Beyond “Economic Immigration”: Understanding the Role of Labor Market and Lifestyle Expectations in Technology Sector Newcomer Experiences in Canada

Abstract

Canada has long sought to disperse skilled immigration across the country, with the goal of promoting economic development, improving cultural diversity, and mitigating population decline. The Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) are one mechanism for achieving regionalized immigration: they allow Canadian provinces and territories to use labor market information (LMI) to identify in-demand skills and offer visas to newcomers who match local needs. However, even when LMI is accurate, many factors can prevent newcomer access to local labor markets, particularly in third-tier cities (populations of 100,000 to 500,000), including credential recognition, discrimination, and a lack of settlement infrastructure. This paper centers the stories of three newcomers to Canada, each with senior technology sector experience and arriving through PNPs into third-tier cities. Amidst well-established themes in settlement narratives, such as housing affordability, family, lifestyle, and the role of Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPs), this paper suggests that newcomers arriving under programs such as the PNPs may experience LMI congruence or incongruence: the degree to which expectations of a labor market (shaped by being selected for immigration based on particular in-demand skills) match or do not match newcomers’ real experiences of labor market access. Policymakers and institutions that use LMI to guide decisions may consider two lessons from the narratives offered in this study: one, the continued importance of reducing barriers to labor market entry for newcomers, and two, the possibility that LMI congruence and accurate expectations play a role in retention.

Introduction

Attracting highly skilled immigrants in information technology (IT) and other sectors has been a cornerstone of Canadian immigration policy since the 1990s, as has a push for greater regional dispersion of these immigrants (Caviedes, 2010). About 60% of immigrants to Canada have post-secondary education or higher (International Labour Organization, 2020). Regionalized immigration, referring to the Canadian policy goal of better sharing the demographic, economic, and social benefits of immigration across more regions (Akbari & MacDonald, 2014), is thought to mitigate population decline, improve cultural diversity and economic development, and ease pressures on housing and social services in bigger cities (Krahn et al., 2005). Canada’s provincial nominee programs (PNPs) are one of several programs that devolve federal immigration authority, allowing regions to nominate candidates based on local labor market needs (Baglay & Nakache, 2014). Yet these two policy aims—attracting highly skilled workers and inspiring them to settle outside of Canada’s few cities of a million or more—pose unique challenges for provinces and municipalities trying to boost economic development while providing adequate housing, healthcare, settlement services, and labor market opportunities for newcomers (throughout this study, “newcomers” refers to immigrants who have been in Canada for 5 years or less) (Ferrer et al., 2014). Furthermore, newcomers themselves face the challenge of deciding whether to invest in a community with less short-term economic opportunity in exchange for attractions such as low cost of living or proximity to nature, a negotiation this study examines through the lens of lifestyle migration (Benson & O’Reilly, 2019). After Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, referred to as “first-tier” cities and attracting the vast majority of newcomers to Canada, second-tier cities are smaller urban centers of 500,000 to 1,000,000 people, and third-tier cities have populations of 100,000 to 500,000 people and are characterized by fewer employment opportunities, immigrant services, and less economic and cultural diversity (Krahn et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2015). The three cities discussed in this paper (Regina, SK; Moncton, NB; and Fredericton, NB) are third-tier municipalities; however, due to the presence of programs actively attracting newcomers to support economic development, they may also be called what Pottie-Sherman and Graham (2020) refer to as “aspiring gateways.”

Sector-specific analyses of migration are often comprised of demand-side policy analysis (Ferrer et al., 2014; Ibbitson, 2014) or investigations of labor market integration and economic outcomes (Brunner, 2017; Lai et al., 2017). Research that engages with “supply-side” IT-sector immigrant experiences in Canada has sought to understand the role of variables such as digital platform work in immigrant integration (Lam & Triandafyllidou, 2021), ethnic stereotypes in IT in the Waterloo region of Ontario (Hari, 2013), and gendered experiences of underutilization and precarity (Nardon et al., 2021). Zhuang, (2023) highlights housing, stable economic opportunities, educational spaces, faith-based organizations, and community-based organizations as key themes in the literature on lived settlement experiences of newcomers to Canada, and calls for further research that uses actor-centered participatory methods to highlight the lived experiences of migrants, particularly from an intersectional lens. This paper responds to this call by taking its priorities from in-depth, unstructured interviews with technology sector newcomers, exploring how being selected to help revitalize a region based on certain skills and qualifications impacts settlement experiences. With so much attention given to the economic promise of highly skilled, tech-sector immigrants, this paper suggests that understanding retention in second- and third-tier cities is improved by a holistic approach, more in line with theories that center quality of life than those that center economic choices. Furthermore, it outlines newcomer experiences of labor market information (LMI) congruence and incongruence: awareness of being selected to fill labor market demands compared with first-hand experiences of the real labor market (and access to it), as another factor shaping retention.

