Skill as a relational construct: hiring practices from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada

Under-employment and unemployment of immigrants has often been attributed to immigrants’ lack of human capital skills and/or cultural and social capital endowments. Few studies have addressed the fact that despite these possible ‘capital’ disadvantages, immigrant niches are occasionally made in professional fields. Based on an institutional ethnographic study, this article sheds light on this phenomenon. Specifically, it traces some of the hiring practices found within the engineering profession in Canada from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers. It unveils a hard versus soft skill discourse that ideologically relegates minoritized immigrants to the bottom of the hiring queue. It also maps a project-based and network-dependent hiring schema that paradoxically renders immigrants without ‘desirable’ skills simultaneously dismissible and indispensable. It further argues that the skill discourse revealed constitutes a rationalizing mechanism through which racialization and capitalist pursuit of maximum surplus value interact to produce differential opportunities for immigrants at different places and times.