Macro-level forces and legal consciousness: theorizing (Un)deservingness through vulnerability

People’s interactions with state actors in and outside the legal system shape their perceptions of and relationships with the law (de Sa e Silva Reference de Sa e Silva2020; Gallagher Reference Gallagher2006, Reference Gallagher2017; Galli Reference Galli2020; Headworth Reference Headworth2020; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2023; Merry Reference Merry2003; Tenorio Reference Tenorio2025; Young Reference Young2014). In general, positive experiences with the legal system tend to empower individuals and reinforce their beliefs in their rights and the legal system, while negative experiences with state actors sometimes change their strategies to relate to the law. As Sally Engle Merry’s (Reference Merry2003, p. 347) study on battered women’s mobilization of the law demonstrates, if state actors treated the women’s right to not be battered as insignificant, they may give up and no longer think about their grievances in terms of rights. Likewise, torture prevention activists in Brazil do not continue to uphold law’s authority after realizing the justice system’s empty promises to people when it comes to the actual prevention of torture (de Sa e Silva Reference de Sa e Silva2020). Disenchantment with the promises of the legal system, however, does not necessarily lead to despondency or even rejection among individuals with little experience with the law – Mary Gallagher’s (Reference Gallagher2006, Reference Gallagher2017) research on disadvantaged labor dispute plaintiffs in China finds that they come out from the legal process feeling well-prepared for future legal battles with the strategies they have gained from their mobilization of the law.

Studies on marginalized individuals’ interactions with state actors outside the legal system also offer key insights into the individual’s sense of deservingness of legal rights and protection (Galli Reference Galli2020; Liu Reference Liu2025b; Nguyen Reference Nguyen2023; Sarat Reference Sarat1990; Tenorio Reference Tenorio2025). In the context of legal consciousness and immigration, Luis Edward Tenorio’s (Reference Tenorio2025) research on the disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity among sexual and gender minority unaccompanied minors reveals that the initial negative experiences with state actors lead to the minors’ belief that their legal rights and deservingness of protections are contingent on their legal status in the United States. In another study on undocumented youth’s legal consciousness, Chiara Galli (Reference Galli2020) argues that the interactions with state actors lead the unaccompanied youths to internalize the stigma identities associated with their subordinate social group and contribute to their decisions to distance themselves from those “bad” immigrants. This assumption among undocumented youth is consistent with Austin Sarat’s (Reference Sarat1990) study on the welfare poor, which demonstrates how those “respectable poor” distinguished themselves from “the welfare crowd” to justify their deservingness in the welfare system and the lawyer’s office. Similar to what Michael Katz (Reference Katz2013) describes as the “undeserving poor” whose failure is to blame for their suffering, research participants in these studies believe that it is the responsibility of the individual to gain “deservingness” through fixing their own problems.

It is, however, problematic to consider individuals as autonomous and independent subjects with full control over their deservingness through making rational choices and accumulating resources. As feminist relational theorists argue, the myth of autonomous individuals not only fails to capture structural inequalities and injustice, but also covers up state inaction and its lack of responses to the struggles of people who have received the short end of the stick (e.g. Fineman Reference Fineman2008, Reference Fineman2021; Koggel Reference Koggel2020; Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky2011, Reference Nedelsky, Celermajer and Lefebvre2020, Reference Nedelsky, Brake, Chamallas and Williams2021). Narratives of deservingness based on morality, culture, or biology, therefore, run the risk of leaving systemic aspects of existing societal arrangements out of the picture (Fineman Reference Fineman2008, p.4).

The multi-level legal consciousness framework draws on feminist relational theory to emphasize our inevitable dependence on various types of relationships, institutions, and structures to survive and thrive (Fineman Reference Fineman2008; Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky2011). The central idea of feminist relational theory is that “individuals are situated in networks of relationships in and through which they are co-constituted within the broader social framework of institutions and norms” (Koggel et al. Reference Koggel, Harbin and Llewellyn2022, p.4). Fineman’s (Reference Fineman2008) vulnerability theory suggests that the individualistic and rationalistic conceptions of the self and autonomy, which depict legal subjects as autonomous and independent individuals, fail to reflect the vulnerable and dependent nature of the human condition.

