Precarious working conditions have been a significant global challenge across many countries, and the impact of precarious employment conditions, particularly on low-income refugees, has led to dramatic experiences. Drawing on a qualitative study, this chapter investigates the precarity experiences of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Our exploration which highlights the vulnerable nature of refugees in the work environment also reveals the unwelcoming treatments they face in social life. Our multilevel analyses represent macro-, meso-, and micro-level findings. The macro-level findings point to a lack of migration policy, insufficient level of employment laws and labour unionisation that worsen the precarious conditions. At the meso-level analysis, we found inadequate organisational level interventions by firms such as unethical treatment, intimidation for noticing police and wage theft. Finally, the micro-level results focused on social exclusion. The study contributes to debates on insecurity, inequality, diversity, and human rights in migration studies.

The chapter briefly reviews general US immigration and refugee policy over the years. It then describes the Cuban revolution, and how and why Cubans who opposed it sought refuge in the United States, and how, in turn, the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, successively, opposed to the anti-American radical turn of the revolution in the throes of the Cold War, offered Cubans unique immigration and resettlement entitlements. The “soft power” initiatives were intended to delegitimize Castro’s rule by demonstrating Cuban preference for capitalist democracy over Communism and by depleting Cuba of its human capital. In a “path dependent” manner the Presidents extended a string of entitlements, to address issues earlier entitlements generated or left unresolved, and new issues that evolved. The chapter also describes the failure of Washington’s one “hard power” effort to overthrow Castro, with the help of Cuban beneficiaries of “soft power” entitlements: the Bay of Pigs invasion. Neither the “soft” nor the “hard” power strategies kept Castro from consolidating the revolution.

In this paper I critically review language policies aiming at the integration of immigrants into French minorities in Canada, and use recent survey data to trace the impact of these policies on adult Francophone immigrants’ integration experiences outside of Quebec. An analysis of the intersections between these language policies and the integration trajectories shows interesting, but also worrying trends which are discussed in this paper. While these policies arguably aim at the maintenance of linguistic status quo, both nationally and locally, through reinforcing the existing balance of power between English and French communities, and through leveling asymmetries in French minority settings, they simultaneously work at facilitating but also impeding immigrant integration; as such, they are at times embraced, and at others resisted on immigrants’ pathways.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.