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This FREE course is designed to provide settlement service providers with the knowledge, skills, and tools to understand and address the needs, challenges and opportunities for clients seeking employment. Ultimately, the goal of this course is to prepare learners to provide excellent employment-related services, support, referrals and advocacy to immigrants, refugees and all/any migrants, by understanding the big issues that impact migrant communities in the areas of employment, developing a critical analysis, and learning about promising innovative practices.

Refugees have consistently been found to experience elevated levels of distress, from symptoms of PTSD, depression, and anxiety, to various culturally specific forms of suffering. Their distress was originally believed to be primarily the result of the violence and loss they had experienced in their embattled homeland, prior to escaping into exile. It’s an understandable assumption: Experiences such as witnessing or directly experiencing violence, the constant fear generated by gunfire, shelling, and bombing, and the pervasive destruction of war can cause significant and sometimes lasting psychological harm.

Agreat upheaval is coming. Climate-driven movement of people is adding to a massive migration already under way to the world’s cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent. To survive climate breakdown will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.

Canada welcomed over 830,000 refugees from the 1980s to 2000s. However, their economic outcomes, especially the variation among major refugee groups, have not been examined comprehensively. Using the Longitudinal Immigration Database, this paper examines the labour market outcomes of refugees from 13 source countries with large inflows to Canada over the 1980-to-2009 period. The analysis first compares employment rates and earnings among refugees from the 13 source countries. It further compares each refugee group with economic-class and family-class immigrants who arrived during the same period. The results reveal a very large variation in employment rates and average earnings among the 13 refugee groups. Groups with low employment rates tended to have low earnings levels among the employed. Groups with low (high) employment rates and earnings among the men also tended to have low (high) rates among the women. Very little of the variation in earnings among refugee groups could be accounted for by differences in observable human capital characteristics, economic conditions or the program of entry to Canada. Privately sponsored refugees earned more than comparable government assisted refugees during the initial years in Canada. However, this advantage disappeared after a decade in the country.