Vulnerability theory, according to Fineman (Reference Fineman2021, p.104), “presents a different paradigm for thinking about the nature of the state and its social institutions and relationships, as well as a basis for defining state or collective responsibility, one that also moves us beyond the focus of either a human-rights analysis or a paradigm centered on equality and discrimination.” It foregrounds state responsibility and offers “a heuristic device to examine hidden assumptions and biases that shaped its original social and cultural meanings” (Fineman Reference Fineman2008, p.9). In so doing, it calls for more attention to the state’s inaction and failure in reflecting the vulnerable and dependent nature of human conditions, and advocates for displacing the reasonable man of law that now dominates the existing literature with the vulnerable subject (Fineman Reference Fineman2008;, Reference Fineman2019, Reference Fineman, Fineman and Spitz2024). When it comes to contractual relations, for example, the self-interested individualistic model assumes that it is the individual’s fault to sign contracts that disadvantage them, while vulnerability theory enables us to detect the further exploitation of the poor both in the free-market game and the legal process (Keren Reference Keren, Fineman, Andersson and Mattsson2017).

Building on vulnerability theory, the multi-level legal consciousness framework redirects attention to the role of the state in providing resources for individuals to be resilient. According to Fineman (Reference Fineman2014), individuals accumulate resilience within social structures and institutions over which one has little control, and one’s degree of resilience largely depends on the resources available to the individual. This resilience provides individuals with the means and ability to recover from harm and setbacks (Fineman Reference Fineman2014). The multi-level legal consciousness framework’s emphasis on state responsibility in fostering resilience helps connect the past with the present to explore state inaction in addressing historical wrongs and attending to the needs of those who continue to be disadvantaged in institutional structures. This is especially helpful in societies where structural inequalities embedded in the social, political, and legal systems are difficult to detect.

Canada, for example, has a long history of depicting Chinese immigrants as disposable and undesirable. From the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, Chinese immigrants faced racial discrimination and immigration exclusion and control under the Chinese Head Tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Hermansen and Henry Reference Hermansen, Henry, Bonnell and Fortin2014). Back then, many white Canadians were hostile to Chinese immigrants, despite the latter’s significant contribution to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (MaRae Reference MaRae2017). In 1885, immediately after the completion of the railway, the Canadian government imposed a head tax on all Chinese entering Canada to discourage Chinese migration, which was initially $50 but went up to $500 over 3 years (MaRae Reference MaRae2017). The Chinese Head Tax was the Canadian government’s response to racist criticisms from Anglo-Saxon workers in British Columbia that Chinese labourers were driving down wages and taking jobs away from them (James Reference James2005). In 1924, the Chinese Head Tax was replaced with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited nearly all Chinese immigration to Canada until 1947 (Chan Reference Chan2016). The racist immigration legislation clearly communicated a status of ethnic undesirability (Winter Reference Winter2008).

Despite the historical injustice and ongoing racial discrimination, anti-Asian racism remains invisible for the most part in Canadian society in recent decades after the removal of overt racist language from law and policy in the 1960s (Fang et al. Reference Fang, Lee, Chan, Al-Raes and Nuesca2024; Lee Reference Lee2023; Yu Reference Yu2022). Nowadays, Canada has successfully presented itself as a country that celebrates diversity and multiculturalism, making it more challenging to deconstruct the role of racism in Canada than in the United States (Lee Reference Lee2023). The insidious and hegemonic nature of anti-Asian racism in Canada makes it extremely difficult for white Canadians and even Chinese immigrants themselves to hold the state accountable for the lack of support for Chinese immigrants to be resilient. The multi-level legal consciousness framework aims to reveal the influential role of systemic racism in shaping the legal consciousness of Chinese immigrants by connecting the host country’s inaction with their everyday experiences of interacting with others in Canadian society.

Micro-level experiences and the relational nature of legal consciousness

Law and society scholarship has demonstrated that our legal consciousness is not only shaped by our own beliefs and experiences but also by our understandings of other people’s perceptions of and experiences with the law (de Sa e Silva Reference de Sa e Silva2022; Headworth Reference Headworth2020; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2023; Young Reference Young2014; Young and Chimowitz Reference Young and Chimowitz2022), which Kathryne M. Young (Reference Young2014) refers to as second-order legal consciousness. Several recent studies draw on the concept of second-order legal consciousness to capture the interplay between the legal consciousness of state authorities and ordinary citizens and the ongoing back-and-forth between each side (de Sa e Silva Reference de Sa e Silva2022; Headworth Reference Headworth2020; Hertogh Reference Hertogh2023; Young and Chimowitz Reference Young and Chimowitz2022). As these studies primarily focus on interactions with state actors, we know little about the scenarios with a less active role of the state and its actors, nor do we know much about how state inaction and the state’s failure in protecting people who share the same marginalized identity shape their legal consciousness. This less obvious role of the state in shaping legal consciousness points to the need to connect micro-level experiences with macro-level forces to understand the impacts of structural inequalities and institutional arrangements on members within the marginalized group. Close attention must be paid to the interactions among group members and how their shared experiences shape their legal consciousness through these interactions.

