Deskilling and Shame. A Study about the Failures of Integration of Foreign Professionals

When people migrate, they lose many things, experiences in the communities they left, and possibly their lives. If they are professionals, they may lose their profession, a process called deskilling or underskilling in migration literature.

Deskilling refers to the loss of a skill, generally due to technological change, while underskilling is understood more as underemployment (doing a job for which people are overqualified). Deskilling can take many forms, so I will begin by recalling Tella Omeri’s written testimony about his flight to Afghanistan. Like many Afghans aged 40 or more, Tella was a refugee twice in his life: the first time because of the Soviet Invasion in 1985 and the second time, with the takeover of the Taliban. His family first flew to Pakistan when he was only six; he remembers he was stopped from throwing stones in the water, how he was pushed not to speak and not to cry despite his broken arm, and also, the situation at the border.
Years passed, Tella grew up as a refugee, and the family could even return to Afghanistan. They had lost all their animals, their source of living. He took a passion for becoming a TV set repair man; he struggled hard to convince his father to pay for his apprenticeship and, long story short, he finally got his own TV and radio business. He felt fulfilled.

Then the Taliban came into power: TVs and radios were banned, and there would be punishment for anyone who held one at home. The media were possible means of contamination and corruption from the West ideas. Tella was beaten up for being a TV repairman, threatened with death, and had to flee with fake documents. After a long and painful journey beyond imagination, Tella made it to the UK. In Margate, England, he worked as a pizza delivery man but didn’t get paid for months. He recalls:
Eventually, Tella got his insurance number and he was able to work. On the streets and in the garbage, he saw many broken TV sets he could repair. However, he soon learned hardly anyone repaired their TVs anymore: they just bought a new one.
RESEARCH IN CANADA
I found the little book by Tella Omeri at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and devoured it quickly after opening it. This story is so compelling in explaining skill loss that I have decided to start this essay by retelling it instead of sharing my own interviews with displaced professionals in Canada and the US.

In 2022-2023 I was honored by receiving funding for a sabbatical project called Skills Mismatch of Displaced Professionals: The Blind Spot of Canadian Migration Policy, at the University of Toronto, with renowned professors Jeffrey Reitz and Randall Hansen. My research was meant to clarify the integration of displaced professional migrants in Canada, using a mixed methodology of biographical research and discourse analysis of Canadian migration diplomacy. My objective was to show the differences between voluntary and forced skilled migration in the context of a model society such as Canadian multiculturalism.

This research aimed to explore the disconnection between the humanitarian discourse surrounding refugees, on the one hand, and the fact that many refugees in Canada are highly skilled. Their experience is different from the overall cohort of unskilled or medium-skilled refugees, an issue that has been many times left behind from the humanitarian discourse of Canadian diplomats and politicians.

Skilled mobility has been pictured as the best scenario of emigration, in which individuals get to choose the place where they want to live and even prepare for their leave through education in foreign languages. However, there are cases when skilled migrants are forced to migrate in the same way as unskilled ones: wars, poverty, and violence may cause sudden or barely planned decisions to migrate.

I chose Canada for conducting this research for its particularities as a model host society, protected by its multiculturalism against populist and antimigrant discourses that other main countries of destination of skilled migration, such as the US, the UK and Australia, are currently experiencing. Canada was even shown to benefit from a possible spillover effect that caused certain foreign workers from the US to move to cosmopolitan technological hubs such as Toronto, “the world in a city” (Anisef and Laphnier, 2003; Wadhwa et al., 2007). Canada was also leading the refugee submissions by destination as of January 2020 (UNHCR, 2020).

Despite its excellent migration diplomacy practice, many refugees were shown to need help in their integration into the job market (Enns, 2017; Nichles and Nyce, 2018). Many displaced professionals do not carry their diplomas and even when they do, they lack Canadian experience; furthermore, the definition for certain skills in their country of origin is different from that of their country of destination. These differences in skills definition are quite common among various knowledge economies (Lo, Li and Yo, 2019).

