Similarities exist between refugee direct care workers and migrant care workers. Refugee direct care workers, like other migrant direct care workers, are ‘citizens-in-waiting,’ and have to withstand long periods of uncertainty regarding their immigration applications. They are ‘development agents’ whose remittances provide support for their families and communities back home. But unlike migrant care workers, refugee care workers face pressures that are distinct: their migration histories are arguably more fraught than other migrant care workers and their journey into care work is more complex, with many seeing care work as a way to strengthen their applications for asylum.

Our research, based on one-on-one and focus group interviews with direct care workers with forced migration backgrounds, illustrates how the conditionality of citizenship creates a coercive environment, where refugee care workers become dependent on precarious employment in the care sector. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated such precarity, as employment in direct care work became one of the few avenues available for asylum claimants to secure legal status. We consider the realities of deskilling and exploitation that direct care workers face, which reveals systemic failures in providing adequate protections and opportunities for advancement. Using Landolt and Goldring’s (2013) framework of conditional citizenship and non-linear temporariness, we argue that care workers with forced migration backgrounds are ‘coerced carers’ whose attempts to gain secure status are mediated by immigration and workplace policies and their interactions with ‘gatekeepers.’ Ultimately, we consider the sustainability of tying refugees’ ability to stay on their ability to work, and consider how migration regimes reinforce binaries of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees.

International development and integration paradigms continue to position empowerment as a departure from “tradition,” measuring refugee women’s progress through liberal benchmarks of autonomy, paid labour, and public participation. Such assumptions reinforce a global project of internationalism grounded in Eurocentric understandings of agency, rationality, and rights-bearing citizenship. This paper advances relational agency as a feminist and decolonial alternative: a framework that recognizes how Afghan refugee women negotiate transformation from within familial, communal, spatial, economic, and spiritual structures rather than through rupture or assimilation.

Grounded in postcolonial feminist theory and intersectionality, the paper synthesizes recent qualitative studies on Afghan diasporas in Canada and other Western resettlement contexts. It demonstrates how women strategically reshape gendered expectations through three interconnected practices: (1) negotiating social legitimacy within kinship networks while expanding influence over marriage, mobility, and household decision-making; (2) reconfiguring belonging in urban and rural geographies marked by racialized surveillance and limited infrastructures of care; and (3) drawing on religious epistemologies of suffering, endurance, and ethical responsibility to reclaim dignity and moral authority.

Together, these strategies demonstrate that agency emerges not as resistance to culture but as calibrated transformation that sustains collective ties and cultural continuity. By theorizing relational agency as a situated practice, the paper challenges development scripts that conflate empowerment with individual autonomy and visibility. It proposes a model of internationalism rooted in interdependence, cultural accountability, and plural ways of knowing. Centering Afghan women’s knowledge offers a feminist and decolonial pathway for reimagining global development and solidarity.

This paper examines how South Asian skilled immigrant women navigate professional integration in Canada and critically assesses contemporary forms of internationalism and development governance. Based on semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study uses thematic analysis to explore skilled women’s lived experiences.

Although migration is usually viewed as a win-win development strategy, the narratives of these skilled women reveal how integration responsibilities are increasingly shifted onto individuals, especially racialized women. The findings indicate that these women depend on their agency, cultural adaptability, and informal networks to secure meaningful employment rather than on formal settlement or employment institutions. They considered these institutions to be generic, entry-level oriented, and misaligned with the needs of highly educated professionals. The strategies of self-navigation by these women indicate gaps in recognition of credentials, sector-specific guidance, and gender-sensitive support, as well as the pressure of caregiving.

Placing these results in the context of feminist and intersectional theories, I argue that the use of informal strategies by these women is more than a display of resilience; it is also a manifestation of institutional withdrawal under neoliberal regimes of migration.

By centering the voices of the marginalized, this research challenges the dominant development narrative that frames skilled migration as inherently beneficial and contributes to the discussion of internationalism by demonstrating how current development and migration systems place the responsibility of integration on individuals while maintaining the same levels of inequality. It demands changes to skilled migration policies that better recognize women's skills and work towards more inclusive and equitable approaches to global mobility and development.