In fact, relational legal consciousness studies that define relationality along the line of relationships have provided some insights into the impact of group dynamics on individual members’ legal consciousness. These studies feature the exchange of love among family members, the desire for a sense of belonging, and the need to maintain close relationships (Abrego Reference Abrego2019; Engel Reference Engel2016, Reference Engel, Bloom, Engel and Jolly2025; Liu Reference Liu2023, Reference Liu2024, Reference Liu2025a; Tenorio Reference Tenorio2024; Wang Reference Wang2019, Reference Wang2023). For example, according to Engel’s (Reference Engel2016, p.157) research on injury victims’ reluctance to claim rights in the United States and Thailand, “Interactions with their closest friends and family members will produce a shared understanding of the accident, why it happened, and what should be done about it – and this understanding is likely to have a powerful effect on the victim’s thoughts and actions for quite a long time, because of the strength and stability of the relationships.” The importance of maintaining harmonious family relations in Chinese societies also significantly shapes people’s decisions regarding how to use the law or not when confronting unfair treatment and family disputes, as harmony within the family often takes priority over individual needs and desires (Liu Reference Liu2025a; Wang Reference Wang2019, Reference Wang2023). Focusing on formerly undocumented immigrants in the United States, Tenorio (Reference Tenorio2024, p.408) notes, “Interactions within social networks produced a sense of social debt or the notion that formerly undocumented immigrants owed their family, those close to them, or their broader community to act upon the perceived privileges and responsibilities of their legal status.”

Despite their contributions to our understanding of the impact of close relationships on legal consciousness, existing studies have not yet offered a detailed analysis of how shared experiences within a marginalized community lead to a process of co-constructing legal consciousness among community members. This article aims to address this neglected area of inquiry by focusing on how state inaction and its lack of response to the struggles of members of the Chinese community push Chinese immigrants to internalize and reproduce structural inequalities in their everyday interactions and co-construct a sense of undeservingness.

Chinese immigrants’ reluctance to discuss contracts openly and seek redress

Virtually all Chinese immigrants interviewed for this study had experienced predatory practices of some sort upon their arrival in Canada. It is common for Chinese immigrants to encounter landlords who have them sign unfavourable rental agreements, mechanics who sell them cars with accident histories and no inspections, employers who refuse to provide employment agreements, and business partners who gradually push them out of joint business, just to name a few. Lawyers who routinely work with Chinese clients blame Chinese immigrants’ lack of awareness of the importance of contracts and their reliance on guanxi, which makes it difficult to obtain evidence to be presented to the court. Lawyer Gao, a small-firm practitioner whose clients were primarily Chinese immigrants, observed from her 10 years of experience that “Chinese people feel culturally inappropriate to emphasize their rights and interests in front of the other party explicitly” (Interview with Ying Gao, December 2023). This emphasis on guanxi, in her view, led to their lack of attention to contracts. She explained,

While Lawyer Gao and other Chinese lawyers took it for granted that contracts would be effective tools for Chinese immigrants, it is problematic to assume that Chinese immigrants can decide freely as autonomous individuals when it comes to contractual relations. It fails to consider the situations where Chinese immigrants are in no position to insist on having a written agreement or revising contract terms.

Take employment agreements as an example. Jie Che, who arrived in Canada in 2018 as a mature student in her mid-30s with several years of experience in the banking industry, struggled to find work after receiving her degree in finance from a university in Western Canada. Jie decided to lower her standards and take on whatever job she could find after realizing that most Chinese immigrants did not manage to find jobs that matched their skills and experiences. “It is too difficult for Chinese immigrants to get back to their own fields, and I feel that we are all picking up some new skills to fit in based on what the Canadian society needs because oftentimes our credentials from China are not recognized here,” Jie explained. Her observation was consistent with studies on the experiences of Chinese immigrant professionals in Canada (Guo Reference Guo2009; Guo and DeVoretz Reference Guo and DeVoretz2006).

