Margaret Walton-Roberts

• MA, PhD UBC
• Graduate Officer at Wilfrid Laurier University

In this paper we reflect on the Komagata Maru as a fundamental foreshadowing of a century of Sikh negotiation with the Canadian state to achieve inclusion and belonging. The commitment of Gurdit Singh, who charted the vessel, is emblematic of miri piri, the idea that the spiritual and political cannot be separated in the fight for justice. We use m...

In this chapter I reflect on three sets of field experiences over the last 10 years through a discussion of family, mobility and social reproduction. I use Katz's (1994) notion of ―the field‖ as a flexible space where the political and personal merge and this is clearly illustrated when we think about family within the context of field work. I empl...

Geographies of health have neglected relevant consideration of health human resources. Five developments in the sub-discipline are examined to demonstrate how health labour has been neglected. Three research themes, circulation, regulation and distribution, are then presented to indicate the value of a greater focus on health workers for the geogra...

This chapter examines the evolving dynamics of international student mobility (ISM) in the context of medical education, with a particular focus on Indian students pursuing undergraduate medical degrees in non-Anglophone countries such as Russia, Ukraine and China. It highlights the shift from traditional South-North migration patterns to a more di...

With international migration on the rise and the critical need for labour in the global north, governments are increasingly focused on the employment integration of immigrants. Studies demonstrate that where immigrants choose to settle has an impact on how effectively they integrate into employment. In Canada, there has been a shift in immigrant se...

Many scholars have used neoliberalism as an analytical framework to examine the Philippines' labour export policy. While neoliberalism entails a retreat of the state in favour of market reforms, evidence shows that state intervention of the market becomes larger and stronger over time. This paper utilises liberal neo‐statism as an alternative frame...

Aims This article describes the sociodemographic characteristics of internationally educated nurses since the change in the registration examination in 2015. It aims to investigate the association between internationally educated nurses' sociodemographic characteristics and their successful integration into the nursing workforce in Canada. Design...

Canada has emerged as a major education destination for international students from across the world. International students are understood to significantly contribute towards the labour market and economic growth of Canada including the higher education sector that has come to financially rely on international students. India has emerged as the la...

Background: Canada is less successful in integrating internationally educated nurses (IENs) into the nursing workforce than other developed countries like Australia. Objective & Design: This scoping review compares the integration trends of internationally educated nurses in Canada with those in Australia. Data Sources & Methods: Nine online databa...

A persistent challenge with health-worker migration is the inequities it creates. To minimize these inequities, systems of global governance of health-worker migration have arisen which include various global codes of practice, agreements and reporting requirements. Reporting that is rigorous, open and transparent, and subject to scrutiny from the...

International skilled heath worker migration is a key feature of the global economy, a major contributor to socio-economic development and reflective of the transnationalization of health and elder care that is underway in most OECD nations. The distribution of care and health workforce planning has previously been analysed solely within national c...

Diasporas are increasingly seen as an economic resource and new agents in sending state development regimes. The nature of these state‐diaspora relationships are matters of increasing interest to scholars. In this paper we examine the case of India and the current government's engagement with diaspora groups, especially alumni networks of Indian In...

We review literature on marriage migration through the lens of migrant agency, and structural factors of policy and state control. In doing this we aim to address Bélanger and Flynn’s (2018, p. 198) call that ‘a deeper integration of transnational perspectives to examine both agency and structural constraints would facilitate an appreciation of the...

Canada's immigration policy is regarded globally as a best practice model for selecting highly skilled migrants. Yet, upon arrival many immigrants face challenges integrating into employment. Where immigrants settle is one factor that has been shown to impact on employment integration. In Canada, regionalization policies have resulted in more immig...

The increasing complexity of the migration pathways of health and care workers is a critical consideration in the reporting requirements of international agreements designed to address their impacts. There are inherent challenges across these different agreements including reporting functions that are misaligned across different data collection too...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of immigrant health workers in OECD nations, and intensified debates about the current and future supply and distribution of such workers, particularly nurses. This review paper considers internationally educated nurses in the case of Ontario, Canada, and the policy responses developed during the pan...

In this paper, we argue that the importance of care work and migration is undervalued and undertheorized in current understandings of the future of work. Discussions of the future of work are predominantly technocentric. Focus tends toward speculative predictions and the implications of supposedly inevitable technological advances that will lead to...

Background The World Health Organization adopted the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health Workforce 2030 in May 2016. It sets specific milestones for improving health workforce planning in member countries, such as developing a health workforce registry by 2020 and ensuring workforce self-sufficiency by halving dependency on foreign-traine...

Migration industries include a diverse array of migration-related services provided by the state, commercial agents, humanitarian organisations and migrant social networks. The work performed by this array of providers, both non-state and state actors, includes facilitating, filtering/channelling and constraining migration. As a powerful example of...

Canada’s active immigration policy includes thousands of internationally trained health workers arriving annually. The effective utilization of these workers represents an ethical issue relevant to the WHO’s Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, to which Canada is a signatory. The ethical obligation for Canad...