Background

Due to border and travel restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of immigrants to Canada decreased to 184,624 in 2020; this was down by almost half from 2019 (Statistics Canada, 2021). In previous years, immigration has been responsible for the majority of Canada’s population growth (85.7% in 2019; Statistics Canada, 2021). The Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) is a not-for-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) that has administered programs to support technology sector immigrants for over 10 years. Global Onboarding of Talent (GO Talent) clients are highly skilled, technology sector newcomers who work with ICTC to prepare for their Canadian arrival by learning about Canadian resume, interview, and workplace norms, and make virtual connections with Canadian employers. The 2018–2019 cohorts were comprised of just under 1500 clients, holding occupations such as information systems analysts and consultants (29%) and software engineers and designers (17%).

Highly educated newcomers with IT skills might seem like the likeliest candidates for large urban centers: and indeed, 24% of the 2018–2019 GO Talent Cohort landed in Toronto, Ontario (ON), followed by Mississauga at 7%. Figure 1 is a map of Canada. The country’s largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, ON, Montreal, QC, and Vancouver, BC. Interestingly, lesser-known cities also performed well compared with their share of the Canadian population: Halifax and Calgary were the next most popular destinations, followed by Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, and Regina drew 4%, Moncton 3%, and Fredericton 2% of the cohort, despite the fact that each of these cities are home to well below 1% of Canadians. ICTC’s GO Talent data thus suggests a slow but consistent flow of skilled immigrants towards second- and third-tier Canadian cities, whose value offering centers around quality of life, cost of living, or tailored incentives such as PNPs rather than economic opportunity necessarily.

Fig. 1.

Canadian political divisions.

Natural Resources Canada, (2022). Reference Maps. Government of Canada. Retrieved Sept 15, 2022, from https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/explore-our-maps/reference-maps/16846. Reprinted under an Open Government License: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Despite the consistent flow of newcomers to less-populated regions, newcomer retention rates across Canada exhibit significant variation. For all immigrants admitted to Canada in 2016, New Brunswick’s 2-year retention rate was 60.8%, while Moncton’s was 49.6%. Saskatchewan’s was 68.4%, while Regina’s was 61.2%. In comparison, Ontario had a retention rate of 93.8%, with Toronto at 85.8% (Statistics Canada, 2020). While immigration to less populated regions of the country is seen as a way to “rebalance Canada’s population” and mitigate a “cycle of declining economic prospects and population decline,” (Esses et al., 2021), lower retention rates in second- and third-tier cities illustrate that municipalities and provinces must do more than attract immigrants in the first place—they must also incentivize them to stay.

Newcomers to smaller communities in Canada are most at risk of leaving those communities in the period of time shortly after their arrival: if people stay longer than 2 to 5 years, they are likely to have set down roots and remain there longer-term (Hellstrom, 2019; Krahn et al., 2005). Prior research in this area by Statistics Canada indicates that immigrants are up to 30% more likely than non-immigrants to move provinces in pursuit of opportunities from an economic boom (Ostrovsky et al., 2008).

Methodology

The authors of this paper come from a research and capacity-building organization, ICTC, which investigates the IT labor market in Canada and offers programs to support job-seekers and industry. This study arose from the desire to better-understand the experiences of IT-sector newcomers who had landed in third-tier Canadian cities. To this end, the researchers conducted serial, open-ended biographical interviews with three technology-sector newcomers. Participants were selected through conversation with ICTC Go-Talent staff: these personnel conduct training with tech-sector immigrants before, during, and after the immigration process. In conversation with the authors (members of the research team, a different division of ICTC) Go-Talent staff identified candidates that had moved to and stayed in third-tier cities. Further qualifying features included entry through a PNP (see Table 1 for distinct pathways chosen), successfully completing the Go-Talent program (no longer interacting with ICTC programming for conflict of interest considerations), and free, prior, and informed consent. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper, and interviewees had an opportunity to withdraw any data they did not wish represented through review of the draft findings. While participant narratives may have been influenced by their interactions with ICTC, the researchers made all possible efforts to avoid conflict of interest; for similar reasons, this paper does not seek to comment upon or evaluate ICTC programming.

Table 1.

Interviewees selected

Former Role	Time in Canadaa	Landing city, province	PNP Immigration Stream	Primary reasons to apply this location	Job offer before arrival
Project manager (Software engineering)	1 month	Fredericton, NB	Express entry	Fredericton’s reputation for IT job opportunities	Yes
Software developer	3 years	Regina, SK	Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program (SINP)	Work-life balance; ability to focus on career, family, and faith in a smaller, calmer community	No
Business development and technology consultant	2 years	Moncton, NB	NB Strategic Initiative Stream (French speaking skilled workers)	Promise of opportunities for French-speaking immigrants; family wanted to live in NB	No

