Anna Boucher

Skill, Migration and Gender in Australia and Canada: The Case of Gender-based Analysis

The shift away from family immigration and towards skilled immigration is one of the most important changes over the past decade in Australian immigration policy. Yet the implications of this shift for female applicants have remained largely unexplored. Skilled immigration has slipped by as a genderless story in which the androgynous skilled migrant is the central character and economists do most of the storytelling. This paper discusses the gender equality concerns raised by the policy shift towards skilled immigration. It argues that Australias skilled immigration scheme disadvantages female applicants through its construction both of economic independence and ‘skill.’ A comparison with Canadas skilled migration law and regulations, which are audited by gender mainstreaming tools, is considered to ascertain what role, if any, gender-based analysis plays in identifying and rectifying the potential gender inequalities produced by skilled immigration selection.

Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database

This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.

Measuring and Comparing Immigration, Asylum and Naturalization Policies Across Countries: Challenges and Solutions

Academics and policy makers require a better understanding of the variation of policies that regulate global migration, asylum and immigrant naturalization. At present, however, there is no comprehensive cross-national, time-series database of such policies, rendering the analysis of policy trends across and within these areas difficult at best. Several new immigration databases and indices have been developed in recent years. However, there is no consensus on how best to conceptualize, measure and aggregate migration policy indicators to allow for meaningful comparisons through time and across space. This article discusses these methodological challenges and introduces practical solutions that involve historical, multi-dimensional, disaggregated and transparent conceptualizing, measuring and compiling of cross-national immigration policies. Such an approach informs the International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) database.

Bureaucratic Control and Policy Change: A Comparative Venue Shopping Approach to Skilled Immigration Policies in Australia and Canada

Abstract Governments increasingly seek to implement skilled migration programmes. Yet, the policies that ultimately result differ in important ways, particularly with regard to the human capital assets required of applicants. These differences in policy outputs can be attributed to important variations in the policy-making process, in particular in the extent of bureaucratic control over policy-making, and in the capacity for venue shopping on the part of internal and external actors. This article develops ideas around bureaucratic control and how it interacts with venue shopping in two Westminster-inspired systems of government in the skilled immigration area.

Familialism and migrant welfare policy: restrictions on social security provision for newly arrived immigrants

This article assesses the ways in which expectations around familial reliance are built into welfare policies for newly arrived immigrants. Through analysis of policies in place in Australia and Canada, it shows how familial reliance is tied as a condition of immigration entry, as well as eligibility for social welfare. It demonstrates how these rules differ across welfare benefit and visa categories. Patterns of familialism are heightened in the immigrant welfare setting and apply to a broader range of benefits and familial relationships, than for general welfare receivers, suggesting new extensions to the familialism scholarship.

Boundary spanning regimes and public policy change: the convergence of welfare and immigration policies

ABSTRACT The concept of boundary spanning regimes has emerged to describe activity across policy subsystems that seek to manage ‘wicked’ public policy problems. This paper examines two existing public policy theories, namely those of exogenous shocks and the Advocacy Coalition Framework theories and assesses their capacity to explain why boundary spanning regimes emerge. It argues that broad structural conditions play an important role in shaping boundary spanning activity in the case studies discussed in this paper, indicating limitations in these theories which tend to overlook such conditions. The paper tests the explanations for policy change through original qualitative analysis of incremental convergence across the welfare and immigration policy fields in Australia from 1947 to 1996.