Immigration in two federations: Canada and Australia

The need for increasingly widespread application of a policy or program, settlement, and multiculturalism is urgent in both Canada and Australia. For both countries there is a clear pattern of coalescence and divergence and the distinct growth of immigration as a federal function. While Australia has strengthened federal functions in a area of increasingly geo-political need, Canada is moving towards a looser model of federalism. By 1918 both countries were strengthening their federal functions in immigration as discussions within the British Empire on the recommendations of the 1917 Dominions Royal Commission took root. Both countries were interested in agricultural immigration and land settlement. The Great Depression caused a major reduction in population growth rates. From 1933-1948 Canada had a poor record of providing sanctuary for Jews. In Australia, however, Jewish voluntary agencies were aiding the reception of refugees by 1937. The 1st permanent embodiment of commonwealth jurisdiction over immigration was the establishment of an Immigration Branch within the Department of Interior around 1938. Australia needed extra population for defense. The major structural link between government and the immigrant communities was through the Good Neighbor Movement, which began on a nationwide basis in 1950. Both Canada and Australia are major receiving countries for refugees. In 1973 Australia reached the position of effective, practical nondiscrimination achieved by Canada in 1967. Prime Minister Trudeau's policy was multiculturalism within a framework of bilingualism. By 1978 Australia had a new federalism policy, which in all areas concerned with immigrants, refugees and ethnicity, rationalized resources allocation and imposed a political philosophy. The foci of multiculturalism in Australia are 1) community languages; 2) creation of a tolerant, non-discriminatory society; and 3) equity and participation. In 1978 Australia specified population replacement and increase as the major aim of immigration policy. In 1984 Australia showed a significant movement forward in understanding by many, but it confirmed a resistance to change on regional, gender, race, and age criteria with others. The fundamental problem for both countries will be to combine the core federal function in immigration, needed both for international and domestic politics, with an increasingly flexible response to regional factors.     

Navigating Globalization: Immigration Policy in Canada and Australia, 1945–20071

Scholarship on immigration and globalization has failed to adequately analyze the nation‐state’s regulatory capacities, insisting instead that contemporary patterns of migration jeopardize national sovereignty and territoriality. While recognized that states possess the legitimate authority to control their territorial and membership boundaries, recent transformations of these capacities remain largely unanalyzed. This article’s historical analysis of Australia and Canada’s postwar immigration policies demonstrates that the contours of state regulation are intimately connected to the exigencies of state administration and nation building and—in contrast to the expectations of dominant theories—have intensified and expanded within the globalization context. The literature’s inattention to the fundamentally political nature of immigration has obscured the critical effects of national policies within both the migratory and globalization process. Australia’s and Canada’s contemporary policies constitute a unique model of migration control and reflect attempts by both countries to strategically position their societies within the global system and resolve a number of economic, political, cultural, and demographic transitions associated with globalization.     

Immigration and Immigrants

Abstract

Public opinion polls conducted from 1964 to 1999 found that Americans' desire to reduce immigration increased dramatically, but there existed a wide variation regarding which nationalities were to be restricted. Furthermore, the majority believed that many immigrants wind up on welfare and raise taxes for Americans and, hence, cause problems for the United States. This article reports on these findings and their implications for current political attitudes toward immigration and recent change and proposed changes inimmigration laws and programs.     

Immigration in America

The purpose of this study was to analyze the evolution of geography in the United States’ K–12 education system throughout the Nineteenth Century to understand the causes of variations, shifts in focus, and relative importance placed on geography. A broad theoretical framework, based on the work of sociologists of education and education philosophers and historians, guided the process of data collection and analysis. The authors feel that this research is significant because it clearly shows that geography was a high-status, “stand alone” subject in the public schools throughout most of the Nineteenth Century. Factors contributing to geography's prominent curricular position correlate well with the theoretical notion that the variation of emphasis of school subjects hinges largely on the involvement of their respective academic disciplines and/or scholars, and that society must perceive the subject as macro-economically beneficial to the long-term longevity of the nation's interests and economy. For the social studies as a whole, this paper represents a model of analysis for all of the subject areas that are currently included in the collection of ideas, themes, and approaches that comprise the modern concept of the social studies.     

