"Thou land of hope for all who toil"? The effects of social resources on job search and job outcome of skilled immigrants in Toronto (Ontario)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to the expectations of assimilation theory, job contacts used by respondents even for the job at the time of survey remained predominantly co-ethnic. Moreover, with time, there was increasing participation in the ethnic-related economy. Nevertheless, the use of co-ethnic ties led more often to jobs in the mainstream---usually good jobs with high occupational status. But jobs in the ethnic economy at the time of survey, while slightly inferior to mainstream economy jobs, were mainly good jobs, thanks to the almost institutionally complete Chinese ethnic economy in Toronto which provided opportunities in many professions. Distinction between mainstream and ethnic economy jobs was not significant. Previous research indicated that social resources significantly affected job search outcome for the general population. This study tests whether this also holds true for skilled immigrants. Based on a survey and in-depth interviews of university graduates from Hong Kong in Toronto, it finds that social resources were also key to their job search. While these skilled immigrants lacked social resources immediately after settlement, with time, they established ties, especially Canadian work ties. These ties were instrumental in their obtaining jobs that were of higher occupational status and better matches for their skills and work experience. Their job search pattern grew to resemble mid-career job changes among professionals and managers. Evidence points to social resources, especially in the form of contact status reached, acting as an intervening variable between the human capital endowment of the immigrant and his/her job search outcome. The lack of social resources could be an important but rarely explored explanation for the widespread occupational status dislocation and income disparity experienced by immigrants. The study also found that job search outcome was significantly related to the type of occupation held by the respondent, which also impacted on the method of job search. Confirming previous findings, immigrants found accessing managerial jobs and jobs in other people- and service-oriented occupations most difficult. Because these occupations required linguistic and cultural sensitivity, skills were less portable internationally. Immigrants need personal intermediaries to find such jobs precisely because such skills were not evident in their credentials.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".