^aDuring first interview

A serial, open-ended approach to interviewing draws from the tradition of the biographical interview, with roots in qualitative sociology and ethnography (Breckner, 2015; Kazmierska, 2004; Tabib-Calif & Lomsky-Feder, 2021; Schütze, 1983). While approaches differ, the researcher typically frames the topic of inquiry with a generative question and intervenes minimally throughout the conversation. In this study, the researchers first conducted an unrecorded introductory call, explaining the purpose of the research, and walking participants through their informed consent forms, which included what to expect, right to withdraw, and permission to record. This first call also allowed the researchers to get to know participants informally. Subsequently, the researchers conducted two sets of 1 h-long interviews with each participant, approximately 1 month apart. Interviews were primarily unstructured, inviting interviewees to lead their own re-telling of their settlement narratives. Guiding questions were used when necessary to address breaks in narrative, and included “tell us about your impression of [your city] prior to arrival,” “tell us about your experience landing,” and “what do you do outside of work.” As Read, (2018) notes, serial interviewing builds trust and comfort and provides time for reflection, as interviewees may revise or elaborate on instances described in the previous interview. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, followed by a thematic analysis approach (Riessman, 2008) that sought to center participant voices through an inductive coding scheme, before placing different findings from interviews in conversation with relevant literature. A small number of cases allows the reader to experience the voices of each participant, and indeed, for the research participants to be able to recognize themselves in the final product (Tabib-Calif & Lomsky-Feder, 2021). The latter is crucial in the context of the literature on immigrant retention in third-tier cities in Canada, in part due to the call from scholars in this field for research that foregrounds immigrant voices and experiences of their own roles in shaping settlement outcomes (Zhuang, 2023). Furthermore, case-oriented research engages in a conversation between patterns of individual conduct and institutional or contextual mediating factors, shedding light on the impact that, for example, law and policy can have on individual migration experiences (e.g., Wygnanska, 2019). Accordingly, where not identifying, interviewee narratives have been presented in their own words or directly paraphrased throughout much of this paper, with consent and review from the participants.

Findings and Discussion

Landing Destinations and Provincial Nominee Programs

Canada’s PNPs are one of several programs that devolve federal immigration authority, allowing regions to nominate candidates based on local labor market needs (Baglay & Nakache, 2014; Lewis, 2010). Through the PNPs, a province or territory can attract applicants with in-demand skillsets based on regional LMI. Certain provinces depend on PNPs in order to bolster their workforces: for example, New Brunswick’s declining birthrate, out-migration to other provinces, and an aging population lead it to rely heavily on attracting newcomers (Government of New Brunswick, n.d. in Baglay & Nakache, 2014). Applicants are evaluated by the provinces, and those who are selected will be nominated under an Express Entry PNP stream (expedited based on a points system) or a non-Express entry scheme. Applicants must demonstrate intent to settle in the sponsoring province but are not required to remain once they attain residency (Hugo, 2008). PNPs differ in execution: some require that applicants have local job offers prior to arrival, while others simply require work experience in one of a set of in-demand National Occupation Classifications (NOCs) in Canada or abroad (Government of New Brunswick, n.d.)

As previously discussed, the first 2 to 5 years of arrival comprise a key decision-making period for newcomers considering inter-provincial migration. Each of the three interviewees in this study spoke to the researchers during this window, but at different points. Abosede, a Nigerian-Canadian woman in her 40s and former software developer, had been in Regina, SK (CMA population 249,217 as of the 2021 Census, see Fig. 2) for 3 years at the time of the interviews. She emigrated from Nigeria “not for greener pastures, because I was making good money, doing good at home,” but for work-life balance. Abosede applied to several Canadian immigration streams but “it was the Saskatchewan immigration nomination program that eventually came through.”

Fig. 2.

Political map of Saskatchewan.

Natural Resources Canada, (2022). Reference Maps. Government of Canada. Retrieved Sept 15, 2022, from https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/explore-our-maps/reference-maps/16846. Reprinted under an Open Government License: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Fahad is a software engineer in his 30s, who had been in Fredericton, NB (CMA 108,610 as of the 2021 Census, see Fig. 3) just over 1 month when he first spoke with the research team. A decade before coming to Canada, he moved his career to Dubai, where he and his wife worked as a project manager and a marketing manager, respectively. While their careers were successful and stable, Dubai does not offer citizenship to immigrants, “no matter how long you spend: your whole lifetime, 20, 30 years, you still have to go back to your country.” Fahad and his wife felt that it would be difficult to eventually have to migrate back to Pakistan, “the economy there is under so much pressure. So we thought, why not choose a destination which we can call our home, settle permanently. We can raise our kids there.”

Fig. 3.

Political map of New Brunswick.

Natural Resources Canada, (2022). Reference Maps. Government of Canada. Retrieved Sept 15, 2022, from https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/atlas-canada/explore-our-maps/reference-maps/16846. Reprinted under an Open Government License: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Malek is French, with Tunisian background, in his 40s, living in Moncton, NB (population 157,717, CMA 2021, see Fig. 3) for 2 years at the time of his interviews with the authors. He had been interested in coming to Canada since 2004. Before immigrating to Canada, having an academic background in IT and engineering, he worked for over a decade internationally in business development and technology consulting. Career opportunities, academic opportunities, and family kept him from pursuing Canada fully until 2017, when he and his wife came for an exploratory visit.

Malek and Fahad were both nominated by the Province of New Brunswick, Malek under the special New Brunswick Strategic Initiative stream for French-speaking immigrants and Fahad under the Express Entry program. Malek selected Moncton due to the promise of other Francophones, while Fahad selected Fredericton because the city had a reputation for having good jobs in IT (which both he and his wife had work experience in) and because as the provincial capital, “we thought it would be easier for us to get our documentation done after arrival.” For each interviewee, PNP nomination comprised a crucial first step in deciding to settle in a third-tier city.

