Book: Calculated Kindness: Global Restructuring, Immigration and Settlement in Canada

Edited by Rose Baaba Folson

Published by Fernwood Publishing

price: $19.95 Calculated Kindness is a progressive collection of essays by various authors addressing the overlapping themes of globalization, immigration and settlement in Canada. Though there are various approaches and focuses within the collection, there are also a number of common themes. Since it is difficult to thoroughly review a nine-essay book, I will only address a few of the pieces as well as discuss some of the themes that run through the edition.

One of the most valuable things about this collection is how it grapples with the issue of migration from a systemic perspective while at the same time having a detailed, on-the-ground, agency-based description and analysis of the lives and experiences of immigrants and migrants. To do this in a consistently integrated way - both in terms of race, gender and class and also in terms of those two systemic and experiential levels of analysis - is quite a challenge, with any topic.

Challenging Ideologies of Migration

The first article "Representation of the Immigrant" by the book's editor, Rose Baaba Folson, sets a detailed theoretical stage for the rest of the collection. She reviews the history and varied reasons for migration, for both the migrants and the nation-states that benefit from their arrival. She also briefly sketches out the three common theories of migration of the last few decades. These are neo-classical economic equilibrium theory, the historical-structuralist approach and migration systems theory. Neo-classical economic equilibrium theory is considered a de-politicized, narrowly-economic, "push-pull" approach to understanding migration. The historical-structuralist approach is described as having its roots in (a conventional) Marxism. Migration systems theory is said to have been developed in the 1980s as a result of dissatisfaction with the other two theories and focuses on the colonial-based prior linkages between nation-states to more fully explain migration patterns.

Baaba Folson's contribution also describes and challenges some of the common oppressive ideologies and realities about migration, such as the very connotations - both good and bad - that society has of the "migrant". She points out how travel from South to North for work often leads to underemployment, for example doctors driving taxis, whereas migration from North to South is constructed as experts/consultants going to "fix problems". Baaba Folson criticizes the image the Canadian State fosters of itself as a benevolent host country helping the unfortunate people from the third world make a better life, in a context where people and their future families can structurally become "permanent (im)migrants".

Magaly San Martin's piece "Unwanted in Paradise: Undocumented Migrant Women Sex Workers in Toronto" offers a well-integrated look at the often abusive experiences of such migrant workers. She communicates clearly the absurdity and injustice of how, while Canadian immigration regularly issues "exotic dancer" (sex trade worker) visas, the same State is not only unsympathetic to the women who are frequently and often brutally abused (physically, sexually and economically) once they arrive; it may treat them as criminals for doing the very work they were legally brought in to perform. Because sex-trade work is subjected to such a heavy moral judgement, so too are the women who are employed in it. Because they are not deemed productive or in any other way valued members of society, they are also constructed as not deserving social support.

The context for the blossoming of a wide range of precarious migrant work is also clearly defined in San Martin's article. With globalization, "global cities" such as Toronto are places where a growing group of well-paid professionals, a minority in the population as a whole, are a growing market for a wide range of specialty services that depend on low-waged, precarious jobs for their expansion. Such services include fancy restaurants, cafes, and art shops, health-product stores and so on. Most of the low-paid work is therefore that of cashiers, dishwashers, salespeople and servers. Again, the themes of the benevolence of the Canadian State and the forms of racialized sexism migrant women face, are brought home in this piece.

In her contribution "Shifting the Paradigm: Globalization, Canadian Aid and the Migration Trail", Nupur Gogia provides a detailed analysis of the role of Northern non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in supporting and developing Canadian business interests abroad in the era of globalization. Intricately connected with this is the theme of how "migrants" are those that come from the South to the North, while it is "experts" that go in the other direction to teach, help and build their careers. Gogia looks at the implicitly paternalistic assumptions of who has the right to leadership in not only "fixing problems", but defining who, what and where the problem is; and in whose interest these assumptions are generated and maintained.

The last piece by Alireza Asgharzadeh entitled "Islamic Fundamentalism, Globalization and Migration: New Challenges in Canada" is another useful contribution to the overall discussion. He not only looks in detail at the problematic of fundamentalist ideologies - using Iran as a detailed case in point - but he also looks at how the Arab or Muslim migrant is socially constructed in the West, becoming essentialized and socially marginalized. As such, both imperialism and religious fundamentalism perform a similar homogenizing function, mobilizing and misusing ideas about what is "culture" and "religion" in the name of power and social control.

