The majority of our participants came to Canada recently and primarily through the economic class. A few respondents used the LCP programme as a way into the country. When asked the reasons for migrating to the destination country, many respondents wanted to escape the conditions of war, lack of job opportunities in their home countries and the abundance of educational opportunities in Canada. Most respondents had some sort of health care background and had worked in this sector in their country of origin. Some respondents reveal that in their cultures it is a common practice to take care of the grandparents; therefore, they had an affinity to seek employment in the field elder care. The interviews reveal that recruitment agencies did not play a huge role in the process of the interviewees’ migration to and employment in Canada but informal networks played an important role.

Of the employers we interviewed, many had little or no experience with recruitment or employment agencies. Instead, word of mouth tends to direct workers to apply for jobs within their homes/care centres. Many employers expressed the opinion that there were no specific reasons for recruiting/employing migrant care workers over domestic workers. Some employers see the commitment to caring/respect for older clients by immigrant care workers to be an advantage but most stressed the opinion that commitment to caring cannot be defined by one’s culture or nationality. One of the main challenges in employing immigrant care workers was that of language barriers. Many of the employers interviewed stated that they did not have anything to do with immigration policies, and were uneducated in terms of the current immigration policies influencing the recruitment and retention of immigrant care workers.