Margaret Walton-Roberts

Wilfrid Laurier University | WLU · Department of Geography and Environmental Studies

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...

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...

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...

en 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 ques...

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...

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

en 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’...

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.

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...

International students have become an increasingly important dimension of Canada‘s educational and immigration policy landscape, which has led to the development of pathways from educational to working visa status. In this report we present an analysis of international student numbers, visa transition rates, processes and government policy evolutio...

The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditi...

Book: The growth of international travel for purposes of medical treatment has been accompanied by increased academic research and analysis. This Handbook explores the emergence of medical travel and patient mobility and the implications for patients and health systems. Bringing together leading scholars and analysts from across the globe, this unp...

This chapter offers an examination of international nurse migration with specific reference to Punjab. As with southern India, nursing as an export industry is developing in Punjab, and the locality is being inserted into diverse transnational nurse migration circuits through educational and labour brokerage networks. Understanding both the structu...

The Human Right to Citizenship provides an accessible overview of citizenship regimes around the globe, focusing on empirical cases of denied or weakened legal rights. Exploring the legal and social implications of specific national contexts, contributors examine the status of labor migrants in the United States and Canada, the changing definition...

In this paper, I explore the migration of Indian-trained nurses enrolled in a post-graduate critical/geriatric care programme at a Canadian public college. Calling upon recent literature on gender, modernity and mobility in India, I examine the extent to which skilled transnational migration is shaped by gender relations established in India. While...

Understanding the economic development of many nations in the Global South can no longer be comprehensively charted without a focus on international labour migration and its associated socio-economic and spatial transformations. Interest in this issue has emerged in the range of work exploring transnational migration, yet the spatiality of transnat...

What affect does increasing European integration have on the international community beyond Europe’s borders? This issue is examined in this chapter in terms of the global migration of nurses. In particular, I consider the how nurse migration from Global South source regions—particularly India—are influenced by the deeper integration of training an...

In May 2011 the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) hosted a conference on South Asian migration. It was organized as an interdisciplinary gathering with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Margaret Walton-Roberts and Simon Chilvers were the principal organizers. While most re...

The global context for the research includes: a global health worker (HW) shortage; a dramatic increase of HW migration over the last decade; the need to develop and sustain developing countries’ health systems; and reliance of high income countries (HICs) on HWs who migrate from low and middle income countries (LMICs) such as India. Investigating...

This knowledge synthesis report examines how migrant transition programs (status conversion from temporary to permanent) inform nursing labour force planning in Canada with a specific focus on Ontario.

IMRC Policy Points provide current and relevant policy briefings and recommendations drawn from scholarly research carried out by our Associates and Affiliates worldwide. Follow our series at: www.imrc.ca.

This viewpoint reports on a multidisciplinary panel held at the 2012 CAG/Congress meeting that brought together a number of researchers with important expertise on census-related issues. They were asked to tackle the question: “Why do we still need a census?” Their presentations generated dialogue based on both Canadian and international experience...

Abstract This viewpoint reports on a multidisciplinary panel held at the 2012 CAG/Congress meeting that brought together a number of researchers with important expertise on census-related issues. They were asked to tackle the question: “Why do we still need a census?” Their presentations generated dialogue based on both Canadian and international...

Published Spring 2014 In May 2011 the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) hosted a conference on South Asian migration. It was organized as an interdisciplinary gathering with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Margaret Walton-Roberts and Simon Chilvers were the principal org...

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars around an important question: how has migration changed in Europe as the European Union (EU) has enlarged, and what are the consequences for countries (and for migrants themselves) that are cast inside and outside of the redrawn jurisdictional and territorial borders of the EU? By a...

This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars around an important question: how has migration changed in Europe as the European Union has enlarged, and what are the consequences for countries (and for migrants themselves) inside and outside of these redrawn jurisdictional and territorial borders? By addressing this question the...

In Canada half of all internationally educated nurses (IENs) are employed in Ontario, and in 2010 the top three countries where new IENs had received their training were the Philippines, India and China. This presentation reports on preliminary results from an ongoing research project examining the experiences of IENs from the Philippines and India...

Canada has experienced the development of suburban ethnic enclaves by established immigrant diaspora groups surrounding major metropolitan centres. However, less is known regarding the housing and location preferences of their maturing offspring population, known as the second-generation. This paper seeks to explain the housing preferences and loca...

This chapter examines the changing role of nursing as a career option for young people in Punjab. The paper contextualizes the substantial growth of nursing education institutions in the context of international migration opportunities. Based on survey and interview data gathered at nursing schools and colleges across Punjab, the paper demonstrates...

In this article I explore the issue of nursing status in Kerala, India and how over time a colonial discourse of caste‐based pollution has given way to a discourse of sexual pollution under expanding migratory opportunities. Based on survey and qualitative research findings, I caution that the improving occupational status of nursing in India is no...