Durham, NC; London, UK: Duke University Press, 2017. xi, 207 pp. US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6316-3.
This radically subversive, superbly written ethnographic analysis of de-skilling among recent Pakistani female immigrants to Canada highlights some of the unintended contradictions and consequences of Canadian immigration and ethnic minority policies. The central contradiction lies in the points system, which targets highly skilled and educated immigrants, “inviting” them to immigrate to Canada because they are supposedly able to “fit” into Canadian society and its workforce. Except they don’t. First, because even the most qualified, experienced professionals in their country of origin must pass extensive—and very expensive—examinations to qualify to work in Canada as pharmacists, doctors, nurses, accountants, engineers and the like. The bureaucratic maze is itself formidable. This means that even when there are shortages in some occupations, there is no guarantee that immigrants qualified elsewhere are available to fill the vacancies. A second unintended consequence of the point system is that, in actual fact there is no “fit” between educational qualifications and the job market, and particularly so for immigrants wishing to settle in places like Toronto where most Pakistani professionals want to live. The result is that an army of qualified Pakistani women—doctors, pharmacists and the like—work in unskilled jobs in supermarkets and department stores, with little hope of earning enough to pay for the required qualifying courses, and even less time to study. The book provides a sense of the humiliation and hopelessness experienced by the women as the realisation dawns that their chances of finding jobs appropriate to their qualifications recede into the distance.
They don’t easily give up, however. They repeatedly attend courses that are intended to help them find suitable work. This is where contradictions of another progressive Canadian state policy, that of multiculturalism, surface. There is of course a difference in Canada between multicultural policies relating to native Canadian peoples and those targeting ethnic minorities in cities. Historically, both kinds of minorities suffered racism but of a different variety. Amit-Talai and Knowles have shown some of the implicit racism still contained in present-day Canadian multicultural ethnic policies (Vered Amit-Talai and Caroline Knowles, Re-Situating Identities: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture, University of Toronto Press, 1996). In the present book, the author found that courses intended to help highly qualified professional women find jobs operate by promoting a “sanitised sensorium.” Anyone who has ever attended such a course, as I once did, will know that it utilises strict formulas of acceptability—in dress, accent, style, etiquette—that reject absolutely any semblance of cultural difference. The imaginary employer in these courses is thought to seek an idealised female helper who, the instructors stress, should not “smell” of exotic food and certainly should not wear a dangerous veil. Rather than guiding women towards finding jobs in their appropriate professions, the courses assume that such occupations are beyond their reach. So, while the Canadian state or the city of Toronto encourage multicultural festivals displaying ethnic food, colourful dress, and folk dances and songs, these exotica are relegated to enclaved places and times. They are not supposed to intrude into the world of (masculine) work.
Thus far the argument is persuasive, and is backed up with statistics and nicely nuanced descriptions. Ameeriar spent over a year attending courses and interviewing various activists and policy makers. She herself is the Canadian daughter of a de-skilled mother who grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Toronto. But the issue of de-skilling is, of course, not limited to Canada. In Britain, I observed an early generation of educated Pakistani male migrants move into self-employment from dead-end jobs into self-employment in the face of discrimination at work. Most recently, highly experienced and qualified Zimbabwean refugees and asylum seekers working as unskilled caregivers label themselves sardonically “the BBC” (British Bottom Cleaners), conveying their sense of humiliation, as Joann McGregor documents (“‘Joining the BBC’ (British Bottom Cleaners): Zimbabwean Migrants and the UK Care Industry,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33, no. 5 [2007]). What makes the Canadian example exceptional is the anomalous fact that these de-skilled immigrants are notionally welcomed into Canadian society.
Despite the richness of documentation in the book I remained a little sceptical of the author’s conclusions. First, because as I and others have argued elsewhere, multiculturalism is not the same as anti-racism, as she seems to assume. Confronting racism requires a range of different sorts of activism and legislation beyond multiculturalism. Secondly, we know little about the lives of Pakistani professionals who have “made it” in Canada, which does have, in places like Toronto, a long established, thriving Pakistani ethnic community. Focusing exclusively on “problem” cases makes it hard to understand her subjects’ insistence on remaining in Canada despite being unsuccessful, socially downward, or the grounds for their future hopes.
This is in many ways an excellent book: it has a good range of scholarly references on migration, diaspora, Pakistanis, current feminism, and Canadian society. As a provocative study that raises important questions, it makes a salient contribution to the anthropology of new migration from Pakistan to North America.
Pnina Werbner
Keele University, Staffordshire, United Kingdom