Lifestyle Migration and Quality of Life

While PNP nomination led Abosede, Malek, and Fahad to settle in their choice of city (and for Fahad, learn about New Brunswick for the first time) all expressed that they saw the appeal of smaller cities as a way to get away from their previous lives’ “hustle and bustle,” in Abosede’s words, and foregrounded a desire to live more peacefully for their children and/or spouses. This desire to re-negotiate work-life balance is a prominent element of what is known as lifestyle migration (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009). Lifestyle migration theory differs from neo-classical migration theory, which suggests that migrants are driven to make decisions that maximize income or utility and thus react to wage differentials and geographic imbalances in labor supply and demand, and new economics of labor migration (NELM), where migration occurs to diversify family or household income through risk-spreading (de Haas, 2010). Both models heavily prioritize economic optimization over a more holistic model of decision-making, which includes perceptions of desirability and lifestyle rather than just wages (de Haas, 2010; Benson & O’Reilly, 2009). Lifestyle migration was originally conceived as a framework with which to analyze the motivations of relatively affluent migrants who might not be competing for local jobs (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009) which is not true of the interviewees in this study who still sought fulfilling work and a reasonable cost of living. Nevertheless, lifestyle migration models have since been used to more broadly consider all migrants pursuing a “better life,” (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016) and do not discount the “rational choice” of neoclassical economic theories but acknowledge a diversity of migration types based on the “characteristics and motivations of the migrants, their life stages, and directionality of the movement” (Kılınç & King, 2017: 1492). Alternatively phrased, lifestyle migration does “not intended to flatten motives to a single dimension … [but] also acknowledges the inseparability of economic factors like income, and the quality of life it supports” (Knowles & Harper, 2009: 11).

Lifestyle migration becomes an interesting lens with which to examine the promise of second- and third-tier cities in Canada when newcomer expectations for their settlement experiences include both a calm, quiet city, and an adequate labor market, based on being selected for PNPs due to having particular in-demand skills and experiences. The lens of lifestyle migration acknowledges that these motivations may be co-negotiated, and therefore improves understanding of newcomer retention for municipalities who seek to use their small size and proximity to nature as a strength.

Interviewees in this study held pre-conceptions about what their lifestyle in their new host cities would look like, formed by combinations of government messaging and informal media. Each expressed a desire to be living in a city that was small, but metropolitan enough. While Malek had been interested in moving to Ontario, his wife “fell in love with New Brunswick,” for the lifestyle and family-friendliness. Abosede had asked around with friends in the Nigerian-Canadian community and found a network that recommended Regina as calm and small. Flying in, she was pleasantly surprised: she knew not to expect skyscrapers in Regina, “but I wasn’t expecting to see such huge road networks: I like the fact that everything I need is readily accessible.” Fahad, meanwhile, described his pre-arrival impression of Fredericton will slight self-effacement:

When we got the provincial nomination, we didn’t know New Brunswick at all. We never heard of it. We knew only Canada. And in Canada, we knew only three places, Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. At that time we researched more and we thought, OK, New Brunswick. Oh, it’s just next to Quebec. So it’s not that far. And the second thing we did is we researched on YouTube and see how it looks. There were like a couple of blogs, people traveling around and they were showing us Fredericton and Moncton. We thought, OK, it’s a cool, nice place. It’s a very beautiful place with the rivers and hills and greenery and everything. But obviously when somebody shows around, they show places where the tourists go. They normally don’t show the city area or, you know, the buildings and stuff like that. We didn’t know that nobody was here. So you can imagine that there was a little misconception.

Fahad and his wife had made a trip for their “soft landing” for a month in summer 2019, to get paperwork done, experience Fredericton, and get their PR cards, before returning to Dubai to wrap up their lives there. They had a pleasant experience in a short-term rental in Fredericton. By the time they returned in 2020, however, they found that the city had grown busier, housing had become more expensive, and they faced new challenges of a pandemic and lockdown. The rest of this paper unpacks interviewee expectations and experiences of their new cities, with an eye to lessons for retention.

Settlement and Integration: the Role of LMI Congruence or Incongruence

Analyses of PNPs have shown that the programs have allowed many provinces (including Saskatchewan and Atlantic provinces) to increase both number of immigrants and immigrant retention since their establishment (Bonikowska et al., 2016). Despite careful efforts to ensure that newcomers match local labor market needs, LMI alone is not sufficient to ensure that second- and third-tier cities across Canada can successfully integrate and retain newcomers. Cities also need adequate economic “absorptiveness,” characterized both by the gap between labor market data and immigrant access to the labor market, and by municipal institutions, housing, and sociocultural factors. Credential recognition comprises a significant portion of the former challenge, with some scholars demonstrating that highly educated international professionals may find it particularly difficult to find employers that value their credentials comparably (Li, 2001; Wilson-Forsberg, 2015; Frank & Hou, 2017) and that immigrants to Canada earn less on average than Canadians with equivalent education (Bonikowska et al., 2011; Hou et al., 2019). Challenges such as a lack of an interpersonal network (Feenan & Madhany, 2021), discrimination, or language ability may also intervene in newcomers’ ability to re-establish their careers after migration (Van Ngo & Este, 2006). Finally, economic absorptiveness implies adequate housing and health care infrastructure, and educational and community services (Depner & Teixeira, 2012; Lewis, 2010; Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021). Newcomers’ labor market access may, in turn, impact the services and communities that are open to them: Allain et al., (2019) describe the phenomenon of “conditional welcoming” in third-tier host cities where newcomers are valued based on their economic potential and eventually, contribution.

