Canada

Postdoctoral project on temporary labor migration in Canada, starting on 1 February 2027

Canada has a century-long identity as an immigrant country. Long known to be a settler state that turned immigrants into citizens, temporary foreign worker schemes have become a major pillar of the country’s economic policy in the twenty-first century and led to Canada’s classification as Neoliberal Immigration Regime today. Schemes for low-wage workers have expanded most rapidly, but high-skill occupations such as physicians and engineers – with the IT sector experiencing labor shortages, partly due to their own professionals leaving for higher-wage US jobs – account for high percentages of foreigners, too. Those classified as highly-skilled migrants enjoy expedited processing of applications for permanent residence (PR). The low-wage sector of construction, for its part, faces such a pressing labor shortage that the government first introduced and then expanded an exceptional scheme that grants PR to a limited number of out-of-status construction workers. Such policy measures reveal the urgency of the issue, which is aggravated by the country’s very low fertility rate and the retirement of the Baby Boom Generation in the 2010s. Today, (im)migration, among which a growing share is temporary, has become the sole determinant of population change, but its consequences for the labor market and society are poorly understood.