Ottawa pausing deportations of international students affected by acceptance letter scam

2023/06/16 Leave a comment

Not really a surprise. Hard to see, however, given current pressures on IRCC that it will be able to review each case specifically. CIMM is starting a study on exploitation of Indian students but unlikely that will examine the complicity of governments and education institutions in a system that almost incentivizes such exploitation:

The federal government says it’s hitting pause on planned deportations of international students who may have been caught up in a foreign acceptance letter scam.

The announcement from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) comes after dozens of international students received deportation orders which accuse them of using forged post-secondary school acceptance documents to get into Canada.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser warned that “potentially a few hundred people” could find themselves affected by the scam and removal orders.

Source: Ottawa pausing deportations of international students affected by acceptance letter scam

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Travellers demand compensation after foul-up at immigration department upsets their plans

2023/06/15 Leave a comment

Yet another anticipation and implementation failure. Far too many IMO:

Travellers who lost money and missed out on important occasions because of errors at Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) say the government should compensate them for their losses.

The government’s eTA (Electronic Travel Authorization) system was out of operation from June 8 to June 10. As a consequence, many passengers who had paid for flights and had their documents in order — including some who were merely transiting through Canada on their way to other destinations — were prevented from boarding.

The eTA costs $7 and is required of all international travellers who hold passports from visa-waiver countries such as Mexico, Australia and New Zealand and much of the European Union — countries whose residents aren’t required to obtain visas to visit Canada.

Source: Travellers demand compensation after foul-up at immigration department upsets their plans

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Ottawa n’aurait aucune idée du nombre de sans-papiers au Canada

2023/06/15 Leave a comment

Longstanding issue. USA manages to count visa overstays (the majority of cases) and unclear why Canada has been such a laggard. As a result, advocates are free to throw around large numbers without substantiation:

Ottawa naviguerait sans boussole dans sa volonté de régulariser massivement le statut des sans-papiers sur son territoire.

La lettre de mandat remise au ministre fédéral de l’Immigration, Sean Fraser, par le premier ministre Justin Trudeau, au moment de sa nomination en décembre 2021, lui enjoint de « poursuivre l’exploration de moyens de régulariser le statut des travailleurs sans papiers qui contribuent aux communautés canadiennes ».

Selon Radio-Canada, le gouvernement fédéral souhaiterait amorcer une démarche de régularisation massive dès cet été, mais au Québec, une telle décision doit recevoir l’aval du gouvernement Legault, qui a le dernier mot sur l’accueil de nouveaux arrivants en vertu de ses pouvoirs en immigration.

Or, si la ministre québécoise de l’Immigration, Christine Fréchette, répète qu’elle est ouverte à aller de l’avant, elle continue de réclamer des chiffres qui, semble-t-il, n’existent pas.

« C’est une des choses pour lesquelles on attend des informations. Les seuls chiffres qu’on nous a donnés au fédéral, c’est que ça concernerait entre 20 000 et 500 000 personnes [à l’échelle canadienne]. Alors entre ça et ne pas avoir d’estimé, c’est la même chose », a-t-elle laissé tomber en mêlée de presse à l’issue d’une annonce en francisation à Montréal, mardi.

Les voies de communication sont tout de même ouvertes. « Il y a eu des premiers contacts, des premiers échanges », a-t-elle précisé.

Mme Fréchette reconnaît qu’il n’est guère simple d’avoir des données précises dans le cas des sans-papiers.

« On parle de gens pour qui on n’a pas une connaissance fine de la réalité parce que ce sont des gens qui oeuvrent d’une manière un peu souterraine, mais on attend quand même d’avoir un estimé plus précis en ce qui a trait au Québec. »

En d’autres termes, le gouvernement fédéral n’a pas plus de précisions à offrir à l’échelle provinciale qu’il n’en a à l’échelle pancanadienne et, en l’absence d’un ordre de grandeur, la décision de Québec devient difficile à prendre.

Un actif pour la société

Il n’y a cependant pas de réticence à accueillir ces éventuels nouveaux citoyens, particulièrement dans un contexte de pénurie de main-d’oeuvre, s’empresse de préciser la ministre Fréchette.

« Ces gens-là sont déjà ici, ils sont actifs dans une variété de secteurs économiques, donc ça va faire partie des réflexions de savoir un peu plus qui ils sont, de qui il s’agit », mais pour ça, répète-t-elle, il faut savoir « combien sont au Québec ».

La plupart des personnes désignées comme étant des sans-papiers sont des personnes entrées légalement au Canada, mais qui ont perdu leur statut, soit par l’expiration d’un permis de travail ou d’un visa. Cette catégorie comprend également les demandeurs de statut de réfugié qui ont essuyé un refus, mais qui se trouvent toujours au Canada pour diverses raisons. Dans tous les cas, ce sont des personnes qui n’ont pas l’autorisation de résider ou de travailler au Canada, ce qui exclut les travailleurs temporaires et les demandeurs d’asile dont le dossier est toujours à l’étude.

Source: Ottawa n’aurait aucune idée du nombre de sans-papiers au Canada

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Hardin: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

2023/06/14 Leave a comment

A bit of a rant and overly rambling and unfocussed but nevertheless a signal among some who consider themselves progressive are increasingly concerned given housing and other impacts:

….And as if that weren’t enough, Justin Trudeau keeps on increasing the number of immigrants, hiking it from 400,000 annually to half a million. When Eby began the frantic drumbeating for new housing, the figure for new immigrants arriving in Greater Vancouver was an estimated 30,000 to 40,000. That had already changed by the end of 2021, when the net inflow of people to B.C. was 100,797. Of those, 33,356 people came from other Canadian provinces and territories and the remaining 67,141 from abroad, with most ending up in Greater Vancouver. Not all of them would have been immigrants; net non–permanent residents like “temporary foreign workers” and net foreign students would be in the total.