Immigration and crisis

The author examines the purposes and results of recent migration legislation aimed at reducing the number of immigrants to France. The effects of government policies on employment, relocation of industry, and ideological structures are analyzed. Resistance to these policies is discussed, and other economic functions of immigration within the national framework are studied     

Immigration Policy in Australia,Canada, New Zealand,and the United States: An Overview of Recent Trends

Immigration policies in most host nations of the west have undergone significant changes in recent years. Based on the four country‐specific papers that appear in this section of the journal, and also on our own research, we present an overview of these changes and their context. In all countries, economic considerations play a central role in shaping immigration policy and greater importance is given to scientific research. Several common policy changes are noted in Australia, Canada and New Zealand which include: a shift away from a human capital focus toward more targeted selection based on labor market demand for specific skills, increased emphasis on temporary foreign worker programs, attraction of international students, an overhauling of the refugee system, and regionalization of immigration. In the U.S., while adoption of some of these changes has often surfaced in public policy and academic discussions, legalization of unauthorized migrants remains an important policy debate, with recent arguments focusing on the economic benefits of legalization.     

Ideology, domination and unemployment

Criticisms of the neo-Marxist dominant ideology thesis tend to under-emphasize the role which ideology plays in legitimating and sustaining systems of inequality, and instead to privilege explanations based on the ‘iron cage’ of economic and political relationships. A serious problem with some neo-Marxist analyses is the rather crude conceptualization of ideology which makes them susceptible to attack. Using material collected in Belfast amongst Protestant and Catholic working class, employed and unemployed, married men, this article seeks both to recast the notion of ideology, in particular to suggest that ideology would be better conceived not as a coherent, self-consistent system of ideas, but rather as a possibly contradictory set of themes whose primary importance lies in their specific, changing and tactical relationships to typical forms of practice, and also thereby to demonstrate how powerful and pervasive is the ideological dimension of domination.     

Parental unemployment and child health in China

This paper studies the causal effect of maternal and paternal unemployment on child health in China, analyzing panel data for the period 1997–2004, when the country underwent economic reforms leading to massive layoffs. Using a FE-IV strategy, we find that paternal unemployment reduces child health, while maternal unemployment has beneficial child health impacts. Analysis of channels shows that paternal and maternal unemployment have different effects on income, time use, and children’s diets. Though many estimates are imprecise, a key finding is that paternal unemployment significantly reduces children’s fat intake and dietary diversity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence on the causal effect of parental unemployment on the nutrient intake of children aged 0–17. In all, our estimates are consistent with the notion that traditional gender roles can explain why mothers’ and fathers’ unemployment affect child health differently.

     

American unemployment in historical perspective

During the twentieth century, the annual average unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics data has varied between 1.2 and 24.9 percent. This article, derived from our recent book,Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in 20th Century America, examines and explains variations in unemployment over time. These large fluctuations in unemployment probably account for this century’s obsession with joblessness. Alfred Marshall’sPrinciples of Economics, published in 1890, barely mentions unemployment. Only two short generations later, unemployment was the dominant topic of interest among economists, and the most influential economics book of this century, Keynes’sGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was concerned largely with explaining its existence.     

Disguised unemployment in British agriculture

This paper highlights some important changes that are taking place in the composition of the agricultural and horticultural workforce in England and Wales. It suggests that the regular whole-time hired worker has been increasingly replaced on the one hand by the casual or contract worker and on the other by the family worker. There is also some evidence, at present anecdotal or at best circumstantial, that the children of farmers may be using the farm as an employment ‘refuge’ in a period in which employment opportunities in the economy as a whole are severely limited. This raises the question of whether the phenomenon of ‘disguised unemployment’ hitherto regarded as a feature of many less developed countries may be found among family-worked farms in England and Wales. It is important that future empirical investigations should attempt to establish whether this is indeed the case.