The Housing Experiences of Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs) in Canada: Examining Issues Through a Systematic Literature Review

Although studies show that housing is integral to integrating immigrants into mainstream Canada, no systematic literature review has been conducted to examine established findings in the existing literature on the housing experiences of temporary foreign workers. The only existing scoping review exclusively focused on the housing experiences of seasonal agricultural workers. On this premise, we acknowledge the existence of different groups of temporary foreign workers in Canada and systematically synthesize studies on their housing situation using forty-one empirical peer-reviewed articles published between 1966 and 2024. The selected articles for review were retrieved from academic databases such as Omni, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Google Scholar, and JSTOR. Five interconnected themes emerged from the study, including the effects of housing conditions on foreign workers’ sense of community, power relations, subjective wellbeing, and transnational housing effects on housing choices in Canada. However, the findings do not provide clarity on the housing situations of foreign workers after their contractual terms or the impacts of housing on the integration of those who decide to stay in Canada. Therefore, policy interventions should address foreign workers’ housing experiences subjectively, given the different positionalities of foreign migrant workers.