In the subsequent year, 2022, the inflow into B.C. from international migration increased to 150,783, of whom 98,763 were non–permanent residents. Canada’s population overall increased by 1,050,110 people; almost all the increase – 96 per cent – came from international migration.

Eby has mentioned what lay behind what he was facing – federal immigration policy. No wielding of the hammer on that one, however. The new housing minister, Ravi Kahlon, has belatedly gone as far as to argue with Ottawa that immigration should be tied to housing availability. But without his tackling the underlying premises impelling Trudeau and company – without even following through on his own argument – he hasn’t, as of this writing, made much headway.

The taboo is great.

Nor is Eby the only one who shies away from speaking directly to the root issue.

With some exceptions, almost everyone publicly tearing their hair out over housing unaffordability or what the attendant pressure is doing to Vancouver avoids mentioning the “i” word as something that needs to be tackled first and foremost, in the same way that everyone, except a little boy, wouldn’t say out loud that the emperor had no clothes.

What’s really behind high immigration numbers

What underlies immigration to Canada and the current numbers is not humanitarianism but economics. Indeed, immigration to Canada, save for refugees, has always largely been economic. The argument is that immigrants boost the Canadian economy and are even needed to keep the Canadian economy going. That this might be a dubious argument doesn’t discourage its promoters.

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser was quite straightforward about this in a statement to Reuters late in 2021. “Canada needs immigration to create jobs and drive our economic recovery,” he said, as if simply saying so made it true.

Fraser has since doubled down on his message box, again without in fact making the case and again without addressing housing affordability and additional pressures on health care.

The need for immigrants to keep the economy going has now become a mantra, repeated casually at large (an “economic imperative,” a National Post columnist called it), to which has recently been added a submantra: the need for immigrants to fill unfilled job positions. It’s economics – unquestioned economics – again.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has also, naively, claimed we are dependent economically on immigration. He and the political left in Canada, captive to their routinized thinking on immigration, have failed to understand the dynamic at work. It’s important to realize that open immigration to serve economics isn’t left-wing at all. The free movement of labour is part of classical right-wing neoliberal doctrine, complementing free trade. If community is harmed or destabilized by the application of the doctrine, whether by free trade or inflated immigration levels, “So what?” says the market-doctrine right-winger: “It’s the market at work. You shouldn’t object.”

It’s not surprising, then, that the original recommendation for hiking the level of immigration to Canada to 450,000 annually came from the federal Advisory Council on Economic Growth, circa 2017, replete with neoliberals and with nobody as awkward as even a pale socialist or environmentalist to show any dissent. The Council was chaired by Dominic Barton, a former senior executive of management consulting firm McKinsey and Company.

The Council also recommended that Canada aim for 100 million people by the end of the century. This was without reference to the environment. The connection between another 60-odd million people in a northern, high-consuming country and its impact on global warming and the environment is not part of the neoliberal frame. The doctrine on this score – justifying immigration for economic reasons outside of the environmental context – is no different, schematically and ideologically, from justifying increased oil sands production and otherwise boosting the oil patch overall for economic reasons.

There’s a further irony underlying these other ironies. The economic rationale for immigration – the majestic declaration that newcomers are the key to the future – is faulty taken by itself.

It’s false to claim that increased immigration is essential to the Canadian economy in any ordinary sense; the evidence doesn’t sustain that and it doesn’t meet the standard of common sense.

There is nothing to prevent an economy with a stable or slowly growing population from functioning well. Indeed, it is arguable that the more stable a population, the more focus can be given to employment engagement, training and education, and downstream allocation of the workforce in order to produce the maximum economic, social and environmental payoff per capita and, at the same time, enhance the quality of life.

It also begs the theoretical question of whether Canada, and every country in the world, have to keep compounding their population growth forever and ever until Doomsday if they wish to prevent their economies from falling apart. The world’s population, then, would have to increase to 15 billion people, and then 20 billion, and so on, just to keep economically afloat – a notion that we know is absurd.

In the here and now, the argument for inflated immigration to Canada is also a counterproductive notion, economically speaking, because it measures by mass rather than by per capita economic performance and quality of life. Canada (using the International Monetary Fund measure) is 26th in the world rankings of GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), as of current estimates. Denmark, which has strictly limited immigration, is 11th. Norway is seventh, Switzerland sixth, the United States eighth and so on. All the Scandinavian countries are higher than Canada; so are Austria and Taiwan. Singapore is second.

In 1986, just prior to immigration to Canada spiking, Canada was 15th; we’ve lost 11 places since. Our GDP per capita in 1986, again adjusted for purchasing power parity, was 89 per cent of the American one; since then it has fallen to 75 per cent.

Perhaps more instructive are the IMF’s projections through to 2027, where Canada is projected to fall to 28th place. It will also have lost, once more, a few percentage points to the United States, which itself is predicted to fall a few places in the IMF rankings. By way of explanation, the OECD has Canada dead last among the 38 OECD members in GDP per capita growth for 2020–30 (and also dead last for 2030–60).

Don Wright, former deputy minister to B.C. Premier John Horgan and a Harvard-trained economist, takes this one step further in a recent paper for the Public Policy Forum. Wright points out that by counting on immigrants and foreign workers for low-wage jobs, average per capita income and what goes with it (from quality of life to per capita tax revenue) are lowered and the professed desire to help the middle class is betrayed. He references stagnant real wages, their direct relationship to housing unaffordability and the coincidental ascendancy of neoliberalism. Raising the per capita standard of living should be the goal, he argues. He goes on to debunk the argument of the open-ended need for more and more labour:

When businesses complain about having difficulty finding enough workers, what this really means is that they cannot easily find the workers they want at a wage they want to pay. But, within reasonable limits, this is a good thing. It forces employers to pay higher wages, provide better working conditions and drives the creative destruction that leads to higher productivity, more valuable products and better business models.