Jie soon accepted an offer to be a cashier in a small Chinese restaurant. There was no employment agreement involved, and Jie felt that she should not ask for a written contract because doing so would eliminate her chance of getting the job when there were so many people competing for very few positions. After several months’ hard work, she received a text message from the owner, telling her not to come to work the next day. When I asked whether she had confronted her employer in any way, Jie reminded me that there was no employment agreement whatsoever. In Jie’s words, “I didn’t sign an employment agreement because it was the norm for Chinese restaurants… I have decided to turn the page and move on. Now I see it as a lesson learned.” (Interview with Jie Che, February 2024). Jie emphasized that becoming a victim of predatory practices was the destiny of every Chinese immigrant.

The same mindset of not deserving to insist on a contract is evident among Chinese immigrants in the business context. Hongwei Zheng, owner of an electronics factory in mainland China who arrived in Canada in the late 2000s, met Mr. Chen, an established Chinese immigrant hired by a Canadian construction company to look for investors for rezoning projects involving tearing down old buildings for the construction of new condos for sale. Out of his trust in Mr. Chen, Hongwei decided to take C$150,000 out of his family’s savings to be part of the rezoning project. He signed the contract provided by the company without reviewing it carefully, nor did he read the monthly reports line by line. It turned out that the company had been struggling with mismanagement for a while, and the contract contained terms that kept Hongwei from getting anything back when the company went through bankruptcy shortly after.

Looking back, Hongwei saw this experience as a lesson for new immigrants who had a high level of trust in others. Hongwei said, “The biggest problem is that Chinese immigrants place too much trust in other people… Mr. Chen convinced several Chinese families to invest in the project, and nobody read those documents carefully. There were red flags in the transaction histories, but we did not catch them…I thought reading through the contract and reports word by word was a culturally inappropriate thing to do to a friend” (Interview with Hongwei Zheng, September 2023). During the interview, Hongwei’s wife jumped in to emphasize that it was because they knew little about Canadian society back then, “We were fresh off the boat at that time. Most Chinese immigrants like us had been taken advantage of when we first arrived. It is almost like a lesson that Chinese immigrants must all learn” (Interview with Sha Luo, September 2023).

While Hongwei and his wife blamed Chinese ways of maintaining guanxi and getting things done, the more Hongwei described their experience, the more I realized they had no choice but to forgo formality for the business opportunity. Like Jie, Hongwei and his wife had great difficulties finding jobs or business opportunities in Canada, despite their extensive experience and success in mainland China. Seeing many Chinese immigrants with high achievements end up working in Chinatown restaurants and Chinese nursing homes, Hongwei had a profound sense of disappointment and anxiety. Determined to settle down with his family in Canada, he did not seem to have other options but to take the risk and trust his friend wholeheartedly without reviewing the contract and transaction histories carefully. Demonstrating trust in Mr. Chen in a culturally sensitive way was crucial for him to secure the business opportunity, especially when other Chinese families were all following the same cultural norms.

Another recurring theme in my fieldwork was that when encountering predatory practices in Canada, most Chinese immigrants chose to lump it, meaning that they did not confront their predators in any significant way to seek redress (Engel Reference Engel2016). Reflecting on the long process during which she tried to digest her grievance, Jie walked me through how she decided to lump it. She said,

Jie’s explanation for why she decided not to insist on a written contract and chose not to claim her rights was consistent with the experiences of many Chinese immigrants who participated in this study. In fact, it is the shared sense of undeservingness within the Chinese community that leads many Chinese immigrants to lump it or give up resisting. Jie’s emphasis on her understanding of how others would deal with the same situation is the key to making sense of her decision to lump it. One Chinese immigrant after another referred to the Chinese proverbs that “it is better to suck it up to avoid unnecessary trouble on the foreign land (在别人的地盘上多一事不如少一事)”; and that “a fierce dragon cannot easily suppress a local snake (猛龙不压地头蛇),” meaning that even a powerful individual will find it difficult to overpower someone with strong local connections.

