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Do immigrants receive a warmer welcome in Canada than in other countries? Jeffrey Reitz has spent the better part of his career searching for answers to this question. A professor of sociology and the R.F. Harney Professor of Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies, Reitz’s interests have taken him down many paths, but lately his focus has been on the employment success of recent immigrants.

When he came to Canada from the United States in the early 1970s, Reitz was intrigued by the perceived differences in the two countries concerning immigration and race relations issues. “What really drove my interest was the emerging race relations scene in Canada, and the question of whether race relations was really going to be any different here, as everyone was claiming and assuming it would be.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada’s immigrant populations were excelling in the job market compared to their counterparts in the U.S. After conducting several cross-national studies, however, Reitz concluded that what was distinctive about Canada in terms of our early success on the immigration front wasn’t what people thought it was.

“It wasn’t because we were more tolerant, nor was it that we had a more selective immigration program,” says Reitz. “It was really a kind of historical anomaly because, at the time, our post-secondary education system lagged behind the U.S.” Canada wasn’t producing as many highly-educated, native-born Canadians, Reitz explains, so we needed skilled and educated immigrants to fill professional jobs. “Now, of course, given that the majority of native-born Canadians complete some type of post-secondary education, recent immigrants are having a much tougher time on the job market than they had in the past.”

The waning employment success of recent immigrants has resulted in a mass of highly-educated people working as cab drivers and restaurant workers. This “brain waste,” says Reitz, costs Canada dearly. In a recent study conducted for the federal government, Reitz concluded that the Canadian economy is losing an astonishing $15 billion annually due to immigrants being underutilized and underpaid.

Reitz’s work is unique in its focus. While most of the current literature focuses on the characteristics of immigrants themselves as the key determinant of how successful they are, Reitz looks at how society and social institutions – such as the education system, the social welfare system and the labour market structure – determine what happens. “It’s not necessarily something we can control, but we can certainly look at how social and institutional changes are affecting the constraints on our immigrant program and adjust to them.”

As director of the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies, located within the Munk Centre for International Studies, Reitz is responsible for the graduate collaborative program in ethnic and pluralism studies.

In that role, he is eager to build on this field of research by fostering interdisciplinary work among graduate students who are specializing in a variety of areas such as geography, political science, industrial relations, history, law, religion, nursing and social work. “The real impact of the program is to bring students together and create other kinds of activities – like seminars and conferences – that support their work.”

Reitz is passionate about the importance of this kind of scholarship, which
he says is still in its infancy. “It seems to me that in a city like Toronto and on a
campus where the student population is as diverse as it is, this aspect of our curriculum definitely needs to be highlighted and developed.”

Usha George is an ideal expert on the settlement of newcomers in Canada. Originally from India, George lived in the United States and then Nigeria before immigrating to Canada in 1991 in order to “give our children a better future.”

George used her PhD in sociology to carve out a career in social work – first at South Asian Family Support Services and then at the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto – before joining U of T’s Faculty of Social Work in 1994.

Since then, her research – which focuses on diversity, particularly as it relates to social work in diverse populations – has included analyses of settlement services and immigrant women’s healthcare.

In the process, George and her colleagues have proven to be a valuable resource for Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), which regularly uses her expertise to better understand immigrant populations.

One project, for example, involved conducting needs assessments of newcomers from the 10 countries that represent the majority of immigrants in Canada. “We found that newcomers didn’t know about the services available to them, and even when they did know, they hardly ever accessed them,” says George, now associate dean of social work.

So she and her team conducted a series of focus groups from several communities – including African, Yugoslavian and Afghan groups – to create better models for delivering services like language training, housing and job searches, and general orientation to Canada. “We also recommended some additional levels of service to address the specific needs of highly-educated immigrants as well as the needs of those coming from war-affected countries.”

CIC has implemented many of George’s recommendations, a particularly successful example of which is the placement of trained settlement workers in Toronto schools. “School is the first port of call for many newcomer parents,” says George. “So settlement workers act as bridges between the parents and the educational system, and then they also give advice about other settlement issues.”

The success of this new model has led CIC to place settlement workers in schools in Peel, York, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton and Ottawa, and George has been charged with the task of evaluating all of these sites.

George also serves as director of the Anti-Racism, Multi-Culturalism and Native Issues Centre at the Faculty of Social Work, a role in which she spearheaded another huge initiative: the development of cultural profiles for over 100 countries.

“Citizenship and Immigration Canada has a program that matches newcomers with established Canadians to better orient them to Canadian society,” explains George. Since the “hosts” don’t often hail from the same country as the newcomers, cultural profiles help them better understand the backgrounds – and therefore the needs – of the newcomers they are orienting.

But the profiles that George’s team developed – which summarize a country’s history, education, family life, spirituality and so on – have had a much broader impact. “We get requests for the booklets from all sorts of places where multicultural populations are being served,” says George. “Places like schools, colleges, libraries, hospitals, seniors centres, long-term care centres, police stations and courts.”

As a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT), an African-Canadian and – perhaps most importantly – the father of a 15-year-old son, George Dei has a keen interest in minority education.

“I have an obligation, like everyone else, to work as part of a collective to make schools very inclusive for all kids.” To that end, Dei has launched several research projects to explore the strengths and weaknesses in Ontario schools in terms of racial and cultural inclusion.

His first study explored “student disengagement,” focusing on why high school students – particularly African-Canadian teens – are dissatisfied with school and, in many cases, dropping out.

The three-year project involved interviewing both black students and drop-outs, as well as teachers, administrators, parents, caregivers, community groups and a sample of non-black students to cross-reference black youths’ experiences.