What is a research brief and what does it stands for? A research brief is less than a policy note and more than an individual expression of research interest. It brings together the knowledge of this working group. It aims to think outside the box and promotes interdisciplinary thought. It delineates future lines of research and explains why these...

Although Canada has long been regarded as a global leader in immigration policies and practices (Esipova et al., 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated existing challenges and vulnerabilities in Canada’s immigration system (Esses et al., 2021). Border closures restricted who was able to travel, favoring temporary foreign workers who...

Globally there is a care crisis in terms of the quantity of care needed for an aging population and the quality of both the care provided and work conditions of those providing this care. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and heighted this crisis of care. In this chapter we review the issue with a particular focus on long-term care (LTC) facilities...

As societies age, social care is an increasingly important social policy domain focussed on the provision of care and social protection for vulnerable groups. These groups include children, those living with disabilities, and fragile older adults. Social care and healthcare services are part of a continuum of care provided by societies, but their s...

The forum includes a research paper, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by five short responses from Pablo Mendez, Loretta Lees, Margaret Walton‐Roberts, Ilse Helbrecht, and Alison Mountz. Mountz's introduction sets the context for the paper and makes some framing remarks on David Ley's career. The main paper examines the housing questio...

Four years ago, eleven women collaborated on a paper advocating a collective, feminist engagement with the pressures and consequences of the neoliberal academy. Inspired by that work and now as mid-career scholars, the authors of this chapter are increasingly thinking about how to create lasting imprints for a better future inside and outside the a...

Background: The World Health Organization adopted the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health Workforce 2030 in May 2016. It sets specific milestones for improving health workforce planning in member countries, such as developing a health workforce registry by 2020 and ensuring workforce self-sufficiency by halving dependency on foreign-train...

This chapter focuses on the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic poses for health professionals and the concurrent challenges for geographical scholarship on them as a group. Without health workers there is no health, and understanding the geographical complexities of occupational hierarchies, distribution, location and circulation of human health...

Canada has been seen globally as a leader in immigration and integration policies and programs and as an attractive and welcoming country for immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and international students. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some of the strengths of Canada’s immigration system, as well as some of the fault lines that ha...

Background Gender roles and relations affect both the drivers and experiences of health worker migration, yet policy responses rarely consider these gender dimensions. This lack of explicit attention from source country perspectives can lead to inadequate policy responses. Methods A Canadian-led research team partnered with co-investigators in the...

The global care chain approach conceptualizes how care and domestic services are provided through chains of feminized and racialized migrant labor. The value of care labor is determined within global capital and patriarchal systems that devalue carework generally, as well as determine the value of workers more specifically through spatial and ethni...

How did communities respond to the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI) of 2015–16 in Ontario’s mid-sized cities, and what lessons can we learn from the experience? This chapter explores these questions based on a comparative case study approach and qualitative key informant interviews with municipal, immigrant-serving, and local immigrati...

Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, over 5.6 million people have fled Syria and another 6.6 million continue to be internally displaced (unhcr 2018). Filippo Grandi, the UNHCR High Commissioner for Refugees, declared that “Syria is the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time” (UNHCR 2016). In this context, during the fal...

Although Canada has long been regarded as a world leader in refugee resettlement – and recently resettled more refugees than any other country in the world (UNHCR 2019) – Operation Syrian Refugees was unprecedented. Within weeks of the Liberal Party of Canada’s election to office in November 2015, a complex, whole-of-government coordination effort...

The migration pathways in which nurses engage are increasingly heterogeneous. In this article, I contrast three types of nurse migration pathway from three country pairs – Vietnam to Germany ‘triple win’ bi‐lateral migration (direct migration); India to Canada two‐step study‐work (multistage) pathway; and ‘bus stop’ multinational migration from the...

Background: Gender roles affect health worker migration and their migration experiences, but policy responses have rarely considered the gender dimensions of health worker migration. This invisibility and lack of attention can lead to social, health and labour market inequities. Methods: A Canadian-led research team with co-investigators in the Phi...

Background: Gender roles and relations affect both the drivers and experiences of health worker migration, yet policy responses rarely consider these gender dimensions. This lack of explicit attention from source country perspectives can lead to inadequate policy responses. Methods: A Canadian-led research team with co-investigators in the Philippi...

The pandemic has shown how essential care labour is to the functioning of the global economy.

Balsillie School Papers contribution

Market-based migrant intermediaries play an important role in skilled migration. Skilled workers, especially in regulated professions such as nursing, face increasingly complex testing and credential assessment systems. ‘Regimes of skill’ control and filter membership to these professions by reproducing already existing power imbalances in the glob...

Mobilities of Labour and Capital in Asia - edited by Preet S. Aulakh January 2020

Using a gendered lens, we examine the balance between the contribution that migrant women make to global economic and social development through their labour, especially in the care and global service economy, with the health impacts and costs incurred by this group of migrants.

We examine Canada ' s recent Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI ) paying close attention to the resettlement role played by mid‐sized urban communities. We elaborate on a key policy dimension at work at this scale of action: local immigration partnerships (LIPs). We start with a very brief review of Canada's history of mass refugee resett...

