Abstract
Sociologists have long studied immigrants’ labor-market incorporation. Given that much recent immigration to North America and Europe coincides with deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and a rise in precarious work, many immigrants struggle to find employment commensurate with pre-migration qualifications. While the challenges and barriers associated with immigrants’ economic incorporation are well researched in the United States, less is known about our Canadian neighbors. Indeed, as a key immigrant receiving society, Canada’s official policies and philosophies of multiculturalism are often touted as an immigrant success story where newcomers are welcomed and actively incorporated into society’s social, civic, and political landscapes.
Furthermore, when juxtaposed with the rampant racial strife and assimilationist philosophies of the United States, Canadian multiculturalism is emblematic of tolerance and acceptance of immigrants’ cultural and ethnic differences. Yet the celebratory narrative of Canada’s immigration story as widely perceived in the United States conceals the ways in which group ascriptions and racialization processes contribute to the unequal social organization of Canadian society. Lalaie Ameeriar’s poignant critique Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora illustrates how Canadian multiculturalism stifles immigrant women’s economic aspirations through a racializing colonial logic—where certain cultural markers of differences are celebrated while, at the same time, immigrant women are encouraged to sanitize foreign sensory markers of Otherness in order to secure employment.
Drawing on rich ethnographic data collected across the city of Toronto, Ameeriar analyzes how Pakistani immigrant women’s efforts to secure employment commensurate with their pre-migration qualifications are hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and a racializing logic among state and civil society actors—where sensory markers of difference (body odor and cultural dress) are essentialized and treated as individualized deficiencies. Accordingly, Ameeriar’s rich ethnographic account describes the obstacles Pakistani immigrant women confront as they navigate racialized and gendered institutional spaces where they are expected to shed their ethnic, religious and cultural traits in order to secure precarious employment. The book’s analytic focus concerns how notions of Otherness are mapped onto the bodies of Pakistani immigrant women. Thus, the cultural mannerisms and dress of Pakistani immigrant women become a site of embodied practice that is embedded in a racialized hierarchy where modernity and mainstream white Canadian culture is projected as superior and antithetical to Pakistani and South Asian culture.
Much of the data collection and analysis revolve around a government-funded employment center that aims to help new immigrants find work. In her depiction of the “Center,” Ameeriar describes the daily confrontations between Pakistani immigrant women seeking employment training and white Canadian women who routinely belittle them by criticizing their cultural dress, mannerisms, and hygiene while discounting their prior work experience and pre-migration qualifications.
Ameeriar’s sanitized sanatorium is the primary conceptual contribution of the book. Ameeriar documents how the messages conveyed in government-funded employment centers and workplace training classrooms tell Pakistani women to remove their foreign sensory traits (e.g., traditional dress, hijabs, body odors) because they may offend prospective employers. By focusing on the cultural sensory traits of Pakistani immigrant women and overlooking their pre-migration employment and educational experiences, Ameeriar argues that the multicultural state’s efforts to prepare immigrant women for labor market incorporation seeks to sanitize their foreign Otherness and prepare them for precarious gendered “care work” that is incommensurate with their qualifications. Thus, the sanitized sanatorium reflects an inherent paradox in Canada’s official policies and philosophies of multiculturalism: select ethnic and cultural differences are celebrated in some contexts and disparaged in others.
After a concise and inviting introduction, the first three chapters describe the bureaucracies, institutions, and policies shaping the Pakistani immigrant women’s economic incorporation into Canada’s multiculturalism project. In Chapter One, Ameeriar explores how bureaucratic entanglements and Otherness as depicted in the bodies of immigrant women collectively contribute to the sustained unemployment or precarious employment of skilled Pakistani immigrant women. Chapter Two examines the gendered nature of “care work” by tracing the ways a government-funded program for training foreign nurses produces docile and deferential workers that are racialized as unskilled and inferior.
Chapter Three offers a persuasive critique of Canadian multiculturalism by effectively showing how Canada’s inclusive and celebratory rhetoric of cultural difference is juxtaposed with concerted efforts to erase sensory markers of difference in the labor market. The final two chapters offer in-depth explorations of the ways Pakistani immigrant women experience both racialization and precarious employment. Chapter Four focuses on acceptable forms of citizenship and belonging within the multicultural state, where Pakistani women are expected to embrace a pan-national South Asian identity. Many of the women interviewed reject the South Asian label and find it yet another way in which the multicultural state seeks to erase their ethnonational and religious identities.
The final chapter examines precarious work as a sensory experience where Pakistani immigrant women struggle to belong. Through a series of life histories, Ameeriar recounts feelings of hope and despair, uncovering a scaffolding of poverty and exclusion in a city and country widely perceived as beacons of immigrant inclusivity.
With respect to the growing sociological literature on immigrant incorporation, many American sociologists will find Ameeriar’s critique and revelations of the paradoxes and contradictions of Canadian multiculturalism counterintuitive and refreshing. Previous comparative research on immigrants in the United States and Canada finds that Canadian multiculturalism policies offer symbolic and material resources to help facilitate immigrant incorporation (Bloemraad 2006). This active involvement from the Canadian state helps explain why immigrants in Canada tend to have higher rates of naturalization and civic engagement than immigrants in the United States (Bloemraad 2006).
Indeed, Canada’s official policies of multiculturalism and celebratory philosophies of tolerance and cultural diversity are often juxtaposed with assimilationist approaches that encourage immigrants to decrease their ethnic and cultural differences by assimilating toward the mainstream. The positive perceptions of Canadian multiculturalism are especially apparent in the contemporary moment because they stand in stark contrast to the nationalist populism and xenophobia engulfing the United States and much of Europe. Indeed, it is the inclusive context of Canadian multiculturalism that makes Ameeriar’s revelations all the more striking.
By seeking to sanitize for labor market integration the same sensory traits that are celebrated in multicultural festivals, Ameeriar elucidates a central contradiction within Canadian multiculturalism. Celebratory discourses of cultural differences, tolerance, and diversity mask the pervasive structural and cultural barriers immigrants encounter as they seek to secure employment and integrate themselves into the Canadian labor market. Thus, despite the stark differences between Canadian multiculturalism’s celebration of difference and the U.S. assimilationist tendencies to discourage group differences, labor market incorporation for Pakistani immigrant women may reflect gendered and racialized processes that converge across the two societies. Ameeriar convincingly presents Canada as a multicultural state operating under a colonial logic that perpetuates systematic ascriptive inequalities.
This uncovering of racializing processes in the experience of Pakistani immigrant women is a useful empirical contribution to sociology. That said, the book is limited theoretically due to its insufficient engagement with sociological literature on the racialization of immigrants. So despite the clear contributions the book makes to our understanding of complexities and inequalities within Canadian multiculturalism, it is not clear how the work challenges or advances existing theories and concepts such as racial formation, segmented assimilation, or racialized incorporation. It is also not clear how the case of Pakistani immigrant women challenges or advances existing understandings of marginalization within Canadian scholarship on race and immigration. Nevertheless, this is an important case study that will be of great interest to sociologists interested in immigration and citizenship, racialization, precarious work, gender, and the South Asian diaspora.