Filipino Youth Transitions In Canada Research (FYTIC)
Posted by casjcanada on February 16, 2011
Many Filipino immigrants have experienced deprofessionalization in the Canadian labour market. This failure of Canadian employers and institutions to recognize the training, education and professional experience of immigrants is a widely acknowledged problem. A growing concern, however, is how the children of immigrants are faring in terms of their educational and employment outcomes.
Past research has shown that the children of Filipino immigrants have one of the lowest rates of university graduation and some of the highest rates of drop-out from high school. It seems that, despite their talents, some Filipino-Canadian youth may be getting channelled into the same kinds of deprofessionalized labour market positions as their parents. The objective of this project is to examine the roots of these inter-generational outcomes.
The study is based on qualitative interviews with key informants from the Filipino community, focus group discussions, and surveys of respondents aged 18-30 in the 2nd or 1.5 generations (i.e. those born in Canada to immigrant parents, and those who immigrated during childhood).
The project is conducting case studies in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Hamilton. This will allow us to examine outcomes in cities with diverse histories of Filipino settlement, and in quite different neighbourhoods across these cities. In each city, the project will have a collaborative relationship with a local community organization. The project was created in Toronto in collaboration with the Community Alliance for Social Justice.
This research should help us understand how Filipino identity is related to economic opportunities, how parental employment is reproduced in the life chances of their children, and how different immigrant settlement sites shape the next generation in important ways.
Philip F. Kelly
Philip Kelly is the Principal Investigator of the Filipino Youth Transitions in Canada project (FYTIC), a collaborative research project with The Community Alliance for Social Justice (CASJ). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at York University. He is the author of Landscapes of Globalization: Human Geographies of Economic Change in the Philippines (Routledge, 2000) and co-author (with Neil Coe and Henry Yeung) of Economic Geography: A Contemporary Introduction (Blackwell, 2007). He is currently completing a project on migration and rural change in Southeast Asia, and is Principal Investigator of the Toronto Immigrant Employment Data Initiative, a
Website: http://www.yorku.ca/pfkelly/