As an example of this "homogenizing function", I would point to the manner in which both imperialist and religious fundamentalist ideologies often use culture and religion synonymously, such as when describing Iran as a Muslim "culture". Any sense of individuality, any diversity in human perspective and experience is lost in this now fairly common notion. One would think that all Iranian women are Muslim just because they are swathed in chadors, that all Muslim-Iranian women themselves share the same religious and therefore same social values, and that none of these women have the right or even the will to exercise their agency beyond some narrow idea others have about what is their religion/culture. Such homogenizing also draws attention away from the sources of power and repression, from who enforced that veiling in the first place and the complexity of how that plays out for all women on a day-to-day basis.

Unfortunately, such homogenizing is not a sole activity of those in power on the right. The phenomenon of cultural relativism is still in fashion among certain segments of the broader left, a concept which boils down to: it's okay that "they" do that "over there"; it's their different "culture" and so it is not oppressive like it would be for "us" "over here". Asgharzadeh's article is quite effective in undermining relativist ideas and understandings.

An Integrated Analysis of Immigration and Globalization

This collection grapples both at macro and daily-life levels with the issue of migration. Its ability to do this consistently and in an integrated way varies quite a bit within but particularly among the articles. Two broad topics could have used tighter theoretical attention: globalization and migration theory. Tightening the treatment of "globalization" would be quite a challenge, both because this term is now used in many different contexts to describe a wide range of social phenomena, and because this is a collection of authors who are not necessarily meant to be on the same theoretical page. Nonetheless, a more thorough foregrounding of globalization in the historical development of capitalist imperialism would be helpful early on in the book.

With respect to the discussion of migration theories, these theories are mentioned fairly briefly twice, in the first and seventh chapters, but we do not get a thorough analysis of the nature of these theories or their problematics. This collection clearly offers useful insights and analysis, particularly in the way it integrates gender, and goes beyond at the same time as it takes from the neoclassical, historical-structuralist and the migration systems theories. However, it would have been interesting to have these traditions explored more fully.

The integrated analysis could be fuller at times too. That is, both in terms of weaving the complex social relations of race, gender and class, and also in terms of interconnecting systemic and experience-based analyses. For example, Bonnie Slade in her piece "Highly Skilled and Under-Theorized: Women Migrant Professionals" talks about how university educated immigrants become "de-skilled" once in Canada. To have a deeper look at de-skilling, it would have been helpful to explicitly discuss how such changes in class position occur. Many understand that the State gears its immigration policy to the various and changing needs of capital, for both production and reproduction, for work in the home and out of the home. We are at a point, as many of the authors addressed in different ways, where capital needs an increasing supply of "cheap labour" for the growing range of low-waged, service-oriented jobs. Yet, legislative changes have increased the difficulty of achieving independent-status immigration by increasing the educational and language requirements. At the same time, it remains extremely difficult for foreign-trained doctors, teachers and engineers to obtain professional accreditation in Canada. In the last number of years there have also been huge cuts to free English as a Second Language classes

In essence then, it would seem that State policies and the structure of the economy are functioning to knowingly seek out immigrants that will not be able to get jobs that they are legitimately educated and experienced to do, and who will also not be seeking under-funded language or university services. It is clear, then, that immigrants are forced to play the role of "cheap labour", and that is what they were really allowed in to do. As such, because of the deeply internationalized structure of capitalism, and the racist and imperialist migration flows from South to North, more and more immigrants are experiencing a marked shift in class position when they arrive. So then, this is an analytical opportunity for seeing class not as a rigid box that people are placed or found in: we can see how it is composed and recomposed over time and in different places. It follows from such an analysis that the de-skilling that Slade talks about is therefore one of the results of such a process, rather than a description of the phenomenon itself.

One other issue that would be interesting to see explored in more depth is that of the "construction of the immigrant woman". There seems to be a great tension, a dialectic really, between the fact that there is a material reality of poverty and exclusion lived by a huge percentage of migrant women of colour, and that there is generalizing, homogenizing, racialized sexist social construction of a "type" of woman who is unskilled and does low-waged work. We know that many people are actually living this kind of life, and so when we talk about it and organize around it, the oppressive reasons for it are crucial to understand. Yet, the ideas used in the construction are part and parcel of the lived experience, the material existence; the ideas do not stand outside nor are they stand-ins for lived experience. Therefore, it is a useful theoretical challenge to pull apart, within a historical framework, the lived experience from the externally imposed ideology, to understand more about the complex relationship between oppressive ideas about people and their/our actual experience of marginalization, and how these evolve over time.