A subsequent study in Policy Options by labour economists Fabian Lange of McGill, Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo and Christopher Worswick of Carleton elaborated on the argument, focusing in particular on the economic case against low-wage temporary foreign workers.⁶

The submantra that we need inflated immigration levels to fill unfilled jobs nevertheless keeps resurfacing, cited as a given both by ostensible experts and by politicians desperate to rationalize consequences like the housing crisis. David Eby himself, just before being sworn in as B.C. Premier, mentioned it by way of explaining why he needed to act aggressively on housing.

It overlooks how the necessary adjustment in the labour market would happen, per Don Wright’s thesis. It’s as if there is no alternative to the neoliberal ideological fix behind the current excessive immigration level.

Well here, schematically, is the alternative, as would happen in a normal economy. Jobs are posted and if they’re more important relative to other jobs, the market or public allocation rises until they’re filled. At the same time, other jobs that cannot compete, because they’re relatively unimportant or not important at all, so that they don’t have sufficient competitive draw on the market or on public revenue, disappear. Over time, one ends up with a far more productive economy and a far more appropriate economy that dynamically follows market demand and public need.

But none of the alternatives to the current immigration level can be properly discussed, nor can a proper public debate take place, until we bury for good the neoliberal legend that we need immigration to keep our economy going. Once we do that, we can then get started on framing public policy accordingly, dramatically cutting back immigration and freely charting another course. We might even conclude that what makes most sense, for a high-energy-use country like Canada, is a stable population. But that’s for another analysis.

Source: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

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Family reunification for Ukrainians in Canada to come soon: immigration minister

2023/06/14 Leave a comment

Will be tricky given precedents it may set for other groups and mixed signals regarding mixed signals to Ukraine government:

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser says he plans to announce a long-awaited program to grant permanent residency to Ukrainians with familial ties to Canada soon, but a similar program for other Ukrainians is still a ways away.

Canada took the unusual step last year of offering temporary refuge to an unlimited number of Ukrainians fleeing the war, and so far 230,000 have made the journey.

The government also promised a family reunification program for Ukrainians that would offer those with familial ties to Canada permanent residency status, but that has yet to be realized.

Fraser says those who don’t qualify for family reunification can still apply for permanent residency through traditional immigration streams.

The government plans to assess whether more needs to be done to secure permanent residency for other Ukrainians over the next year or two.

McGill Institute for the Study of Canada director Daniel Béland says the government will need to co-ordinate with the Ukrainian government, since offering permanent residency could signal a lack of optimism about Ukraine’s ability to beat the Russian military out of its sovereign borders.

Source: Family reunification for Ukrainians in Canada to come soon: immigration minister

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‘I respect myself too much to stay in Canada’: Why so many new immigrants are leaving

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

Good in-depth account of how the Canadian immigration value proposition is becoming more shaky at best:

Should he stay or should he go? It was the question on Sanjay Gupta Sagar’s mind.

He had come to Canada six years ago, with the expectation that everything would fall into place. 

The Nepalese man had a PhD. He had years of international research experience in public health and epidemiology. He had chosen to come to Carleton University in Ottawa as a postgraduate work fellow.

“I was flying high in my professional career,” says the 37-year-old. “There was nothing that could’ve stopped me from becoming a successful scientist and researcher.”

After a year, in 2019, riding his solid credentials, he, his wife and his son got their permanent residence in Canada. It was, it turned out, the easy part.

“After I completed my fellowship, that was the turning point,” he says.

Sagar struggled to find work in his field. He eventually got an administrative job at Statistics Canada, but he felt frustrated at not being able to use his training and education.

“I never would’ve thought I would have to struggle in my life professionally or financially,” he says.

He knew he was unhappy, but uprooting his family and leaving Canada? That was a tougher question — one without an easy answer.

It has been a question not just for Sagar, but for thousands of other newcomers, and for the policymakers striving to grow this country’s population.

Canada is in the process of welcoming a historic number of permanent residents — 465,000 in 2023; 485,000 in 2024; and 500,000 in 2025. But Canada is not the only country vying for skilled immigrants, and many highly educated and motivated immigrants who have come here are also leaving, in search of greener pastures. 

A conservative estimate of 15 to 20 per cent of immigrants leave the country within 10 years, according to Statistics Canada.

But it’s rarely an easy decision to give up on the Canadian dream.

Do immigrants get a fair opportunity in Canada?

Sagar left Nepal when he finished his undergraduate studies in public health and moved to Missouri for postgraduate studies. His research interest would later take him across the United States and to Germany, South Africa and Australia.

Although he had never been to Canada, it seemed to be a great choice. It offered a clear and promising pathway for permanent residence via the work permit with his postgraduate fellowship.

A pioneering researcher in electromagnetic field exposure, Sagar was confident he would thrive in his adopted country and bought a three-bedroom condo in Ottawa shortly after his arrival.

But the harsh reality sank in soon after he finished his fellowship. He applied to more than 50 jobs related to public health but only got two interviews. Both were unsuccessful; one employer was looking for different skill sets, while the other had a better candidate.

“It was demotivating, frustrating and demoralizing,” says Sagar, who wasn’t sure of the reason why. “I’m not getting the right kind of job. Is there any problem in me or is it Canada?”

He started applying for jobs in the U.S. To his surprise, he says, calls for interviews started pouring in, though he always balked at taking up any job offer in the U.S. on a work permit without the safeguard of a green card.

“There are so many skilled immigrants who qualify to come to Canada, but once they end up here, many don’t get the opportunity for the jobs their skill sets are for,” he laments. 

“You have engineers, doctors and dentists working in retail. That’s very strange to me.”

A recent Statistics Canada report found 34 per cent of immigrants selected via the economic category — a group selected for entry into this country due to their higher education and skills — were employed in lower-skilled jobs. 