Dei and his team found that many of the issues that have historically been identified as problematic were recurring themes in the study – including lack of diversity among teachers, differential treatment, labelling, stigmatization and low teacher expectations, for example. There were also questions and struggles with cultural identity.

“We need to look critically at the structures for teaching, learning and the administration of education to see how they contribute to the problem of disengagement,” says Dei.
Following on that study, Dei and his team of OISE/UT graduate students began to explore exemplary practices of inclusive schooling. They identified several best practices for inclusive schooling, including: the diversity of teachers’ backgrounds, the promotion of learning through multiple languages, the active role of parents and the community, the integration of different cultural bodies of knowledge into the curriculum, and proactive approaches to addressing race and anti-racism issues.

Results of the study were published in a book, Removing the Margins: The Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusive Schooling and in a companion guide for teachers. “You cannot prepare an educator for today’s society without dealing with these issues,” insists Dei. “Those who don’t have a basic understanding of these issues are not well-equipped teachers.”

Dei’s work has garnered international recognition and was most recently celebrated last fall when he received the Race, Gender and Class Project Academic Award – whose past recipients include renowned U.S. civil rights activist Angela Davis – at the 4th annual Race, Gender and Class conference in New Orleans.

Dei’s latest study, which is just getting underway, involves exploring the issue of student excellence. “We’re looking at the personal education histories of minority and non-minority students who were able to achieve excellence in order to learn from those successful cases.”

Dei’s academic work both evolved out of and informs his participation in community groups such as the Organization of Parents of Black Children and the Ghanaian-Canadian Association of Ontario. “For minority parents in Ontario, the question of education is
foremost in our minds,” he observes.

Scot Wortley found himself at the centre of a very heated political debate in Toronto this past year. An expert on racial profiling, Wortley is both sought after by the federal government for his expertise in survey research and criticized by some members of the Toronto police service for contributing to racial tensions between police and the black community.

It all started in 1993, when Wortley, still a PhD student, was asked to work with the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System. “At the time there was a lot of controversy,” he recalls. “You had community groups making charges of racial bias and criminal justice representatives denying that this bias existed.”

Working with a group of researchers, Wortley interviewed a random sample of 400 black, 400 Asian and 400 white respondents from the Toronto area to investigate attitudes about and experiences with the criminal justice system.

He discovered that a dramatically higher percentage of black males had been stopped and searched by police over a two-year period, compared to white and Asian males.

“We also found that two things that protect white males from police contact, social class and age – the older you are and the higher your income, the less police contact you have – did not protect black males,” notes Wortley.

The study was not well received by police. “They said that the results simply weren’t true, that they didn’t practice racial profiling, and that there must be other reasons for the police stops,” says Wortley.

A common argument, he says, is that police have “street experience” that gives them an ability to distinguish between criminals and law-abiding citizens.

But Wortley’s recent work calls this theory into question. With U of T sociologist Julian Tanner, he surveyed over 4,000 Toronto youth regarding their attitudes about and contact with the criminal justice system.

Not only did this study confirm the findings in the earlier research, it revealed that racial differences in police contact were even higher among the “good” kids – those who had never engaged in criminal behaviour. “Over 50% of the black kids in the ‘good’ category had been stopped and searched by police in the past two years compared to only about 8% of the white kids in the same category,” says Wortley.

“Even when we eliminated all the elements that might contribute to being stopped by police – things like routine activities (hanging out in parks at night), gang involvement, drug and alcohol use and criminal activity – the race effect not only still existed but it doubled.”

So, neither age nor class nor good behaviour protect black people from much higher rates of police contact, Wortley concludes. “If you’re black, the colour of your skin is going to mean, in this city right now, that you’re going to be considered one of the usual suspects.”

Ayelet Shachar is exploring a decidedly more theoretical issue, but one that may soon help shape public policy in countries around the world.

“In the past decade, there has been an explosion in the legal literature arguing for greater accommodation of minority communities like Aboriginal people, religious minorities and ethnic minorities,” observes Shachar. “The basic argument is that the state should give more power to these communities to control various issues affecting their members – issues like education, linguistic policy, marriage and divorce, custody and adoption, and so on.”

While Shachar is supportive of empowering minority groups, she is also concerned about protecting women’s rights in traditionally male-dominated communities.

To explore the issue further, she launched an extensive review of legislation, case law and public policy in countries around the world. Then she started thinking creatively about ways to both respect deep cultural differences and protect the hard-won citizenship rights of vulnerable group members, particularly women.

“Striking a balance between maintaining cultural tradition and ensuring that women in minority groups enjoy rights similar to other citizens is not only theoretically needed, but also institutionally feasible,” she says.

Shachar’s innovative approach – which she applies to family law, immigration policy and criminal justice – envisions a legislative framework within which the state controls some legal issues while minority groups control others. “This new ‘joint governance’ approach reflects the need to reduce injustice between minority groups and the wider society, while simultaneously enhancing justice within them,” explains Shachar.

Shachar’s book on the subject – Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights – won the prestigious Best First Book Award, given by the American Political Science Association in 2002. The book is also permeating legal circles internationally, and is already being taught in many law schools around the world.
Educated in Israel (Tel-Aviv University) and the United States (Yale University), and now working in Canada, Shachar has had a first-hand view of three different legal systems. Cross-referencing the Israeli, American, and Canadian legal systems, she says, had a powerful influence on her work. “Israel informed my defining of the problems, and Canada and the United States informed my solutions.”

In terms of actual application, Shachar is hopeful that her work will shape public policy and perhaps even legislation down the road. Several initial steps in this direction have been taken in Canada, Israel, Germany, India, South Africa, England, and the United States. “My work draws from practices and enriches the theory, but it’s hard to evaluate how it will influence the world. Someone has to like the idea within a specific legal system and then try to implement it.”