Hongwei also mentioned the shared understanding among Chinese immigrants that they were in a disadvantaged position compared to native speakers of English and those who were born and raised in Canada when navigating the legal system. Unlike Jie, who did not even try to seek advice from others, Hongwei learned this from his own experience of looking for help from the police and the legal system. Hongwei shared, “We went to the police station to report the construction company. But the police here pushed us away, telling us that we did not have evidence. Canadian police always assume that individuals like us have the power to collect all the evidence. You know, back in China, we always turned to the police for help when bad things happened” (Hongwei Zheng, September 2023). After being turned away by the police, Hongwei’s family started asking members of the Chinese community for advice and recommendations for lawyers. Unfortunately, the more people they asked, the more they were convinced that they should give up. After hearing lots of stories from other Chinese immigrants who had similar experiences but had no luck with seeking remedies, he gradually came to accept that falling victim to predatory practices was an almost inevitable lesson for virtually all Chinese immigrants. What ultimately led Hongwei to give up on claiming his rights was the difficulty he encountered in finding a lawyer he could both trust and afford. Hongwei recalled, “When your English was not good enough, you didn’t really have a choice but to hire a Mandarin-speaking lawyer. There were very few Chinese lawyers in town at that time, and to be honest, most of them focused on family law and real estate…. They could be very selective and reluctant to take on complicated cases that involved civil litigation” (Hongwei Zheng, September 2023).

Since then, Hongwei had decided to avoid investment in Canada altogether – he had no confidence in the power of written contracts and the legal system in protecting him from predatory practices. The normalizing of struggles within the Chinese community and the lack of available legal services led to his advice for Chinese immigrants that they should stay away from the risk by avoiding doing investment in Canada because “one should not go deep into the mountains when he is fully aware that there are tigers living there (明知山有虎偏向虎山行)” (Hongwei Zheng, September 2023).

Although no one would deny that Chinese culture plays a significant role in shaping Chinese immigrants’ decision to prioritize guanxi over formality, we must also be wary of seeing culture as fixed and static (Kubal Reference Kubal2013; Volpp Reference Volpp2000). Rather than being brought to Canada by Chinese immigrants from their home country, culture within the Chinese community is fluid – members of the Chinese community are participating in co-constructing cultures within their community to survive and thrive in Canada. The difficulties in finding work and business opportunities and the barriers to accessing the legal system have reshaped the culture within the community. The struggle shared among Chinese immigrants in the Canadian labour market, the prevalence of predatory practices targeting Chinese immigrants, and the lack of legal resources and services available all played a role in convincing Hongwei and Jie to forgo formality and give up seeking redress. Both Jie and Hongwei were, in fact, adjusting their behaviour to follow the cultural norms of the local Chinese community. Jie complied with the unspoken rules in the Chinese restaurant industry by not asking for an employment agreement. Hongwei signed the contract without reading it word by word to act in accordance with other Chinese immigrants who had participated in the investment. He gradually learned about the futility of turning to law for help through sharing and listening to stories of other Chinese immigrants. To understand their decisions, we must situate their legal consciousness in the broader social and legal contexts within which Chinese immigrants perceived their relationship with the law as a way to connect their micro-level experiences with macro-level forces.

State responsibility and the sense of being undeserving

It may seem on the surface that Chinese immigrants’ emphasis on futility resonates with the existing research on the relationship between cultural capital and sense of entitlement. Young and Billings (Reference Young and Billings2020) find that people with high cultural capital tended to have a more salient sense of entitlement in terms of navigating interactions with the police and expressed a lower level of trust in authority than their low cultural capital counterparts; on the contrary, those with limited cultural capital were more likely to express futility, meaning that they felt that asserting right would be useless. To some extent, Chinese immigrants’ reluctance to emphasize contracts is related to their low cultural capital in Canadian society: language barriers, inadequate understanding of Canadian society and legal system, and the lack of established local connections. Nevertheless, a key feature that distinguishes Chinese immigrants’ sense of futility from that of the individuals in the study of Young and Billings (Reference Young and Billings2020) is that the former is a collective sense of undeservingness based on their shared identity as Chinese immigrants, more so than individual experiences.

To understand why Chinese immigrants actively participate in reinforcing a narrative of undeservingness that seems disempowering, we must analyze how members of an immigrant community co-create culture to deal with challenges in everyday life when the host country turns a blind eye to their struggles. Chinese immigrants participate in reinforcing a sense of undeservingness through daily interactions with fellow Chinese immigrants. In the process of showing support and sympathy – by sharing wisdom, experience, and advice to shield others from blaming themselves for failing to secure jobs that match one’s credentials and find ways to navigate the legal system – they inadvertently promote the idea that getting back to their own fields and having legal protection are unrealistic expectations. Like second-order legal consciousness, the sense of undeservingness depends heavily on other people’s perceptions; however, the factors that contribute to the sense of undeservingness are much broader than other people’s perceptions of the law.