Even among longer-term economic immigrants who have been in Canada for more than a decade, 31 per cent were in these so-called survival jobs.

“We historically focused on the ‘front end’ of immigration, namely recruitment,” says Western University professor Michael Haan, whose research focuses on immigrant settlement, labour market integration and data development. “Nearly no research or policy attention has been given to keeping newcomers in Canada.”

“It is very expensive to identify the types of immigrants we want and need, recruit newcomers that fit the profile, process their applications and provide them with settlement services. To have them leave the country after all this work provides us with little to no return on this investment.”

Sagar, meanwhile, worried that the longer he settled in Canada with an unfit job, the more he would lose his aspiration to stay the course as a researcher.

His older son had grown comfortable in Canada, and now Sagar also had a Canadian-born baby daughter to feed.

Immigrants’ expectations have shifted

The issue of “deskilling” highly skilled immigrants is not new. 

Successive waves of newcomers have struggled to get their foreign credentials accredited and satisfy employers’ preference for Canadian work experience.

Toronto Metropolitan University professor Marshia Akbar, who studies labour migration, says many immigrants who came in the 1980s and 1990s accepted the adversity and toiled in odd jobs to remain in Canada, because they believed they had no other option and their sacrifices would give their children a better future.

But their expectations seem to have shifted.

“For this generation of immigrants, they are not going to work in low-skilled jobs and wait for 10 years to catch up and get to work as an engineer or as a banker,” she says. “They get their residency but they don’t even wait for their citizenship.” 

She says research suggests the country simply doesn’t have so many skilled jobs to go around.

A recent Statistics Canada report suggested there are no widespread labour shortages for jobs that require high levels of education as the number of unemployed Canadians with a bachelor’s degree or higher education since 2016 has always exceeded the number of vacant positions that require at least an undergraduate education.

Akbar knows a number of people who have left Canada after completing their PhDs because they couldn’t find a job and moved to the U.S. or returned home, where their Canadian education is highly regarded. 

“In the contemporary situation, not just the traditional immigrant-receiving countries like the U.S., U.K. and Australia are looking for highly skilled migrants. Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, U.A.E. and every country are all waiting to receive highly skilled migrants,” she says.

“We have a higher cost of living. We pay higher taxes. These are all the reasons why many newcomers are not happy in Canada.” 

And that seems to be supported by a national survey released in April by Leger for the Institute of Canadian Citizenship that found 30 per cent of newcomers below age 35, and 23 per cent of university-educated new immigrants, are planning to relocate within the next two years.

Citizenship rate declining

Among the worrying signs when it comes to Canada’s immigration success story is the fact that the citizenship rate among immigrants has been declining for years.

The 2021 census found that just 45.7 per cent of permanent residents became citizens within 10 years, down from 60 per cent in 2016 and 75.1 per cent in 2001. 

The two countries from which Canada gets the most immigrants — India and China — don’t recognize dual citizenship. That has likely had an effect on Canadian citizenship uptake as newcomers are afraid Beijing and Delhi will strip their Chinese and Indian citizenship. 

Critics have linked the decline with measures brought in by the former federal Conservative government that were meant to tighten citizenship requirements.

However, it could also be an indication of the devaluation of Canadian citizenship.

Feng Hou, principal researcher of the statistics agency, says data has shown immigrant out-migration from Canada generally surges during recession years. That’s indicated by the decline in immigrant income tax filing — a default indicator of a person’s presence in Canada in the absence of official exit and entry records.

Among the different classes of immigrants, he says the ones least likely to stay are those who are the most educated and here for economic opportunities; who came under the federal skilled workers program; and immigrants from the U.S. and Western Europe.

“We need to have a better understanding of why immigrants leave Canada,” says Hou, adding that a Canadian passport does offer skilled immigrants further mobility without the hassles for visas. 

“Are they just using Canada as a stepping stone? Are they moving to the U.S., where there are more opportunities, or are they returning home?”

A lack of ‘Canadian experience’

Komal Makkar, who is in her 30s, had never been to Canada before she landed in Toronto in January 2021. But back home in Punjab, she was raised surrounded by billboards and signs that painted the country as a land of opportunities.

The architect who hailed from India had worked in Dubai since 2016 and developed a niche in multiple international projects in Africa, India, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, designing state-of-the-art hospitals.

But trying to get citizenship in Dubai was close to impossible. To move to the U.S., she would need an employer to sponsor her visa. Canada seemed a good choice as her education and work experience would get her direct entry for permanent residence. 

She knew there could be initial struggles to find her footing and she thought she was prepared.

Makkar and her husband, also an architect, were excited to find a permanent home in Toronto. The winter snow was pretty. The air was fresh. The people were friendly. The vibe of the city was amazing.

The career-oriented couple hit the ground running as soon as they found a temporary home subletting someone’s one-bedroom apartment. But they were daunted by the advice of job counsellors at various immigrant serving agencies.

She was advised to remove her master’s degree from the resumé and shave off some years of her work experience and high-profile projects in her reference, so she wouldn’t be overqualified for entry-level positions. Suggestions were also made for them to explore job options that use their skills in other ways.

“We applied for so many jobs. But most of them were asking for Canadian experience,” says a frustrated Makkar, who was instead offered architectural technician positions at minimum wage. Others offered co-op or unpaid internships for the elusive work experience.

With their savings quickly depleting, she and her husband were faced with the choice of paying hefty tuition fees to go back to school for more certifications or just settle for low-paying jobs that wouldn’t allow them to build a life and home here.

While the cost of living is high in Dubai, it offered Makkar and her husband the financial and professional security that Canada didn’t.

“I was already working up the ladder. I was working on big projects. My goal was to go for even bigger projects. Should I start again from where I started?” Makkar asks. “We don’t see this country as a permanent home.”

After two months, she and her husband made what she called “an unexpected decision” to return to Dubai. Despite the $4,000 she spent in getting all the papers and in fees for their permanent residence application, she says it was the best decision.