As of January 29, 2017 Canada had received 40,081 Syrian refugees. The scale and scope of this resettlement is historic, with the only comparable event being the arrival of 60,000 Indo‐Chinese refugees in the late 1970s. Since that time, much has changed in local resettlement policy. This research focuses on one component of these changes—the role...

This collaborative paper written by mid-career and senior faculty employed in public and private institutions explores the challenges of feminist mentoring at mid-career. We engage this problematic using dialogical writing as a means to highlight our experiences and needs for mentoring, while simultaneously co-mentoring one another to protect each...

In this chapter, Margaret Walton-Roberts provides an analysis of Donald Trump through an intersectional gendered lens. In this analysis, Walton-Roberts reveals the complex role of gender in generating support for, or resistance to, “Trumpism” in America. Walton-Roberts illustrates her argument through analyzing female voting patterns, the Global Ga...

The twenty-first century has witnessed a number of significant demographic and political shifts that have resulted in a care crisis. Addressing the deficit of care provision has led many nations to actively recruit migrant care labour, often under temporary forms of migration. The emergence of this phenomenon has resulted in a rich field of analysi...

This Special Issue expands mobilities research through the idea of therapeutic mobilities, which consist of multiple movements of health-related things and beings, including, though not limited to, nurses, doctors, patients, narratives, information, gifts and pharmaceuticals. The therapeutic emerges from the encounters of mobile human and non-human...

Abstract: This paper examines masculinity, migration and the changing occupational status of nursing through the lens of therapeutic mobilities; health related mobilities of people (nurses) and products (credentials). Indian men have become increasingly interested in nursing as a career, and this interest is strongly associated with the profession’...

BACKGROUND Older adults are the fastest growing age group worldwide and in Canada. Immigrants represent a significant proportion of older Canadians. Social isolation is common among older adults and has many negative consequences including limiting community and civic participation, increasing income insecurity, and increasing the risk of elder abu...

Background: Older adults are the fastest growing age group worldwide and in Canada. Immigrants represent a significant proportion of older Canadians. Social isolation is common among older adults and has many negative consequences, including limited community and civic participation, increased income insecurity, and increased risk of elder abuse....

This paper examines nurse migration from India and the Philippines through the lens of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 4.3 (access to training), 10.7 (orderly and responsible migration) and 3.c (retention of health workers). The international migration of health workers has increasingly featured on the agenda of global health agencies. Ame...

Introduction to a special issue

accepted special issue for the year 2018

This article examines global social policy formation in the area of skilled migration, with a focus on the Gulf Arab region. Across the globe, migration governance presents challenges to multiple levels of authority; its complexity crosses many scales and involves a multitude of actors with diverse interests. Despite this jurisdictional complexity,...

The aim of this chapter is to understand how India and its diaspora have been represented in two Canadian newspapers over the past thirteen years (1999–2012), and how the style of representation has changed during that time period. We use the categories of soft power, hard power, and deficient state as three conceptual lenses to exam how India and...

This paper investigates international labour migration financing processes and related resource backwash – the flow of resources away from the migrant household which continue sometime after the initial migration event. Using customised survey data from four villages in Comilla and Chandpur districts, major migrant source regions in Southern Bangla...

Background This study sought to better understand the drivers of skilled health professional migration, its consequences, and the various strategies countries have employed to mitigate its negative impacts. The study was conducted in four countries—Jamaica, India, the Philippines, and South Africa—that have historically been “sources” of health wor...

Globalisation, supply–demand dynamics, uneven development, enhanced connectivity including the better flow of information, communication and the reduced cost of travel have encouraged the global integration of nursing labour markets. Developed regions of the world have attracted internationally educated nurses (IENs) because of growing healthcare n...

Margaret Walton-Roberts (Chapter 13) examines the relationships between place (in this case Punjab) and Canadian immigration policy in order to understand the effect of skilled immigration policy on sending regions. Using a longer historical frame of analysis she reminds us that skilled migration policy is part of a longer continuum of labour mobil...

Adekola's research has explored discourses of skills circulation in the case of Nigerian trained nurses. Her research explores migrants' own perceptions of international skilled migration in order to assess the relevance of different theoretical arguments about global skills transfer, for example; brain drain, brain circulation, brain waste, brain...

This report is produced by UN Women’s Economic Empowerment Section for the ‘Promoting and Protecting Women Migrant Workers’ Labour and Human Rights’ Project, supported by the European Union. This report is the first of three designed to build on the growing body of scholarship pertaining to gender and migration, and is a resource for the creation o...

Drawing on examples from the global North and South, this book examines the relationship between migration, development and diaspora engagement from a governance perspective. It explores the ways that governments interact with their own extra-national diasporic populations in order to boost economic development, build global trading and investment...

Since the turn of the century the diaspora has become a fixed item on India’s development agenda, moving from an object of historical and cultural marginality to a vital economic and political actor that the Indian government can utilize to enhance national interests. This chapter assesses diaspora engagement in the case of India by problematizing...

The introduction provides a background to the issues that were discussed at the conference on Diasporas, Development and Governance which was convened by the book editors at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in May 2013. The conference sought to identify knowledge gaps, conceptual challenges and governance dilemmas of diaspora engagemen...