The barriers and challenges Chinese immigrants must navigate on their own in all aspects of life with little support gradually take away their hope, confidence, and sense of entitlement and force them to come to terms with the fact that they are undesirable and disposable in Canadian society. They gradually become disillusioned in the so-called immigrant-friendly state that has been normalizing the struggles of Chinese immigrants through its inaction in providing resources for them to be resilient. Jenny Zhang, a Chinese immigrant in her late 40s who arrived in 2012, described vividly, “The journeys of Chinese immigrants are often unnecessarily difficult. People call it cultural shock, but really, being in Canada is more like you are on a boat that keeps tipping over, and you must swim back to shore all by yourself again and again…People who try to tough it out, especially those who run a small business, often end up losing on all fronts and feeling completely helpless (赔了夫人又折兵,非常无助)” (Interview with Jenny Zhang, October 2023).

As Jenny suggested, Canada turned a blind eye to the struggles among Chinese immigrants, leaving them to fight as individuals to find solutions despite their unfamiliarity with local norms. Framing Chinese immigrants’ struggles as a cultural shock, as Jenny pointed out, discounts the pain and hardship they have gone through, and it covers up the ongoing systemic racism in Canada and the political act of remaining silent. This silence is a constant reminder of Chinese immigrants’ undesirable and disposable status in Canadian society.

Several Chinese immigrants described the state’s lack of response to their needs as abandoning them to struggle on their own after having lured them to Canada. Ka-Ho Wong, a 31-year-old immigrant who arrived in Canada in September 2022, complained, “I am very disappointed about how Canada treats us. It is extremely difficult for us to find housing, jobs, and other services… There are always more than 30 people out there competing for one position that pays $15 per hour” (Interview with Ka-Ho Wong, April 2024). Likewise, Yan Dong, a math teacher from a renowned high school in Beijing, immigrated to Canada in 2022 only to find herself tutoring primary school students in the Chinese community. She noticed that the waitlists for immigrant services and training programs were always extremely long. “We would like to improve our language skills and adapt to Canadian society as soon as possible, but it has become almost impossible to get the support that used to be available for immigrants… I think the time has changed, and now supporting new immigrants is not the Canadian government’s priority,” Yan said. (Interview with Yan Dong, February 2024).

Story after story points to the close linkage between the unemployment and underemployment of Chinese immigrants and their lack of emphasis on contracts and the resulting prevalence of predatory practices targeting them. Underemployment and unemployment inevitably bred anxiety and uncertainty in individuals, which eventually shaped their relationships with contracts and the legal system. Jie and Hongwei, for example, would not have been so desperate and under such great pressure to downplay formality if they were confident that they could soon find decent jobs and business opportunities. They had no choice but to downplay formality because of Canada’s devaluation of their foreign credentials and experience.

While most Chinese immigrants were aware of the potential impacts of language barriers and unfamiliarity with Canadian cultures on their career paths, they were not fully aware of the degree of the typical devaluation of their credentials and prior work experience in Canada (Guo Reference Guo2009). During my fieldwork, I had met many highly qualified professionals working in entry-level and even unskilled labour positions, including an architectural designer-turned roofer, an HR manager-turned janitor, and a doctor-turned health care assistant. The point system in the Canadian immigration policy that favours immigrants with higher levels of human capital, as well as Canada’s success in depicting itself as a multicultural country that welcomes immigrants from diverse backgrounds, have created an expectation among immigrant professionals that they will be able to use their skills in Canada (Esses et al. Reference Esses, Dietz, Bennett-Abuayyash and Joshi2007; Man and Chou Reference Man and Chou2017). Unfortunately, racialized immigrant professionals are often underemployed and even unemployed in Canada (Banerjee and Lamb Reference Banerjee and Lamb2024; Cornelissen and Turcotte Reference Cornelissen and Turcotte2020; Esses et al. Reference Esses, Dietz, Bennett-Abuayyash and Joshi2007; Schimmele and Hou Reference Schimmele and Hou2024).

