Self-appreciation and the value of employability: integrating un(der) employed immigrants in post-Fordist Canada

The Canadian government actively recruits skilled immigrants who, by virtue of their human capital, are characterised as full of potential economic value. The widespread un(der)employment of skilled immigrants has consequently been problematised as costing the nation billions of dollars a year in potential economic growth and tax revenue (Toronto City Summit Alliance, 2003). Integration programmes that aim to address this loss, however, often simultaneously focus on immigrants' 'skills deficits' and 'lack of Canadian experience', encouraging them to accumulate knowledge and skills in order to become more 'employable'. This chapter examines the ways in which these programmes and immigrant un(der)employment have become key sites not only for cultivating entrepreneurial and investor subjectivities, but also for value-producing events. More specifically, I show how unemployment for skilled immigrants in Toronto, Canada, and inclusion into the nation require an investor ethos, that of investing in one's human capital as assets. According to this financialised logic, it is more productive to invest in one's future by self-appreciating in the present than it is to merely make an income in a low-paying 'survival job'. Rather than surviving, one cultivates one's human capital by investing in the self through potentially value-producing activities. In addition, this chapter considers how, in an emerging approach to integration, democratising access to credit is viewed as giving immigrants the opportunity to become self-employed through various forms of financialised investment. I also show how the state's privileging of entrepreneurial and investor forms of citizenship reinscribes divisions between those who accept responsibility for the privatisation of integration risks and retraining costs, previously shouldered by the welfare state, and those who do not. This chapter argues that speculative investments do not necessarily result in stable employment; rather, they ensure immigrants are perpetually appreciating, even if desirable employment never arrives