"Canada Took Ten Years of My Life": Return and the Limits of Citizenship Among Egyptian-Canadian Families

• In Event: Return Migration in the Era of Enforcement: Uncertainty and Transnational Lives

Abstract

This paper examines a distinct form of return migration among middle-class Egyptian families who migrate to Canada through skilled worker programs, acquire permanent residency and citizenship, yet confront systematic professional exclusion and credential devaluation. While return migration scholarship has increasingly centered deportation and legal precarity, we focus on migrants who are formally included but structurally constrained. We argue that under conditions of deskilling and racialized labor market gatekeeping, return is neither voluntary nor forced. Instead, it emerges as an iterative strategy through which families attempt to manage blocked mobility across a stratified transnational field.

Drawing on interviews with 1.5-generation Egyptian Canadians (N=17) and their parents (N=12), we identify three broad strategies: transnational commuting, permanent parental return, and reluctant stay despite deskilling. Families frequently moved between these strategies over time, recalibrating decisions in response to professional stagnation, children’s educational trajectories, and shifting global opportunities. Citizenship functioned less as an anchor of incorporation than as a mobility hedge, an asset that enabled circulation without securing belonging.

We bridge return migration and transnational family literatures by examining a reverse configuration of separation: parents return to Egypt or circulate regionally while children remain in Canada. While parents frame return as an investment in children’s futures, many 1.5-generation youth describe Canadian schooling and everyday life as diminished relative to what they left behind. Rather than inheriting secure incorporation, they experience ambivalence toward Canada and imagine futures spanning both countries.

By centering legally secure but professionally marginalized migrants, this study extends enforcement scholarship beyond deportability to include credential regimes and institutionalized non-recognition. It challenges assumptions that citizenship guarantees stable intergenerational incorporation, showing instead how legal inclusion coexists with enduring uncertainty and unsettled belonging.

Authors

• Emine Fidan Elcioglu, University of Toronto

• Rania Salem, University of Toronto