Accordingly, even when LMI is perfectly accurate and a PNP entrant has skills that match in-demand job opportunities, there are numerous established reasons why newcomers to Canada may not quickly and successfully re-establish their careers in third-tier cities, despite credentials and experience. A further layer to the discussion of retention goes a step beyond socio-economic realities to subjective socio-economic expectations; that is, newcomers’ awareness of the reasons for their PNP admission and preconceptions of local labor markets and the gaps they were intended to fill. The comparison between expectation and experience can be thought of as “LMI congruence,” when labor market preconceptions match experiences, or “LMI incongruence,” when there is a disconnect between the two.

Experiences of LMI incongruence can happen for a number of reasons, as illustrated by the three interviewees in this study. Abosede did not move to Canada due to lack of career opportunities in Nigeria, where she had successfully transitioned to working as a successful program manager after her software development career. During her initial job search in Regina, Abosede accepted a job in technical support. While far below her qualifications, she felt that it gave her exposure to Canadian work culture and confidence that she could communicate well. However, she also commented that tech support made her feel “underutilized, mentally. I wasn’t feeling that fulfillment.”

Abosede ultimately found a government job in her field, but described a broad perception of incongruence between available jobs in Saskatchewan and the in-demand skills that newcomers were recruited to bring in. She saw less opportunity in the private sector and wondered if demand for her skills in the province had been overstated: “If the government can support more private organizations to set up, then there will be more jobs, because right now it’s mostly the government organizations, and I mean, we can’t all work in government.” She commented on the conditions that led newcomers to shape narrow career expectations pre-arrival, what she saw as “straight-line matching between education and work here in Canada,” that “boxes people into one single thing you can do.” Abosede described a desire to see newcomers “opened up to all these other alternatives, not necessarily IT: it could be education, it could be health,” through more holistic appreciation of newcomers’ skills, combined with an emphasis on transferable skill coaching. “I see [migration to a new place] as an opportunity to reinvent yourself,” she explained. “Right now, most of the integration courses try to push you towards what you’ve been used to, but it should be the skills that you have, what are other places that they apply?” She also felt that there were many opportunities for newcomer-owned businesses (e.g., she saw a need for more African hairstylists in the city) but expressed that it could be hard for someone new to Saskatchewan to learn how to access grants and entrepreneurial services. While the PNP allows newcomers to work in any field after they have arrived, other economic immigration programs in Canada (such as the path to permanent residency through the post-graduate work permit) emphasize work in their field of study to retain status (Government of Canada, 2022).

Fahad began his job search while still in Dubai and had a job offer when he arrived in Canada. While it was not an ideal position, he believed it made sense to take the opportunity: “It was the first interview and I got in. I thought it was a good option to secure this position, and later maybe I can apply for other positions.” In his second interview with the researchers, Fahad had successfully moved on to a new role, “a senior managerial position” in the public sector, which he experienced as a significant relief:

I was so nervous and I was not too sure during COVID time how the job market would be, especially with a small city like Fredericton. But on the contrary, I think it’s going really good because I can still see so many options available. So that means the job market is good.

Fahad managed his expectations of Fredericton’s labor market because of the COVID-19 pandemic and his arrival during the city’s lockdown. But by his second interview, Fahad reported experiencing congruence between the promise of IT work implied by his PNP nomination, and his success finding a senior job. He voiced that he was happy to have multiple offers. However, his experience of cost of living compared to salary was less positive, highlighting co-negotiated expectations around quality of life and career consistent with lifestyle migration.

Malek, in both interviews, was frustrated by promises he heard during his immigration process that New Brunswick would be a good place for skilled IT workers and for French-speaking talent. When he arrived in Moncton, he registered with employment counseling, but only ended up finding temporary work on his own, first as a substitute teacher in a Francophone school, later in a call center, and finally as a product manager in a start-up, though paid at a much lower rate than he thought was appropriate. He found the call center in particular highly demoralizing as a former entrepreneur: “it was very hard for me. I said, what am I doing here? A lot of IT people, Engineers, they are there because they come with their families. And why they don’t want to leave New Brunswick? Like me, because it is a perfect province for quality of life for children.” Malek had been encouraged to immigrate as a bilingual Francophone under the New Brunswick Strategic Initiative stream, but felt that the province had over-promised on opportunities for French speakers and commitments to bilingual policy; “N.B. is recognized as being the only officially bilingual province, yes. But, unfortunately only in theory.” He related the story of speaking to a provincial Minister in French, and being told that this person couldn’t understand him. “I was shocked. Imagine you came from France, they asked you to prove that you are bilingual, you are in the province that is officially bilingual. And the guy making politics doesn’t speak a word in French.” Malek’s frustration was manifold: that he had been tested for French skills as a condition of entry, that senior politicians in New Brunswick lacked the same skills, and further, that some employers did not believe him when he said he was bilingual on his resume because they did not recognize his last name as Francophone.

