The finding is all the more interesting in these pandemic times, underlines Émilie Nicolas, doctoral student in anthropology and co-founder and president of Québec inclusif. The percentage of black women who work in health is huge
, she says.
At the height of the pandemic, at the end of April, Montreal-North, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada, became the one with the most COVID-19 cases in Quebec. If we had made the link with its socioeconomic profile, we can now do so with the jobs held by its residents.
One in three black women work in the healthcare industry in Canada, the study says. Among Haitian women, it is one in two.
We do not learn anything new from this study, but it is an opportunity to make the connection with the news, because Montreal-North is one of the blackest neighborhoods in the country.
, remarks Ms. Nicolas.
The academic and columnist emphasizes two other points. First, it’s not just first-generation immigrant women who work in health care. Their daughters too, and even their granddaughters. Second, the perception that blacks come from elsewhere is wrong.
If you have to guess where a black person who lives in Canada is from, your best bet is to answer Canada.
This is because, on the one hand, the countries from which blacks emigrate to Canada have become widely diversified over the years, and on the other, the majority of blacks living in Canada were born there.
Ms. Nicolas points to a third figure of interest: the median annual salary of first-generation blacks is roughly the same as that of the second and third generations. That is clearly the impact of systemic racism. This means that even if the second generation is more educated, they still earn much less than what whites earn.
, she asserts.
A general portrait which does not explain everything
The study titled Changing Socioeconomic Situation of the Black Population in Canada allows us to make a few other observations.
Black men earn less than white men, for example, and their employment rate is lower. And unlike other immigrants, who arrive in Canada through the economic immigration program, blacks do so primarily through the family reunification program.
It is a very general and very factual portrait that does not explain everything
, remarks André Jacob, an academic who has worked in many countries and who coordinated the International Observatory on Racism and Discrimination for a few years.
Okay, they have a lower income. But why? It’s too easy to say it’s because of racism and discrimination
, launches the one who advised a large number of immigrants.
I have observed that the difficulties of integration come from cultural differences, such as communication codes in the workplaces, instructions, performance requirements, relations with the hierarchy, the way of training people.
Even more than Haitians, he adds, Africans who immigrate to Canada face the phenomenon that threatens all immigrants: deskilling.
Often, they don’t go to practice their trade here. For various reasons, such as technical requirements or the rigidity of professional orders
, explains Jacob.
He gives the example of a woman he knew during a consulting contract in 2018. A Senegalese woman with a master’s degree who was a journalist in her country. Here she worked at the factory. She had a lower income, she had difficulty adjusting to her new job, and you can add a certain level of discrimination to that.
All that to say that deskilling is a determinant
on the socio-economic situation of people and that it has effects on integration and adaptation
.
We must not lose sight of the fact that many factors have an influence on the social, economic and cultural integration of immigrants: their ability to adapt as much to social life as to professional achievement or language problems, for example. .
The job market is an obstacle course, he illustrates. Just because you are chosen as an engineer does not mean that you are going to find yourself a job there. This is not how it works!
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