Several theoretical approaches served as a background for this study. A more general theoretical approach is provided by Boswell (2009) and Banulescu-Bogdan (2018), both outlining how knowledge utilization in the politics of migration is based on the media information, which means that migration issues have frequently been characterized as a typical subject for risk construction for many countries of destination. Canada may be a different case due to the relevance of migrants for its economy and national identity. Previous work by Roberts (2015) has deconstructed the role of hospitality in the Canadian identity, including its outcome on the integration of new migrants. Other studies are dedicated to the privatization of refugee costs in Canada (Hyndman, Payne and Jiménez, 2017) and to mental health problems that may hinder the labour integration of skilled immigrants in Canada (Kaushik and Drolet, 2018). My research also considered private refugee sponsorship and the intervention of civil society organizations such as World Education Services and Talent Beyond Boundaries in the certification of foreign professionals.

My study was conducted in two levels of analysis: a survey with displaced professionals relocated around the world, and a biographical research based on in-depth interviews with skilled refugees. The survey respondents had previously occupied in research, teaching, management, law, engineering, medicine, art, or accounting (Tigau, 2023). However, 30 percent of them have experienced wage theft or underpayment because of their condition as forced migrants and refugees. 43 percent had changed occupations, 20 percent were unemployed, and 14 percent were studying, even though many of them used their studies to get a scholarship or enter the job market, not because they wanted to study again. Only 23 percent had kept their previous occupation, a finding linked to their well-being. The relocation process, with serious consequences of loss, family loss and separation, loss of previous prestige and professions, and cultural shocks, had a strong impact on individual health, with many suffering from depression (36 percent), posttraumatic stress disorder (20 percent), mental illness (8 percent) and a wide arrange of problems such as high blood pressure and digestive issues. Interestingly, most were thankful for being alive and thanked their new countries. Individuals in Canada were highly grateful for a warm reception; they reported less explicit discrimination than elsewhere. However, they also encountered many difficulties in finding the right job.

Before rounding up the argument and concluding, I’ll return to the personal experiences of displaced professionals I encountered in Canada. This was a difficult group to access, with long periods of waiting for interviews, dangers in talking for some of the political refugees who didn’t want to disclose their names, and a general reluctance to tell their stories. The trauma of displacement, which included several borders and countries during the relocation process, could have caused them shame, humiliation, and fear to talk about their situation.

While we started with a story on deskilling, let’s also revise some about underskilling and what could be called a double brain drain: once for the country of origin that lost a valuable professional and the other for the country of destination that does not create the correct infrastructure to take advantage of the person’s profession and qualities. Medical migration is a clear example of this: medical doctors who have studied abroad (Canadians included) have difficulty recertificating in Canada.

Noghrei, previously a medical doctor in Iran, had been working as a Starbucks and McDonalds attendant for eight years at the time of our conversation. In her 30s, she recently started to study all over again, passing through nursing courses, general medicine, and, hopefully, cardiology. Noghrei, whom I interviewed in a Starbucks at North York, Toronto, on January 20, 2023, hopes to practice again as a cardiologist when she is 40, which makes a lapse of about 16 years in her career as a medical practitioner.

Zaid (pseudonym), from Syria, previously a dentist in Dubai, has also started the recertification process, though differently. He is a circular migrant between Canada and United Arab Emirates: He works as a dentist in Dubai, operates, and makes money for three weeks; then, he returns to Canada to study and pay for the recertification exams, which are estimated to cost over CAD 30,000, counting courses and exams.

Olga, from Ukraine, cannot do the same, mainly due to financial and age issues. She was 58 at the time of the interview and a psychiatrist in Ukraine. But she doesn’t have the money or energy to take a loan, study again and recertify as a psychiatrist when she turns 65. That would be her retirement age. She had never planned on leaving Ukraine, was it not because of the war. Instead, she worked hard to improve her English, and she is now a personal coach, mainly for Ukrainians who left the war.

Amira (pseundonym), also a medical doctor from Sudan, was luckier in finding a job in the UN system on health-related issues. She came to Canada as a refugee years before and finds herself lucky to have managed to keep her profession. However, she reflects:    
CONCLUSION
Whenever we do qualitative research, there is always a question about generalizing the results. There is a general sense that, at least in the medical field, recertification requirements go far beyond what the involved consider a reasonable procedure. Even more so in the case of Canada, a country that is suffering from a critical lack of health personnel recognized by the authorities. 22 percent of the Canadians do not have a family doctor, according to a report by MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions (2024). However, a lot of foreign physicians, already trained and educated, are awaiting recertification. Prof. Henry Bauder from TMU calls this a “brain abuse”, a term that could summarize a problem linked to bureaucratic inefficiently in integration and, why not, a tendency to depreciate intellectual work from elsewhere.

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