“I’m happy in what I’m doing. I love what I’m doing. I don’t have to throw something out of experience,” says Makkar. “I respect myself too much to stay in Canada.”

‘Skill sets in IT are easily transferable’

Harman Singh Dhaliwal was among the fortunate immigrants whose technical skills in IT happened to be in short supply when he arrived in Toronto in February 2018, before living costs went through the roof.

He and his wife, who also worked in IT in India and in the U.S., found jobs in their field within a month, though their positions were one notch below their years of work experience. But that allowed them to soon buy a home in the city.

“The skill sets in IT are very easily transferable,” says the 35-year-old, who took three years to get promoted to be a technical lead at work. “They are the same whether you work in Mumbai, Shanghai, L.A. or Toronto.” 

Dhaliwal says he and his wife were not desperate to leave India and were simply looking for a different lifestyle in North America, where the living standards are higher and air quality and environment are much nicer.

Having access to good jobs is a starting point to keep top talents in Canada as people now have options in China, India and the Gulf countries and can afford to be picky, says Dhaliwal, who became a father last year and is now a Canadian citizen.

Current economic immigration policy favours applicants under 30, with points awarded for age progressively decrease every year. The younger demographics, he says, have fewer obligations, which makes it easier just to pack and leave if they have the sought-after skills.

“When you have a family of your own, you are married and your kids are in school, you live in a nice neighbourhood, own your home, it’s very difficult to leave all of that behind,” says Dhaliwal. 

While Canada is focusing on the quantity of immigrants it’s bringing in, he says it must pay as much attention to the quality of opportunities available for newcomers and make sure they have the supports for new ideas and innovations.

“I think we are attracting a lot of top-tier talent but we end up not giving them the top-tier opportunity or the platform to utilize their talent,” he notes. “I never felt I was bound to Canada, but I got a job in the first month and we bought a house. We’re now very focused on settling our life over here.”

How to retain immigrants

The value of Canadian immigration became a heated debate recently in a Facebook group run by Toronto immigration consultant Kubeir Kamal. The group has half a million followers, and someone posted a question to them about whether Canada offered what they came to this country for.

Kamal says he was surprised that there were more people who were willing to go back or have already returned to where they came from than those who would stick it out. He says many cited the high costs of living and the challenges to maintain the lifestyle they used to enjoy while struggling to secure jobs.

“That was quite an eye-opener even for me,” says Kamal, host of Ask Kubeir on YouTube, which has 80,000 subscribers. “The charm of the first-world passport is very quickly fading away.”

Retention efforts, according to Kamal, should focus on those who show the desire to be here and have established themselves, which mean they have more incentive to stay.

He points out there are more than 1.5 million temporary residents such as international students and temporary foreign workers in Canada, but only a fraction have a shot at permanent residence.

Meanwhile, the bar for permanent residence is extremely high for those who immigrate directly from abroad, without the benefits of Canadian education credentials and work experience. 

Most of these newcomers, says Kamal, would be 30 or under, with a master’s degree and good English, plus several years of international work experience to meet the permanent residence requirements.

“When they come to Canada, it is a shock in terms of the cost of living, the lifestyle. It’s not remotely anticipated for them,” he says.

As a result, some may stay until they get their citizenship and others may leave their spouses and children in Canada and return to their careers in the United Arab Emirates or their country of origin so they could financially support their families here.

Even though the federal government has recently launched a program to target immigration applicants with skills in demand in the country to better align newcomers with Canada’s labour market needs, Kamal says it won’t work without the proper support to help them overcome the lack of Canadian experience and credential recognition, and in professional licensing processes.

“This would fall flat if you don’t back it up by providing accreditation or an easy route to accreditation for these people to practise in Canada,” he says. “If you don’t make it conducive for them to find meaningful employment in Canada, you will end up losing them.”

Opportunity found — in the U.S.

In Ottawa, Sagar, the Nepalese PhD, had a full-time contract job first as a statistical assistant and later an analyst while his wife worked as a retail clerk. When their daughter was born in the summer of 2021, he decided to take a year off to contemplate the family’s future. 

He knew he was deeply unhappy in Canada and decided to revive his stalled career as a research scientist. With his PhD credentials, he successfully applied for an American green card last June. 

In September, he moved to St. Lawrence County, N.Y., and worked as an epidemiologist. In March, he made another move to Lebanon, N.H., into a managerial position in public health, to be followed by his wife and children after this school year.

When he recently sold the three-bedroom condo they bought in Ottawa in 2018, the value of the property actually doubled.

“I actually made more money selling my house than all I’d earned in my time in Canada,” says Sagar, who is now a citizen.

“Immigrants are not coming to Canada with the aim to become super-rich. They just want to have the right kind of jobs and they would be happy to stay and raise their family there.”

Source: ‘I respect myself too much to stay in Canada’: Why so many new immigrants are leaving

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Meggs and Fortin: Are We Heading for 100 Million Canadians?

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

Excerpt from good long and thoughtful conversation between a former senior Quebec immigration official and prominent economist, highlighting the weaknesses of the arguments used by governments, Century Initiative and the business community in favour of current levels and approach:

….

Meggs: In fact, Ottawa needs to base targets on the total number of arrivals, whatever the immigration status, to be able to welcome newcomers properly. The increased arrival numbers should not be so large that the host communities feel overburdened by inclusion and integration. Accommodation of the newcomers means ensuring that they have a roof over their heads, that they can integrate rapidly into the labour force, that they have access to language training, that they can obtain financial services, and that government services such as public transit, child care, education and health care are available and affordable for them. Canada’s recent immigration policy proposes huge increases in permanent immigration targets while refusing to set targets for the even higher levels of temporary immigrants.

