Stratégies de régionalisation : le cas des intervenants isolés en région au Québec

The 1992 provincial government policy on immigrant regionalization attempts to remedy the concentration of immigration in the Montréal region (Boulais, 2010). Despite some mixed results, there has been an increase in ethno-cultural diversity in Québec’s non-metropolitan and rural areas. In these remote regions, there is often only one community actor responsible for these people. Different contextual factors have an impact on these actors’ daily work such as mandates, funding, and types of clientele. Therefore, they need to come up with a strategy in order to pair up different factors to adequately respond to those multiple contextual elements. This Master’s thesis will attempt to answer the following question: What are the intervention strategies used by regionalization agents facing geographical isolation?  The research uses a systemic approach in order to identify the components of this system and identify its conceptual framework. Afterwards, I will attempt to bring to light the system’s practices such as strategies. I favoured ethnographic research methods such as questionnaires, phone interviews and field observations in order to model the work of these actors at the very heart of this research. I used the five components of regionalization identified by Duplessis (2013) as a tool to classify the practices of my respondents and clarify the underlying processes: 1- solicitation, prospecting and recruitment of immigrant people, 2- professional insertion activities, 3- prospecting, networking and procedures with employers, 4- welcoming, establishing and integration of immigrant families, and 5- development of regionalized immigration activities.   The first segment consists of regional promotion events to attract a group of interested people, and then focus on soliciting and persuading them to choose the region in question. The second segment includes job-seeking, insertion and integration activities, namely everything relating to the immigrant person’s increased well-being once hired. The third one consists of all actions taken alongside employers. The fourth segment includes the environment’s groundwork, welcoming and establishment processes as well as mediation. Lastly, the fifth segment consists of concertation tables and administrative practices used to catalogue the clientele.  Finally, I recognize three main intervention strategies alongside the immigrant population in these territories: social, employability and growth. The social strategy emphasizes processes related to integration, while the employability strategy focuses on the issues related to the job market and workplace. The growth strategy does not have much direct contact with immigrant clients themselves, but instead concentrates its energy on the growth of the immigrant population more generally.  In the future, it will be possible to use the template offered by this research to study the changes in the strategies and impact of immigration organizations over time and their relation to host society. This way, we will be able to measure the impacts of the contextual factors on these organizations, especially due to the MIDI’s economic turn when it comes to immigration.

Keyphrases: Regional immigration, Regionalization community actor