Professional Integration of Immigrants Qualified in Information Technology (IT) in Quebec City: Countering the Myths, the Immigrant Perspective
While massive and illegal migratory flows make headlines in Europe, countries such as Canada rely more on skilled immigration. Professional integration in Canada, and more specifically in Quebec, has attracted the interest of a large number of authors. These authors highlight the various difficulties that immigrants face in this regard, despite the constant efforts of public actors to adjust welcoming and integration policies. In the information technology (IT) sector in the Quebec’s capital region, economic growth, labour scarcity, and the growing need for specialized labour are encouraging employers, supported by regional organizations, to recruit skilled workers at the international level. A large proportion of immigrants specialized in IT therefore arrive in the Quebec’s region via this mechanism and actors in the field emphasize their successful integration into the workplace. However, there is one category of immigrants, trained abroad in IT, that are also trying to integrate into the sector. They have not arrived by this usual method of recruitment and hence pass under the radar of regional and sectoral statistics. This exploratory study reveals their existence and focuses upon the conditions that are specific to their professional integration. This article highlights the obstacles faced in their efforts to take up a first IT job, taking into account their skills acquired overseas, obstacles related to weaknesses in language proficiency in the workplace or gaps in employers’ human resource management practices, and differences in occupational classifications. The immigrants encountered in our study put in place back-to-school and de-skilling strategies that would facilitate their entry into a first job in IT. However, these actions do not lead to an optimal and satisfactory insertion of these workers and, in fact, generally lead to over-qualification. Furthermore, the analysis allows us to understand that the workers’ generalist profiles create obstacles because the needs of employers in the region are in fact specialized.