The deskilling and non-recognition of credentials from Third World countries, according to Shibao Guo (Reference Guo2009, 48–49), is “a new, more subtle but powerful head tax to exclude the undesirable and perpetuate oppression in Canada,” aiming to restrict competition and sustain the interests of the dominant groups. Guo (Reference Guo2009) explains that the challenges faced by Chinese immigrant professionals are caused mainly by Canadian employers’ emphasis on Canadian work experience and the reluctance of professional organizations to accredit foreign professionals, both of which treat the skills and experience of Chinese immigrants with suspicion and as inferior.

In fact, the non-recognition of their overseas credentials not only pushes Chinese immigrants towards lower-level jobs but also exacerbates predatory practices. As we have learned from Hongwei’s story, individuals who are unable to secure jobs that match their skillsets may be compelled to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, even without a firm grasp of local customs and practices. At the same time, non-recognition of their foreign credentials often results in significantly lower earnings, which undermines their resilience when seeking redress. Individual after individual emphasized that they were too busy feeding their family and making ends meet to think about confronting their predators.

The Canadian state’s lack of intervention in the prevalence of predatory practices targeting Chinese immigrants further reinforces the collective sense of undeservingness among them – it not only discourages victims from reporting and seeking help but also emboldens predators who seek to exploit Chinese immigrants. Ill-intentioned landlords, mechanics, employers, and businesspeople who manage to get away from the law repeatedly feel emboldened to continue their predatory practices, with some even explicitly telling their victims to feel free to sue them. The absence of written contracts or the presence of contractual terms unfavourable to their victims often fuels their confidence. As predatory practices targeting Chinese immigrants prevail in all walks of life, it also leaves the impression among Chinese immigrants that those ill-intentioned people must have accumulated deep knowledge of how to play with the law skillfully to always get away from lawsuits.

For example, Junbo Lin, a Chinese immigrant in his early 20s, rented a bedroom online prior to his arrival only to find himself in a house that had been unlawfully divided into dozens of rooms to rent out to East Asian students and newcomers. Despite his concerns about fire hazards and sanitation problems, Junbo was reluctant to report his landlord to local authorities or break the lease. Junbo explained, “My landlord has been doing this for more than a decade. I think he must have found a way to obtain approval from the government. I don’t think there is anything for me to gain if I sue him. After all, he has been in Canada for more than 20 years and must know the law very well” (Interview with Junbo Lin, September 2023). Junbo’s roommate, Wenhao Huang, who also decided to cut his losses and move on, explained, “Our landlord must have been very well-prepared to game the law. He always brags about how he continues his business for years despite being brought to court several times” (Interview with Wenhao Huang, November 2024).

To make things worse, the legal system’s deeply rooted assumption that reasonable men are always capable of making independent decisions and entering contracts freely has discouraged victims from claiming rights, especially when they themselves have signed a contract that involved exploitative terms. As Keren (Reference Keren, Fineman, Andersson and Mattsson2017, p.61) argues, “In contrast to the neoliberal view, and especially in a privatized society, people often find themselves consenting to contracts under stress – not because they ‘freely’ choose to do so but because they did not have, or could not have found, a better alternative.” The concepts of individualist autonomy and the reasonable man of law embedded in the Canadian legal system not only lead legal professionals and even Chinese immigrants themselves to blame victims but also keep victims of predatory practices outside the legal system. When victims reach out to lawyers and other Chinese immigrants for advice, it is common for them to be reminded of their own mistake of not taking contracts seriously. For example, during the initial consultation, the lawyer told Wenhao that he had little chance to win because “he did not do a good job signing a contract” (Wenhao Huang, November 2024).

The host country’s failure to provide adequate language-accessible legal services makes it even more difficult for Chinese immigrants to confront their predators. Lawyer Fu, a Mandarin-speaking lawyer in a mid-size law firm in Sunshine City, was concerned about the disadvantages that Chinese immigrants faced in legal proceedings. She said,

Things get more complicated when we take cultural sensitivity into account. While communicating in their own languages helps a great deal, speaking the same language is far from enough. It takes a deep understanding of Chinese cultural norms and extensive lived experience in Chinese societies to remove cultural barriers. Guoping Yang, owner of a small restaurant in a dimly lit shopping mall in Chinatown, preferred working with lawyers born and raised in China over those born to Chinese immigrant families. He explained, “Our education and cultural backgrounds shape the way we communicate. Let’s say I am getting a divorce. Explaining my feelings to a second-generation Chinese Canadian lawyer is like playing the lute to a cow (对牛弹琴), as the lawyer may not understand how people maintain relationships and act in a certain way in Chinese society” (Interview with Guoping Yang, November 2023). The ideal lawyers, according to him, would be those who were familiar with both the Chinese and Canadian legal systems.