This cavalier policy is in great danger of transforming immigration to Canada from a successful operation to a painful breakdown. To answer your question, nobody really knows the right target because planning in line with welcoming and settlement capacity has never been properly undertaken. Canada needs to set guidelines and targets for both permanent and temporary immigration, looking at the number and pace of arrivals rather than the type of permit. Otherwise, the newcomers will not be able to participate adequately in their new communities, and Canadians will lose confidence in immigration policy.

Fortin: I agree that optimal immigration is not maximal immigration. First, the expansive immigration policy inspired by the Century Initiative is generating chaos at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. More than 1.7 million temporary and permanent applications are waiting in the pipeline, which doesn’t include asylum seekers and their applications for a work permit.

Second, as I said above, the increased inflow of immigrants is likely to have a zero or negative impact on the average living standard of Canadians; it will not attenuate the pace of population aging, and it will not reduce global labour shortages. It may make them worse.

Third, I add to your last observation, Anne, that overly expansive immigration targets risk not only producing some “loss of confidence” in immigration but fuelling an anti-immigration movement as has exploded in the United States and Europe. Canadians in general like to vaunt the good performance of their immigration system and their generosity toward immigrants. Unfortunately, this is a vision of the past. A recent online Environics survey (in which respondents are more likely to express their true feelings than in an interactive telephone survey) found that about half of Canadians think that there is too much immigration to Canada.¹⁰ It would not take much to metamorphose Canada’s proverbial generosity into generalized xenophobia. This has recently occurred in one of the world’s most progressive societies, Sweden. In the 2022 election, the Social Democrats there were defeated and the anti-immigration vote exploded. We must avoid slipping into this kind of political quagmire.

My bottom line is that immigration is an imperative work of civilization. It must increase over time, but going too fast is a dangerous course to follow. We should do it “allegro ma non troppo,” as in Italian classical music.

Source: Are We Heading for 100 Million Canadians?

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Le ministère de l’Immigration «s’entête» à ne pas reconnaître les évaluations de français québécoises

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

Accepted for Canadian citizenship but not for Quebec permanent residency. Understandable complaint:

Des épreuves standardisées s’apprêtent à être instaurées dans les cours de francisation, a appris Le Devoir, mais les immigrants continueront à devoir passer des tests entièrement conçus en France pour leur dossier d’immigration. Parallèlement, un immigrant peut utiliser ses cours de francisation du Québec pour devenir citoyen canadien, mais pas pour demander la résidence permanente dans la province.

Plusieurs personnes du milieu de l’enseignement et de la francisation ne décolèrent pas devant ces nouveaux paradoxes. Elles réitèrent leurs appels à créer un test québécois qui puisse servir à prouver le niveau de français nécessaire pour immigrer ou à recommencer à reconnaître les cours de francisation. Un tel projet a déjà été défendu à l’intérieur même du ministère, a-t-on aussi appris.

« Pourquoi ne pas faire d’une pierre deux coups ? On pourrait faire l’arrimage entre les examens certifiés en francisation et ce que le ministère admet comme preuve de compétence en français », suggère par exemple Tania Longpré, enseignante elle-même, qui termine un doctorat en didactique des langues secondes.

Les immigrants en francisation doivent déjà passer des évaluations à la fin de chaque niveau de cours. La nouveauté est que ces examens deviendront des « épreuves ministérielles », nous a confirmé le ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI).

« Désormais, nous devrons tous donner le même examen dans les centres de service scolaire » à travers le Québec, illustre une enseignante en francisation qui a demandé l’anonymat par peur de représailles. Elle précise que les enseignants se font fréquemment rappeler leur « devoir de réserve », d’où la demande récurrente que leur nom ne soit pas révélé.

Le MIFI ne montre cependant pas l’intention d’utiliser ces épreuves à plus large échelle en les acceptant comme preuve de compétence dans les demandes de résidence permanente par exemple.

Depuis 2020, il ne reconnaît plus non plus les attestations qui émanent des cours de francisation. Ce ministère a pourtant dépensé plus de 168 millions de dollars dans les services de francisation durant le dernier exercice financier.

Les immigrants qui n’ont pas fait d’études secondaires ou postsecondaires en français ou qui ne sont pas membres d’un ordre doivent donc passer l’un des tests admissibles pour demander la résidence permanente. Ces tests sont tous conçus entièrement en France, corrigés en partie là-bas et critiqués de toutes parts depuis plusieurs années.

L’ironie est aussi que le gouvernement fédéral reconnaît de son côté la francisation comme une preuve suffisante pour obtenir la citoyenneté, une étape qui vient après la résidence permanente pour les nouveaux arrivants.

Le MIFI indique seulement que des « réflexions sont en cours » pour ajouter de nouveaux moyens pour démontrer les compétences en français. La ministre de l’Immigration Christine Fréchette affirme quant à elle que le travail d’adaptation des tests doit se poursuivre.

L’une des deux instances françaises responsables des tests, la Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris Île-de-France, affirme avoir déjà « une demande forte de la part du ministère […] d’inclure davantage de référents culturels québécois ». Elle avance que l’accent québécois « est présent à 35 % environ dans l’épreuve de compréhension orale », ce qui est contraire à ce que nous avons constaté.

Un chantier pas si facile

Le ministère de l’Éducation avait déjà entrepris des « travaux qui précédaient l’arrivée de Francisation Québec », nous précise-t-on dans un courriel conjoint des deux ministères. Nos sources indiquent que l’instauration des examens standardisés serait déjà en marche pour les niveaux 4 à 7, une information que les ministères n’ont pas confirmée.

« Tout est sous embargo, comme si c’était un secret d’État, alors que c’est une question de cohérence », souligne Mme Longpré.

L’idée de créer un test québécois pour l’immigration ne date pas d’hier. Elle était déjà promue à l’intérieur du MIFI après l’instauration des tests linguistiques faits en France en 2010, a confié au Devoir un ancien haut fonctionnaire. Il a demandé que son identité ne soit pas révélée, car son obligation de « discrétion » est encore applicable, même s’il a cessé d’occuper ses fonctions.

