BAUDER, Harald and SHIELDS, John (dir.) (2015) Immigrant experiences in North America: Understanding settlement and integration. Toronto, Canadian Scholars’ Press, 450 p. (ISBN 978-1-55130-714-5)

This edited volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the array of settlement issues and experiences facing immigrants in Canada and the United States. The list of contributors is impressive with leading scholars on several topics writing chapters (e.g., Beiser on health, Siemiatycki on policy, Wang on retailing to name a few), and two renowned scholars, Bauder and Shields, curating the volume as editors. The result is a fairly exhaustive and intentionally transdisciplinary book. I was initially skeptical about the book’s broad focus on North America, given the vastly different approaches to immigration in the almost two-dozen countries that make up the continent. This volume focuses exclusively on Canada and the United States as host countries, with some mention of other North American countries as sources of migrants. The editors make a good case for studying the United States and Canada together, using a comparative approach. The incorporation of at least two case studies in each chapter serves this purpose well.

As a collection on settlement and integration, this book has all the substantive areas expected, including history and policy approaches to immigration; settlement patterns; employment and education patterns; and gendered experiences. The volume also includes novel chapters on ethnic retailing, security, ethnic media and food security. The editors are to be commended for including immigrant health and access to health care into two separate chapters, as well as dedicating substantial space to issues of marginalization in two distinct chapters on inequality and gender, but also throughout many others. The lack of a specific chapter on citizenship is an obvious gap that the editors note in the introduction. While they state this focus is beyond the scope of this volume, I would argue that immigrant experiences cannot be discussed apart from citizenship as it is the desired outcome for many and shapes how and what immigrants experience during the settlement and integration process (Joppke and Morawska, 2002). Beyond being an official status, citizenship is a social process (or arguably a cultural ethic in Canada) that intends to produce experiences of belonging for newcomers whether or not they become full citizens (Leitner and Ehrkamp, 2006). Sharma (Chapter 8) comes the closest to a fulsome discussion on social citizenship but the inclusion of an independent chapter would be ideal to emphasize its importance.

I struggled with the transdisciplinary approach to this book. On the one hand this is a suitable approach to capture the complexity of immigrant settlement and integration issues, and as noted above, the editors have captured an impressive array of experiences here. However, the volume lacks a strong theoretical or disciplinary foundation that would assist readers—the editors target middle to upper year undergraduates—in situating or interpreting the chapter contents within their respective field of study. In my own teaching, I would find particular chapters very helpful, but as a course text I would need to supplement heavily to maintain the social-spatial focus for senior undergraduates in geography / planning. I believe this book to be better suited for topic-based courses or programs, such as Ryerson University’s graduate program in Immigration and Settlement Studies or as a required reading for senior graduate students studying immigration and settlement who have developed sufficient disciplinary expertise to interpret and apply the diverse material covered.

Finally, this book was published in 2015 before Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States on an anti-immigration platform, and before Justin Trudeau was elected as Prime Minister of Canada using the dichotomous platform of diversity as strength. In the two years between when this book was published and this review written, the impact of these political events and others including Brexit on the trajectory and experiences of immigrants in North America has likely been great. Despite the impossibility of including these events in this edition of the book, their absence is obvious now and so I look forward to seeing how these are incorporated into potential future editions.