Abstract
Family is central to understanding immigrants but its role in the migration experience is under studied. This article forays into the trajectories of economic-class immigrants interviewed in the Toronto metropolitan area. It attempts to unearth how families contributed to their settlement experience, on the one hand, and how local institutions and nascent social capital contributed to their resilience, on the other hand. Findings highlight how integrative agents of local institutions played a significant role in helping interviewees acquire self-confidence and agency in their new reality. This process contributed to strengthening some of their families’ adaptive capacity. As a result, these families could fulfill their own support function more effectively towards their members. An immigrant family resilience framework is then proposed, combining elements of nascent social capital of newcomers and family adaptive systems (Henry et al. 2015). The article concludes on why family matters in the immigration process and enounces significant policy implications.
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Notes
Institutions are generally referred to in this article as organizational structures that involve people working toward a collective goal. These can be private or public or non-for-profit entities. They can represent receiving society and immigrant community organizations.
Participants were asked to draw a representation of their family network as they saw fit.
Pseudonyms are used in this article to identify quotes from participants and refer to family members’ experiences.
Synergy implies here a collaboration between family members that produces more outcomes as a whole than those produced by the same individuals if they were on their own.
Even though the topic of discrimination is not the point of this article, the author underlines that families’ adaptive systems should not be considered as a remedy for systemic prejudices.
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Funding
This study was funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a larger project entitled Integration Trajectories of Immigrant Families (Harald Bauder, from Ryerson University, is principal investigator).
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This paper is based on a research involving Human Participants and has received Ryerson University’s Research Ethics Board approval. Informed consent has been given by all participants at the onset of the research.
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A less developed book chapter, drawing on the current analysis, has been published in May 2019 under the title Social Capital, Newcomer Youth, and Family Resilience, in Putting Family First. Migration and Integration in Canada, H. Bauder (Ed.), UBC Press.
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Valade, M.Y. Influence of Integrative Social Capital on the Resilience of Immigrant Families: Accounts of Economic Class Immigrants in the Toronto Area. Int. Migration & Integration 22, 103–121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-019-00728-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-019-00728-2