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Research on immigrants' socio-economic performances in Canada has produced mixed results. One reason for this has been the fact that many studies have used measures that rely on average performance of immigrants, and also treat immigrants as a homogeneous group. Also, some measures of economic performance are unnecessarily complicated.

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À partir des données des recensements canadiens de 1991 et de 1996, nous nous penchons sur la question des immigrants pauvres et à faible revenu, un sujet très peu traité dans les travaux de recherche précédents sur l'immigration. Comparativement aux Canadiens de souche, les immigrants sont constamment surreprésentés dans la classe des pauvres. Cette surreprésentation comporte une orientation ethnique et raciale claire: les immigrants appartenant aux minorités visibles vivant les pires conditions. Les modèles de régression logis‐tique révèlent que, dans leur cas, les chances d'être pauvres sont con‐sidérablement plus élevées même en tenant compte de toutes les autres variables pertinentes. Les taux de pauvreté des différentes générations d'immigrants ne suivent pas un modèle logique; ceux qui ont émigréà l'adolescence vivent dans des conditions anormales de pauvreté extrême. La comparaison entre la situation des immigrants en 1991 et en 1996 révèle que l'investissement en matière de capital humain favorise de moins en moins les immigrants. Using the 1991 and 1996 Canadian census data, the present study addresses the issue of poor or low‐income immigrants, a topic largely overlooked in previous immigration research. The authors found that, compared to native‐born Canadians, immigrants were consistently over‐represented among the poor, and that this over‐representation had a clear ethnic and racial colour, with visible minority immigrants experiencing the most severe conditions. For them, the logistic regression models show, the odds of poverty are noticeably higher, even after controlling for all other relevant variables. The poverty rates of different generations of immigrants also show an unexpected pattern, in which those who have migrated during their adolescent years experience unusually severe poverty conditions. A comparison of the situation in 1991 and 1996 shows that human capital endowments are becoming less rewarding for immigrants.

The occurrence of the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, followed by a large-scale "Islamization" of society, resulted in some unique developments with regard to religious life in this country. Over the past two decades, there has been a lively debate among social scientists about the nature of such developments, and over their implications for other Middle Eastern and Islamic societies. Most of the contributions to this debate so far have been limited to the examination of different theoretical possibilities, without strong references to empirical evidence. In the present study, we attempt to address this shortcoming in the existing literature on religious developments in Iran by relying on a rich set of empirical data recently gathered through a large-scale national survey of values and attitudes in Iran. Through a composite index of religious sentiments, we explored the magnitude and the nature of religious sentiments among groups of different age and gender. Also, we examined changes with regard to religiosity in the period between 1975 and 2001. The outstanding finding is that the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran has led to the transformation of the nature of faith, marked by a noticeable shift from "organized" to a more "personalized" religion, in which the emphasis is placed on beliefs rather than on practices. Also, among both beliefs and practices, more emphasis is placed on those with a purely individual nature, or with a social nature but organized through civic and nongovernmental bodies, as opposed to those commanded by the government. The article ends with a brief discussion of the implications of such developments for the existing debate among sociologists of religion on secularization and "de-secularization." Our findings indicate that any linear perspective on the demise or survival of religion in society will unreasonably brush aside the fact that religion is not merely a social institution, but also a "cultural resource" that individuals may draw upon, depending on their surrounding sociopolitical circumstances and their reading of those circumstances.