Le coût de ce test a même déjà été évalué à l’interne à environ un million de dollars pour la création et au même montant annuellement pour l’administrer. « On ne nous a jamais autorisés à le créer, même si la discussion revient éternellement », note cette personne. Il suggère que le MIFI pourrait ajouter un test, sans nécessairement remplacer les tests de France, et ainsi offrir ce choix « pour donner la chance de réussir le parcours migratoire ».

Les tests linguistiques ont été instaurés à la suite d’un rapport du vérificateur général du Québec de 2010 sur la sélection des immigrants. On y jugeait que les points attribués au français étaient « laissés au jugement » des agents d’immigration, et qu’il manquait d’information dans le dossier pour justifier le nombre de points alloués.

Une grande proportion d’immigrants passait au départ le test « partout à l’international », après avoir appris le français ailleurs qu’au Québec, note Christophe Chénier, professeur en évaluation du français langue seconde à l’Université de Montréal. Or, les immigrants sont de plus en plus nombreux à séjourner d’abord en tant que temporaires au Québec, et donc à apprendre la langue avec nos spécificités.

La question financière est incontournable selon lui. L’élaboration d’un tel test requiert plusieurs années, une équipe d’une dizaine de personnes et des mises à l’essai auprès de milliers de personnes. Il faut en outre compter le développement de structures informatiques, de points de service, de formation des évaluateurs, de mises à jour du contenu et autres.

« La question fondamentale est que peu importe l’outil utilisé, il doit idéalement respecter des normes de qualité très élevées, à la hauteur des enjeux pour lesquels on l’utilise, car la décision d’immigrer est l’une des rares grandes décisions que l’on prend dans une vie. »

Source: Le ministère de l’Immigration «s’entête» à ne pas reconnaître les évaluations de français québécoises

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Incoming sponsored travel rules for lobbyists will limit ‘educational opportunity’ for MPs and Senators, say CIJA and Results Canada

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

Give me a break, this is lobbying pure and simple, designed to influence, not educate:

Two groups that provide travel programs to parliamentarians are concerned that forthcoming changes to the Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct that will include sponsored travel in rules about gifts will limit their ability to provide MPs and Senators with first-hand experiences in foreign policy and international development issues.

“We don’t use these missions as a gift, but rather as an opportunity for parliamentarians to understand a very complicated region in the world,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, president and CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). “We explicitly indicate in the invitation that there are no strings attached, there are no expectations of the participants other than that they attend all parts of the program, because it’s essential for them to get that whole view. In and of itself, it’s not a lobbying exercise, it’s an educational opportunity.”

“There’s nothing that beats the real impact of seeing [work] on the ground, of talking to a patient whose life has been changed, or talking to a mom who in years previously had no kids that were vaccinated, but now, five out of her six are vaccinated, and the sixth one is in the queue,” said Chris Dendys, executive director of Results Canada. “So, it’s about the tangibility of literally getting your shoes dirty, having real conversations with frontline community health workers, visiting hospitals and clinics that are far from urban centres and seeing the great work that is being done.” 

The updated Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct will come into force on July 1. It states that lobbyists should “never provide any gift—directly or indirectly—to an official that you lobby or expect to lobby, other than a low‑value gift that is a token of appreciation or promotional item.” The accompanying definitions include “travel, including sponsored travel, an excursion, transportation” under its description of gifts.” The “low-value” criteria is set at a maximum of $40 per gift and an annual maximum of $200.

The code permits the commissioner to grant exemptions to the rule by considering several factors, including whether the gift is related to the exercise of a power, duty or function of the official. If an exemption is granted, the commissioner can impose conditions on the lobbyist, such as a cooling-off period during which they cannot lobby the official.

Lobbying Commissioner Nancy Bélanger told The Hill Times in an interview on May 29 that the code was worded so that lobbyists can still offer sponsored travel to individual parliamentarians, provided they do not intend to lobby them. 

“If they want to lobby them, despite the fact that they’ve given them sponsored travel, they’re going to have to ask for an exemption,” she said. “Depending on the circumstances, we would possibly say, ‘The gift can be given; however, you will have a cooling-off period where you cannot lobby until the sense of obligation is reduced.’ … [that is] how it’s going to have to work.”

Fogel said CIJA does not consider its programs to be a gift to public office holders (POHs). The centre, which has been continuously registered to lobby since Feb. 17, 2005, describes its sponsored travel programs on its website as “fact-finding missions to Israel for Canadian influencers and decision-makers.”

“I think where the difference of opinion is and where we think [the commissioner’s] understanding is not complete is that these programs that we undertake are not a gift. There’s no quid pro quo, there’s no expectation that they’re going to come back and adopt CIJA’s position on any of 100 different issues,” Fogel said. “What we believe is that our constituents consider these issues important enough that they want their public office holders to have a good understanding of the situation rather than the kind of superficial one that one gets by just reading headlines and looking at social media posts.”

CIJA’s submission to the first draft of the updated code of conduct, released in December 2021, asked that sponsored travel remain available to POHs. 

“Our missions to Israel (and the Palestinian Authority) are rigorous and, in short, designed to ensure that the POH experiences the highest possible quality and range of insights and background knowledge of the region,” the submission said.

Results Canada also mentioned sponsored travel in a joint submission to the House Ethics Committee’s (ETHI) study of the lobbyists’ code with World Vision Canada and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank in March 2023. The three international development organizations asked the committee to recommend that sponsored travel be specifically exempted from the application of the gifts rule, and for hospitality costs incurred while hosting parliamentarians on sponsored travel to be similarly exempted.

