Nicole Denier’s research while affiliated with University of Alberta and other places

Few have considered whether an immigrant’s sexuality contributes to unique labour market integration and employment outcomes. Using a Canadian immigrant register, consisting of all recently arriving immigrants, and linked income tax records, we break new ground by exploring how biannual arrival cohorts (2000–2010) of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (queer) immigrants fare economically three, five and ten years after arrival. Queer immigrants, who we identify through at least one same-sex tax filing in the first 10 years since arrival, are predominantly arriving from the USA, Europe, and South and Central America as primary economic and family class applicants. They are more highly educated and skilled, less likely to be non-employed, less likely to receive government assistance, and out-earn their heterosexual counterparts over the first 10 years in Canada. Fixed effects modelling reveals a steeper wage growth for queer immigrant men, relative to straight men, between 5 and 10 years since arrival. We also observe the steepest wage growth for straight immigrant women, who enter the labour market with much lower earnings. We posit that queer immigrants leverage social and economic capital from both ethnic and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, aiding in their socio-economic integration in Canada. Our study also highlights important theoretical and empirical considerations concerning the operationalization of sexuality in administrative tax records.

More than two million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this book, Claudia Masferrer, Erin R. Hamilton, and Nicole Denier present the lives of thirty-four people who returned to Mexico City from the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, a period in which U.S. immigration policy became increasingly focused on restriction and enforcement. The authors find that the experience of return migration to Mexico City during this period, after a relatively long time in non-citizen, mostly undocumented status as an immigrant in the United States, leaves the return migrant norteado, “disoriented or lost.” Return migrants have trouble finding health care and social services, family life is upended, and economic mobility is limited. The authors discuss what can be done about the hardships of return migration to Mexico City, exploring how existing policies could be expanded and new policies or programs created to better serve the needs of return migrants in Mexico City and beyond.

As generative large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT gain widespread adoption in various domains, their potential to propagate and amplify social biases, particularly in high-stakes areas such as the labor market, has become a pressing concern. AI algorithms are not only widely used in the selection of job applicants, individual job seekers may also make use of generative LLMs to help develop their job application materials. Against this backdrop, this research builds on a novel experimental design to examine social biases within ChatGPT-generated job applications in response to real job advertisements. By simulating the process of job application creation, we examine the language patterns and biases that emerge when the model is prompted with diverse job postings. Notably, we present a novel bias evaluation framework based on Masked Language Models to quantitatively assess social bias based on validated inventories of social cues/words, enabling a systematic analysis of the language used. Our findings show that the increasing adoption of generative AI, not only by employers but also increasingly by individual job seekers, can reinforce and exacerbate gender and social inequalities in the labor market through the use of biased and gendered language.

Job advertisements (ads) represent the first point of contact between employers and job seekers. By signaling characteristics expected of an ideal candidate, job ads “gatekeep” the labor force and configure its composition. Meanwhile, labor force composition can also shape the wording of job ads. This study develops a multidimensional inventory of gender and EDI (equality, diversity, inclusion) language in job ads. Applying this inventory, it adopts an instrumental-variable approach to disentangle the reciprocal relationships between gender/EDI language in job ads and labor force gender/racial composition. Drawing on the analysis of 28.6 million job ads in the United Kingdom in combination with labor force statistics between 2018 and 2023, the findings reveal three distinct mechanisms through which the bidirectional interplay between language in job ads and labor force composition (re)produces or disrupts labor force gender/racial segregation. They highlight both the benefits and limitations of intervening in the language used in job ads to help reduce labor force gender/racial segregation.

Rapid technological change is touching families in Canada in profound ways. The deepening of digital reach has wide-ranging implications for family life and policy in Canada, and has spurred public discussions about the benefits, perils, and need for regulation of digital technologies. This Issue Brief provides an overview of key issues surrounding digitalization and family life and their implications for the wellbeing of diverse families in Canada. It also highlights issues surrounding digital divides, privacy, and bias, as well as how they relate to inequalities within and between families.

This chapter studies the implications of increasing return migration from the United States to Mexico post-2008 and the immigration of U.S.-born people to Mexico for family life. Our aim is to quantify and analyze the sociodemographic characteristics, living arrangements, and household characteristics of returnees and U.S.-born immigrants in Mexico to document divergent family migration processes at the population level. We couple this demographic portrait with narrative accounts of seven returned migrants we interviewed in Mexico City in 2019 to illuminate how people navigate return and family life in the context of restrictive and heavily enforced U.S. immigration policy. We emphasize the importance of considering return migration when studying migrant families. A focus on return migration reveals that U.S. immigration policy affects not only families in the United States but also in Mexico. In other words, we bring a much-needed binational perspective to the study of the impacts of U.S. immigration policy on migrant families.