Malek sought help from employment counseling services but felt that they were not designed to help people of his skill level and instead funneled people into lower-skilled jobs. He also expressed seeing a lack of coordination and communication between English and Francophone employment and settlement services that he felt left out bilingual job seekers. Malek noted that many French-speaking newcomers he knew had left Moncton for Gatineau, “why? Because you know, it seems that is easier for skilled worker to get a decent job or one relating to their expertise. They talk French and have their English and they can go to work in Ottawa.”

Overall, Malek felt misled by promises that his qualifications would match job opportunities in New Brunswick: “as I said, regarding the nomination, they said “we are looking for IT people,” but when we came here, we had difficulty finding a job. Maybe sometimes they’ve got jobs, but you have to start from the little ones.” He added, “what they promote, NB, is not true compared to the reality of what we are facing.” Malek described feeling incongruence both in terms of actual misinformation about what jobs were available, and with his access to jobs as a newcomer, noting that those opportunities for highly skilled workers he had seen were filled through informal networks, privileging New Brunswickers with existing personal and professional circles.

Interviewees’ experiences finding jobs in their fields varied widely, but each made active, unprompted comparisons between the labor market they felt they had been led to expect by the PNP and the one they had encountered while job seeking. Abosede and Malek questioned the degree to which their home provinces understood and had accurately represented labor market opportunity as newcomers experienced it, reflecting a desire to have governments either portray labor market opportunity more holistically, with a nod to the difficulty accessing it that newcomers might have, or institute more policies and programs that would circumvent barriers to access. Abosede was glad that the Saskatchewan provincial nomination “came through” and opened up a pathway to immigration, but also voiced her perspective on too much “straight-line matching” and over-reliance on public sector work. Malek expressed frustration at having been selected for a program based on being a skilled, IT-sector, French-speaking professional, but at finding employer resistance to his credentials and experiences. Each positioned themselves as making choices based on family and lifestyle rather than economic opportunity, but voiced that others they knew had left because of economic opportunity. Malek described friends leaving for Gatineau, and Abosede noted that “More often than not, people who leave because they’ve tried everything and they’re still not able to get a job in their chosen profession.” Meanwhile, Fahad expressed significant relief at finding that he was indeed able to get a role that matched his qualifications.

Each newcomer weighed LMI congruence or incongruence amidst other factors impacting their decisions to stay in their new provinces, suggesting that LMI congruence or incongruence acts as one of many complex motivations within lifestyle migration decision-making. As others have noted, a limited focus on immigration for economic development can result in a neglect of important, place-based infrastructure and services allowing a third-tier city to absorb population increases (Pottie-Sherman & Graham, 2021; Depner & Teixeira, 2012 in Zhuang, 2023), which is born out by the experiences of this study’s interviewees outside of their job searches. The subsequent section presents the other themes present in interviewees’ settlement experiences.

Negotiating a High Quality of Life: the Role of Settlement Support and Housing

While authority over immigration is, in practice, shared by the Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial governments, municipalities and local civil society also have an important role to play in developing the resources and safe communities that newcomers need (e.g., Acheson & Laforest, 2013; Hellstrom, 2019; Tossutti, 2012). Abosede was the only interviewee to report using local settlement services: she referenced the Regina Open Door Society, a non-profit that connected her with information about housing for new immigrants and offered advice about schools for her children and finding work. They also told her “things like how to register for child care benefits, opening a bank account. They are kind of like your one stop shop.” Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPs) like the Open Door Society are place-based, local mechanisms known to be crucial in improving settlement opportunities for newcomers (Zhuang, 2023). Abosede also described her experience with Regina Housing Authority, which provided social housing for 8 months while she and her family were getting on their feet, very positively, and she knew of many other newcomers whose transition had been eased by the same service.

Fahad and Malek both discussed significant challenges with finding affordable housing, and neither described reaching out to an LIP for support in this area. For Fahad, housing had seemed affordable during his soft landing in Fredericton in 2019, but the situation changed significantly before his final arrival. “Before we came, a friend warned us that it would be very difficult to find an apartment here because of the supply and demand gap.” They started their search ahead of time in Dubai without success. Upon arrival, the search was further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a 14-day mandatory quarantine. Apartment managers were not responsive during this time, or had no space.

It was a major setback for us. It was really frustrating honestly, because you are paying for expensive hotels, you don’t have a job, and in a new country you don’t know anything and you don’t have any permanent place to live. And wherever you go or call, they say, give us your permanent address for documentation, medical cards, and everything.

Malek, similarly, had trouble finding an apartment upon arrival in Moncton, and rather than paying for a hotel for that length of time moved his family to Montreal to stay with a friend for several weeks until they found a good place to live. While housing affordability’s role in settlement choices is debated in the literature (Zhuang, 2023), research has started to note the impact of rapidly rising housing prices across the country (a 21% year-over-year increase as of January 2022 for Canada, and a 32% increase for New Brunswick; Canadian Real-Estate Association, 2022) on newcomers (Drolet & Teixeira, 2020).

