious Work to measure economic incorporation in terms of job quality, and they consider migrants' legal status as an explanatory factor. Tracking job quality and changes in legal status over time allows for an analysis of the effects of policy and labour market dynamics on newcomers.The concepts of precarious work and precarious legal status are central to this study. Precarious legal status is the situation of all nonpermanent residents, authorized and unauthorized. Using original data from a sample of 300 Latin American and Caribbean immigrant workers in the Greater Toronto Area, including information on job quality and legal status over time, the authors present findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses. Based on their quantitative analysis, the authors find that initial job quality and legal status upon entry are significant predictors of current job quality. Transitioning from precarious to secure forms of legal status did not protect respondents from remaining in jobs that were significantly more precarious than those of people who entered with the relatively secure status of permanent residence.The qualitative research shows how early precarious legal status can contribute to migrants settling for precarious work and getting stuck in low-paying jobs for a long time, even after a change to secure legal status. The authors' research identifies two broad factors that help explain the long-term effects of precarious status: employer practices that exploit workers' precarious status to erode, violate or evade employment standards; and employees' need to spend time and resources on efforts to adjust their status, which sometimes results in their losing money.The authors conclude by identifying ways of mitigating the effects of precarious status on immigrant economic outcomes and social inequality, including replacing probationary forms of temporary migration with permanent residence, faster transitions to secure legal status and permanent residence, open work permits for temporary migrant workers, improvements in labour market and workplace equity, and broader access to settlement services. They also call for informed public dialogue on the current transformation of the national immigration system, including the increased role of employers in the selection of immigrants.ResumeL'integration des immigrants a la vie economique du Canada est un processus complexe, qui a des consequences a long terme sur les travailleurs immigrants, leurs familles et toute la societe canadienne. Cette etude propose de recadrer l'analyse de cette integration en pretant plus d'attention aux liens entre statut migratoire, evolution du statut juridique et resultats d'emploi, mesures par la qualite du travail et non seulement par le taux d'emploi et les revenus. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".