Unfortunately, the non-recognition of credentials and the unnecessarily difficult process for immigrant professionals to re-enter their fields inevitably reduce the number of Chinese lawyers with a deep understanding of Chinese society and its legal system. Chinese lawyers trained in their home country must go through a lengthy assessment process that requires taking courses and exams to make sure that they, according to the National Committee on Accreditation (NCA), “will have the knowledge of Canadian law similar to the knowledge of someone who got their law degree through an approved Canadian law school program” before they can look for an articling position.Footnote ⁷ Many of them must attend the one-year foreign-trained lawyers’ program before being allowed to write the NCA exams. The most challenging part begins when they are looking for articling positions under a timeline and system structured for Canadian law school Juris Doctor students. The Canadian legal profession’s approach to evaluating foreign-trained lawyers’ competency reflects its reluctance to include the needs of minority communities and the lawyers’ ability to serve these communities into consideration (Foster Reference Foster2009).

The sense of undeservingness is also evident in the rare cases where Chinese immigrants went to court to seek redress after encountering predatory practices. Among all Chinese immigrants I interviewed, only two turned to the legal system for help after encountering predatory practices. Yonghua Yang, a data analyst in his early 50s, recalled that not a single lawyer in town was interested in his case, and all three lawyers he talked to tried to persuade him to give up because it was him who did not read through the contract carefully when he bought his car from the dealership. Too aggrieved to back down, Yonghua sued and fought on his own. He went to the court center frequently to line up and try to secure a spot for the free 30-minute consultations offered by civil claims duty counsels to seek advice on how to draft his documents. It took him several years to go through the whole procedure – he struggled to understand the duty counsels due to language barriers, and he found the process too confusing to figure out by himself. Seeing how much time and energy Yonghua took during the legal process, his wife kept asking him to give up and move on. But they were, in their words, “reluctant to accept the reality that finding justice could be so difficult for Chinese immigrants in Canada” (Interview with Yonghua Yang and Yanqing Li, January 2024). Yonghua did end up getting his money back after his years of effort, but they believed that it was too much struggle for too little in return.

Despite the prevalence of the sense of undeserving among Chinese immigrants, they rarely attribute their struggles to anti-Asian racism. In fact, many Chinese immigrants, especially men, were strongly against the idea of calling it racism. For example, Matthew Zhang, a financial adviser in his early 30s, emphasized several times during the interview that Chinese immigrants should avoid blaming racism for their own struggles. He said, “I am not denying that racism still exists in Canada, but new immigrants who are taken advantage of should always start from some self-reflection and see whether it is because of their poor English skills or their inability to protect themselves from predatory practices…If so, they’d better improve their language skills” (Interview with Matthew Zhang, April 2024). Matthew, along with many other Chinese men, looked down on those who were, in their words, “overly sensitive” about racism and lacked the capacity to improve their situations in Canada.

The model minority myth, which depicts Asians as free of oppression who have successfully assimilated into a white-dominant society (Walton and Truong Reference Walton and Truong2023), directly contributes to the widespread assumption among Matthew and many other Chinese immigrants that everyone can succeed in North America if they “just stop whining and start working” (Kristof Reference Kristof2015). The model minority myth not only marginalizes the experiences of Asians in ongoing conversations around race in North America but also portrays them as enjoying unbounded success through hard work and merit (Kim et al. Reference Kim, Block and Hong2021). Many Asians have internalized the myth and believed that they are less likely to experience racial discrimination and that they can succeed with hard work and determination (Yi and Todd Reference Yi and Todd2021). It shifts attention away from “institutional arrangements and systems that distribute disadvantage across people and groups” (Fineman Reference Fineman2008, p.20). Thus, Chinese immigrants who manage to succeed in a white man’s world may deny the impact of racism and identity-associated disadvantages, and their success may also leave others hesitant to attribute personal struggles to racism. Canada’s success in depicting itself as a multicultural and immigrant-friendly country has also played a significant role in shaping Chinese immigrants’ understandings of their experiences. Anti-Asian racism has always been deeply embedded in the institutions and ideologies of the Canadian legal system and social structure (Lee Reference Lee2023, p.120), but the announcement of the removal of racist immigration legislation targeting Chinese immigrants erased racial inequalities from sight (Yu Reference Yu2022).