The US and Canada 5 Points of Cultural Convergence

 Today's convergent media industries easily develop stories that span numerous media, presenting the stories of superheroes across comic books, film, and television, and enabling fans to join in popular universes across cinema, literature, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomena may be a prevalent approach in Hollywood's blockbuster fiction machine, linked to digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality is much more than worldwide movie franchises. Different cultures around the world are now making new and sometimes far less commercial uses of transmediality, adapting it to a nation's requirements and systems and reimagining it as cultural, political, and heritage undertakings. This book delves into the national and cultural systems of transmediality around the world, demonstrating how national cultures - including politics, people, heritage, traditions, leisure, and so on - shape transmediality in various countries. The book spans four continents and twelve countries, looking at the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Estonia, the United States, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, and Japan.Immigrant economic integration, or lack thereof, is a major topic of interest in many net-migrant-receiving countries, including Canada. According to Green and Green (1999)

Since the early twentieth century Canadian officials have made economic integration

Of immigrants an explicit goal. Beginning in 1967, Canada's immigration application process transitioned to a point-based system, in which potential immigrants were awarded points for certain characteristics believed to be beneficial to economic integration. However, despite efforts to modify the point-based system in order to attract immigrants who can seamlessly integrate into Canada's economic system, current cohorts of immigrants have not performed as well economically as previous cohorts. Several theories have been presented as to why this could be the case. Grant and Sweetman (2004) establish that Europe has stopped being a main departure point for incoming migrants to Canada, implying that more immigrants are coming from nations with visual racial distinction and language disparities, raising the possibility of discrimination. Aydemir and Skuturud (2005) also demonstrate the shift in composition (country of origin and language skills) of immigrant cohorts, attributing one-third of the observed reduction to this. Buzdugan and Halli (2009) underline that, despite greater schooling, recent immigrant cohorts' wages are dropping. According to Reitz (2005), the enormous wage disparity between native and immigrant workers in Canada is caused by immigrants working at positions below their ability level. Similar findings may be observed at the Canadian province level, where Chemin and Sayour (2016) investigate the effects of increasing weight for French language skills and bachelor degrees in Québec's point-based immigration system. They discover that the immigrants' composition altered (as expected), with more educated and French-speaking immigrants, but their labor market performance did not improve significantly. 

This phenomena isn't unique to Canada For example Fernandez and Ortega  discovered that

Despite equal participation rates, immigrants in Spain have a higher frequency of over-education and "gig" employmentFootnote3 than natives. This raises the issue of discrimination, as the majority of recent immigrants are visible minorities, and some damaging preconceptions and cultural differences are likely impeding the use of their abilities. However, Koopmans (2016) says that controlling for socio-cultural characteristics, or "acculturation," eliminates the perceived detrimental effect of prejudice. Similarly, Furtado and Theodoropoulos (2009) write that "social integration of immigrants is believed to be an important determinant of immigrants' labor market outcomes." Could it be that a perceived lack of cultural integration creates biases against newcomers, which lead to poor economic outcomes for immigrants? The question is whether being culturally integrated into Canada, or perceived as such, helps immigrants assimilate economically. In answering this question, our research adds to the literature on the social consequences of visible-minority immigrants provided by Berry et al. (1989), Berry and Kalin (1995), Berry (2006), Bourhis et al. (2009), and Alcott and Watt (2017). This study is based on the observation that Canadians enjoy winter sports, especially ice hockey, the national winter sport. Ice hockey is an important part of Canadian identity and culture, with hockey playoffs and well-known players dominating social conversations. The bulk of Canadian immigrants in the last 20-30 years have come from countries where winter sports in general, and ice hockey in particular, are not only unpopular but also not played.We feel that watching hockey or other winter sports, whether at home or in public, may be a reasonable indicator of cultural integration because it is a popular pastime among a large number of Canadians. Playing or practicing winter sports likely suggests even greater integration than simply observing, as it demands financial commitments (such as renting or purchasing equipment) as well as substantial time and effort. Thus, the study's hypothesis is that participating in hockey or other winter sports serves as a surrogate for acculturation. The objective is to determine whether participating in winter sports, which indicates cultural integration, is related with improved labour-market outcomes. 

We employ the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), which, in addition to basic

Socioeconomic characteristics, asks respondents if they have played ice hockey, snowboarding, or skiing in the last 3-12 months. Thus, the CCHS includes all of the components required for an empirical test of the relationship between cultural and economic integration. Using this data, we discovered that, in general, participating in winter sports reduces revenue loss as a result of immigration. However, we also find that when we utilize additional metrics of being a "other" or "different" (speaking a language at home other than English or French, being a visible minority,Footnote5, or a combination of these two), people who are a visible minority see no attenuation.Our interpretation of the findings is that the favorable impacts of acculturation imply that there may be some form of bias against "others" (particularly immigrants), and that this bias can impede newcomers from obtaining appropriate economic integration without first achieving cultural acceptance. However, it appears that acculturation alone may not be sufficient to eliminate racial biases against persons who are outwardly different. This conclusion contradicts Alcott and Watt (2017), who conclude from an analysis of two Australian experimental investigations that the native community views immigrants through the acculturation lens rather than racial appearances. India, and Russia. The empirical model is designed to determine the general and immigrant-specific impacts of participating in winter sports, allowing us to estimate how much "acculturation" contributes to compensating for the unfavorable consequences of being an immigrant.