As Fahad put it, “in a smaller city, the first thing that comes to your mind is to get a good price for living, especially housing… but as compared to salaries and other big cities, the cost of living [in Fredericton] is high.” IT sector newcomers moving to third-tier cities may rationalize their choices by emphasizing family quality of life over economic opportunity, but a high cost of living and lack of access to essential services can make this cost untenable. For small cities grappling with housing unaffordability, LIPs and other settlement services that ease the way may provide a crucial service to even high-skilled newcomers like Abosede, Fahad, and Malek, supporting retention by maintaining access to a reasonable cost of living and high quality of life.

Socio-cultural Experiences: Faith-Based Communities, Municipal Culture, and Family

Consistent with each interviewee’s position on seeking a high quality of life for their families, interviewees’ commitments to their cities were highly influenced by the degree to which they felt their families had been welcomed. Serial interviewing was essential to understanding experiences with local welcoming and discrimination, as interviewees’ perceptions changed over the course of time—between each call, incidents in their children’s schools or in local news reshaped what they wanted to tell the authors about their experiences.

For the most part, interviewees felt that they had encountered discrimination but that it was likely worse in other parts of Canada, or where they had come from. While Fahad noted that he had not experienced prejudice or hostility firsthand, he described feeling concerned by an incident that his friend experienced. His friend was walking towards a mosque for evening prayers and was interrupted by occupants in a truck who honked loudly at him and shouted aggressively. This was surprising and unsettling given the overall experience of Fredericton as “quite a friendly place, and it’s a small town. We don’t really hear such things.” Furthermore, this occurred relatively recently after a premeditated terror attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario on June 6, 2021, with Fahad noting that the Pakistani family came from the same city as he was from. This story stood out for him, in stark contrast to the rest of his experience in Canada.

Fahad also reflected on his experience of multiculturalism in Fredericton. In a small city where it was obvious who was a newcomer, he felt welcomed but highly visible. Because it was a little harder to find a pre-existing community of Pakistanis, he and his wife had to work harder to meet people: which was a little lonely, but also lent itself to making friends from different cultures. “I have friends with some Indian people, some local New Brunswickers, which is great.” He told a story of going to a park celebration for Eid and meeting people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, and that this had been a great opportunity for him and his wife to create new connections.

Like Fahad, Abosede had stories of enjoying the small-town friendliness of Regina, but had yet to feel that she had made many close friends of Canadians: “On the job, I would say that professionally they’re very OK. But in being socially welcoming, I would say not really, you know, and you will find the occasional person who, you know, just doesn’t like immigrants.”

Malek was highly aware of the harmful impacts of discrimination, and he was particularly cognizant of unwelcoming dynamics in the workplace and in hiring; for example, he believed that having a non-French/Acadian surname could result in a more negative impression of one’s French-speaking ability or other basic competencies. He felt that interviewers had not taken the time to read his resume, and asked him questions he felt were disrespectful, like “what is the product of eight and nine,” or told him “not to be scared when we talk about math.” His wife, who has a business degree, was asked by a potential employer “if she knew how to use email.” Malek noted that he would appreciate more help from the province to “encourage local business owners or HR people to leverage top immigrant talent.” Malek appreciated the initiative of Dialogue NB at a systemic level, an organization trying to reduce systemic racism in the province. He also applauded the recent appointment of a Commissioner on Systemic Racism.

Family, and having young children, was a significant reason why each interviewee was in a smaller city. Each one expressed joy at seeing their children make friends, develop hobbies, and enjoy their lives. Malek, who had experienced significant LMI incongruence, described a desire not to re-uproot his children as perhaps the most significant factor keeping him in the city: “I believe [Moncton] is the best place to raise our kids. Everything we’re doing here is about the children.” One of the motivating factors for emigrating to Canada was to raise his children in a multicultural country. He spoke about his daughter being able to attend a party of an Indian family, commenting “it’s worth so much more than money, [having friends with] different cultures is like you are traveling all over the world with people.” Nevertheless, Abosede and Malek also both had stories of their children encountering racism at school, and schools not being well-equipped to cope with this occurring inside or outside of the classroom. Fahad’s daughter was yet to join the school system.

Municipal “friendliness” is a known theme in the literature on migration and secondary migration decision-making (Alanya et al., 2015; Schwartz et al., 2014), and third-tier cities are often characterized in the literature as lacking in ethnic diversity and therefore being less welcoming to newcomers (Williams et al., 2015). One theme within each interviewee’s narrative was a desire to shape their new home to improve diversity and welcoming for future newcomers. Both Malek and Abosede had begun to re-invest in their communities and volunteer in leadership roles that either supported newcomers or worked to counter racism. Fahad, much newer to Canada, had begun to meet friends through festivals and gatherings and start to sow community. In this way, part of negotiating a high quality of life in a third-tier municipality entailed taking an active role in shaping local context.