“We provide opportunities for experiential learning and evidence gathering, allowing parliamentarians to learn first-hand the enormous impact of Canadian organizations and the Government of Canada in international development,” the submission said. “This unique experience cannot be replicated by reading reports.”

Results Canada’s Dendys told The Hill Times that the organization has hosted parliamentary delegations overseas approximately once a year since 2007, with a break during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The non-profit advocates for policies and monetary investments to improve health, education, and economic outcomes across the world to eliminate extreme poverty. 

Dendys said the delegations’ value lies in giving parliamentarians a first-hand view of where Canadian international development investments were making a difference.

The most recent delegation was in January, when Liberal MPs Valerie Bradford (Kitchener South–Hespeler, Ont.) and Iqwinder Gaheer (Mississauga–Malton, Ont.), and Conservative MPs Scott Aitchison (Parry Sound–Muskoka, Ont.) and Eric Melillo (Kenora, Ont.) travelled to Kenya.

Results Canada has been continuously registered to lobby federally since Sept. 26, 2011; World Vision Canada since March 22, 2005; and Canadian Foodgrains Bank since Feb. 24, 2005. 

Dendys described the decision to include sponsored travel as a gift in the lobbyists’ code as disappointing. She said her organization was still considering the effect it will have on its work.

“As of right now, our days of providing parliamentarians with on-site experiences will draw to a conclusion unless there’s another review or there’s some amendments,” she said. “It was always just one facet of our overall approach to educating, inspiring and hopefully engaging parliamentarians to become champions. It’s just unfortunate that this very unique and special educational opportunity that organizations like Results and others were providing is seemingly no longer part of the tools in the toolkit.”

Liberal MP John McKay (Scarborough–Guildwood, Ont.) told the House during members’ statements on May 8 that he joined Results Canada on a delegation to Kenya in 2007, “which was far from being a junket; rather, it was a slum tour. Nairobi has some of the biggest slums in the world. What I remember most is the smell of open sewers and the chronic overcrowding.”

Dendys said alternatives to sponsoring parliamentarians’ travel could include closer collaboration with parliamentary associations that have planned delegations to other countries. “It’s also looking at when parliamentarians are travelling anyway, to see if we can inform that travel,” she said.

One solution could be a return to “virtual delegations” held at the height of the pandemic, she said. In February 2022, eight MPs and two Senators took part in such an event with their counterparts in Kenya, alongside health care workers, experts, and advocates in both countries.

CIJA’s Fogel said his organization take its regulatory obligations seriously, and have started consultations with its legal counsel to ensure that the centre fully understands the nuances of the updates before taking the next steps.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to, down the road, see some reconsideration, because everybody has said that they’re valuable experiences. What no-one will say, however, is that they’re a vacation,” he said.

ETHI’s letter to the commissioner supported the call to exempt sponsored travel from the gift rule. 

But Bélanger said in her reply to the committee that she was not persuaded “that automatically exempting sponsored travel from the gift rule would be consistent with the fundamental objectives and expectations set out in the code, including that lobbyists avoid placing officials in conflict of interest situations and that they do not lobby officials who could reasonably be seen to have a sense of obligation towards them.”

She said the rule does not “prevent parliamentarians from accepting sponsored travel. Rather, this rule has been carefully crafted to preclude lobbyists from providing gifts (other than low value tokens of appreciation and promotional items) to officials they lobby or expect to lobby. In practice, this means that lobbyists will not be allowed to lobby officials to whom they have provided sponsored travel.”

The Hill Times reached out to ETHI members to ask about their response to the commissioner’s letter, including Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett (Leeds–Grenville–Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, Ont.), Liberal MP and ETHI vice-chair Iqra Khalid (Mississauga—Erin Mills, Ont.), Bloc Québécois ethics critic and ETHI vice-chair René Villemure (Trois-Rivières, Que.), and NDP ethics critic Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, Ont.). Responses were not received by deadline.

Section 15 of the MP Conflict of Interest Code permits MPs to accept sponsored travel “that arises from his or her duties.” Members must disclose any travel that exceeds $200 and is not paid in full by the MP, their party or a recognized parliamentary association, or from the consolidated revenue fund, to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner within 60 days.

During the Procedure and House Affairs Committee’s most recent review of the code in 2022, members found that the current rule “provides sufficient transparency and accountability, and is in-line with current best practices for the prevention of real or perceived conflicts of interest.” The House agreed to the committee’s report on March 30, 2023.

The Ethics and Confict of Interest Code for Senators has a similar rule in place, with a higher threshold of travel costs exceeding $500. The Senate Ethics Officer published a guideline related to sponsored travel in July 2021, which includes a list of questions for senators to consider before accepting sponsored travel. The questions include: “Is the payor or the sponsor a registered lobbyist? If yes, what is the purpose for which they are lobbying?” and “Would the senator, the sponsor or the payor violate legislation, such as the Criminal Code or the Lobbying Act?”

Source: Incoming sponsored travel rules for lobbyists will limit ‘educational opportunity’ for MPs and Senators, say CIJA and Results Canada

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Globe editorial – Immigration: Canada needs a strategy, not a numbers game [the penny drops…]

2023/06/12 Leave a comment

The Globe completes its shift from earlier “cheerleading” the Century Initiative, business leaders, governments and others in favour of high and higher levels of immigration to recognizing the realities of housing, healthcare and infrastructure deficiencies and raises the need for considering lower immigration levels. Fitting culmination to a good series of editorials and analysis by their journalists.

An “I told you so” moment for me (Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast.) and others. Better late than never…

There have been many waves of immigration that have transformed Canada in decades past. Eastern European migrants headed to the Prairies at the start of the 20th century, forever altering the heart of the country. Canada welcomed Hungarians in the 1950s, opened its doors to non-European immigrants in the 1960s, embraced Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and, more recently, gave a new home to those fleeing the chaos of Syria.

…

Source: Immigration: Canada needs a strategy, not a numbers game

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