Immigrant Professionals in the Ontario Settlement Service Sector
Carleton University Adjunct Research Professor Adnan Türegün has published study on the reality of foreign-born and -trained professionals in Ontario who did not get to practise their respective professions after immigration, but acquired a new profession in the form of settlement work.
The study identifies their pre-immigration education and work history, the reasons they left their countries of origin and sought permanent residence in Canada, the expectations they had, the choices they made about pursuing professional practice, the efforts they put towards that or some alternative goal, and their eventual professional reconstitution as settlement workers.
Following the Canadian trajectory of these dual professionals offers three contributions to research into immigrant access to professions. First, their individual experiences reveal the social processes of inclusion in, and exclusion from, professional practice in Canada. Second, unlike immigrants who are de-professionalized in the post-immigration period, members of our target population have reinvented themselves as practitioners of a new profession and thus provide a more nuanced view of immigrant experience. Third, their common practice as settlement workers gives us insight into the dynamics of the emerging profession that is settlement work. The full paper is available here.