Long-Term Retention

When the authors last spoke to each of the participants, each of them believed that they were on their way to establishing a high quality of life in their municipalities, while also describing projects that they were still engaging in to this end, or noting breaking points that they might 1 day reach. Fahad was enjoying Fredericton and his job, but “the only issue we face is the high rent. If that is sorted, or if we go to Moncton where the rents are 70% of what we are paying here, that would be even better.” He reiterated that he would stay in New Brunswick because the PNP “gave [them] a chance.” Malek continued to experience Moncton as having inadequate opportunities for IT-sector workers, and expressed that he didn’t feel like things had really changed since his arrival. Instead, he said, “for my wife and me, what is successful is to see, feel and hear that our children are happy here. You know, if our children are fine, we are fine.” The last time the authors spoke with Malek, he was planning to pursue his PhD in New Brunswick, to get a credential he felt would be more recognized here. He commented, “The PhD is the opportunity that lets us not leave here. We are happy to be in New Brunswick, and moving out of Moncton to another province, only for career opportunities, is not a ticket to happiness for us.” Abosede works actively in her church to help people settle when they come to Regina, and to organize community events. She also is involved in media and the creative sector. Abosede is enjoying her “peaceful life in Regina.” While occasionally, she talks with her husband about exploring other cities in Canada, that conversation will wait until their children are adults and considering universities—and if they stay in Regina for post-secondary, so too would their parents. She and her husband are both content with their jobs, but she noted that she still saw a lack of opportunities in the private sector in Regina for immigrants. For each of the newcomers in this study, their commitment to their city was related to whether their expectations of local labor markets, economic opportunity, and lifestyle (a welcoming community and affordable life) were ultimately met.

Conclusion and Implications

The final statements by each of the interviewees reinforce one of the many common threads between the three of them: they all made decisions that fall within the model of “lifestyle migration,” that is, renegotiating work-life balance and managing a variety of priorities related to wellbeing and quality of life (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009), which included a lower cost of living, some degree of labor market fulfillment, a welcoming community, and opportunities for their children. Throughout this paper, interviewee intentions to move for an improved quality of life are contrasted with their experiences on the ground, suggesting that existing literature on retention of migrants in second- and third-tier cities (e.g., Williams et al., 2015; Zhuang, 2023) effectively describes the negotiations that highly skilled, technology-sector newcomers must make in order to achieve sufficient quality of life in smaller Canadian municipalities. This paper also suggests a new theme for further research in the literature on retention, in that some newcomers may include LMI congruence or incongruence in their evaluation of whether or not to stay in their communities. LMI congruence or incongruence references the degree to which newcomers feel they have been accurately matched to a local labor market based on selection for an LMI-informed program, such as the PNP entry schemes.

As raised earlier in the paper, provinces and institutions that make decisions based on LMI may look to the idea of newcomer experiences of LMI congruence or incongruence for several lessons. First, the experiences of newcomers expressed in this paper join the existing call to provide more services that improve newcomer access to Canadian labor markets. Policy efforts such as removing “Canadian experience” clauses (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2021) from hiring processes may lend support to closing the gap between LMI and personal labor market experiences. Existing literature on third-tier cities or “aspiring gateways” also emphasizes the role of place-based institutions, including LIPs, in complementing the more regionalized approach of PNPs by developing host municipalities’ economic absorptiveness: improving access to housing, services, and social and community networks (Zhuang, 2023). The contrasting experiences of interviewees in this paper bear out the potential of LIPs to make a significant difference in individual settlement experiences and newcomers’ ability to negotiate a high quality of life.

Furthermore, provinces or institutions using LMI might better prepare newcomers for the challenges they may face in accessing the labor market of their host city. Each of the interviewees in this study offered recommendations or comments relating to this, unsolicited and with potentially generalizable insight. Abosede recommended increasing the number of programs that focused on transferable skills and adaptability for newcomers over “straight-line matching between education and work,” as well as improved access to support for newcomer entrepreneurs. Malek, meanwhile, seemed particularly upset by how rigorously his family had been tested for French language ability compared to the actual state of bilingualism in New Brunswick, and his experience of incongruence might have been eased if he had encountered more nuance in the presentation of demand for French-language technology workers during his immigration process. Fahad, interestingly, had already built in doubt of the likelihood of finding good work “especially in a small city like Fredericton” during the pandemic, despite having heard that it was “good for IT,” but his mental preparation for a job-seeking struggle seemed to improve his experience in that he was pleasantly surprised when he was offered several jobs appropriate to his professional background. These reflections are key for the authors as part of an organization that seeks to compile accurate LMI and distribute it to job-seekers, employers, the public, and policymakers as accessibly as possible: it adds to a body of informal experiences and research suggesting that in addition to characterizing the state of job demand, programs that emphasize transferable skills, build newcomer networks, and help employers connect to newcomers and learn to recognize newcomer credentials are essential to reducing the gap between labor market data and experiences of access (e.g., Farmer et al., 2021). Finally, within the context of lifestyle migration as a framework, LMI congruence may play a role in retention in the case of third-tier cities in particular, where newcomers are co-negotiating quality of life and economic opportunity. In this study, interviewee decisions were guided by the PNPs, and each person either actively chose or rationalized their choice of a third-tier city based on quality of life for their families but held some expectations of the local labor market based on their PNP selection. LMI congruence and improved preparation for accessing local labor markets, combined with LIPs and services to ease housing costs and other shocks, may together support retention of highly skilled newcomers in small municipalities.

Declarations

Competing Interests

This study was made possible by the contributions of the interviewees who generously shared their stories of migration, arrival, and integration. Interviewees for this study were identified from participants in an Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) integration support program. This study does not seek to evaluate or comment upon ICTC programming.