HEC: The Selection of Recent High-Skilled Immigrants to Canada

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Noteworthy study. Interesting that the government has adopted the recommendation to “reweighting current selection criteria to predict earnings” while at the same time implementing sectoral draws that are lower ranked with lower earnings in some cases:

We study economic integration, intentions, and selection using a new survey of recent high-skilled immigrants to Canada (arrivals 2015–2025), linked to native-conditional earning percentile ranks. We document five main results. First, high-skilled immigrants experience large earnings gains from migration, with average earnings roughly doubling within one year of arrival. Second, entry status strongly predicts early outcomes: immigrants on closed work permits outperform direct permanent residents, while students and open-permit entrants start lower, with students catching up faster. Third, nonpermanent residents do not, on average, integrate faster than permanent residents relative to natives, except for former students. Fourth, intentions to stay are more closely related to earnings growth than to income levels. Fifth, reweighting current selection criteria to predict earnings improves expected outcomes and shifts selection toward high-performing non-permanent residents, particularly those on closed permits.

Source: HEC: The Selection of Recent High-Skilled Immigrants to Canada

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Griffiths: Canada’s AI debate has a mile-wide blind spot. It’s our immigration policy

2026/05/11 2 Comments

Good commentary and flagging a real issue that will become more important as AI develops. Just as our trade strategy has been slow to address IP and AI implications, so has immigration:

…But the labour market we are barreling toward is anything but normal.

If the AI thesis is even half-right, the bottleneck for Canadians over the next five years will not be a shortage of workers. It will be a shortage of jobs that AI cannot do—almost all of them physical, hands-on, or relational. Trades. Eldercare. Construction. Skilled installation. Personal services. The very segments where displaced white-collar Canadians, suddenly competing for “hands-on” work, will exert powerful downward pressure on wages. Adding hundreds of thousands of newcomers per year who will struggle to compete in either the contracting knowledge economy or in a skills economy experiencing a surfeit of labour, multiplies the AI disruption rather than relieving it.

The radical idea—and it is radical only because no one in Ottawa is willing to say it out loud—is that an AI-dominated economy may make Canada’s high-immigration model not just unnecessary but actively harmful to the workers we already have. The composition of intake, in such a world, would also need to flip towards ultra specialists, veritable immigrant unicorns, and away from generalist knowledge worker credentials in fields AI can now do at a hundredth of the cost.

Make no mistake: this argument is not nativism dressed in economic clothing. It is the opposite. It is the argument that immigration policy, like every other major lever of state, must respond to the actual economy in front of it—and the economy in front of us is being rewritten in real time by machines that, on a benchmark designed by the companies building them, now do the work of 44 professions about as well as the people who trained for 14 years to do it.

Canada’s policy elites have so far met this once-in-a-century technological inflection with something between a “let it rip” shrug and a quiet hope that the transition to an AI-dominated economy will be slow enough to manage the wrenching structural adjustment. It will not be. The AI dislocation looks set to be wider, deeper, and faster than the prepared playbook anticipates, and immigration policy will be the first of many non-labour files to get caught up in it.

Far better to have the difficult conversation now than after the displacement has begun in earnest. Time, as it has a habit of doing in moments like this, is fast running out.

Source: Canada’s AI debate has a mile-wide blind spot. It’s our immigration policy

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The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Not the principle but the details need to be fixed:

…Very simply, the problems with the CAF’s recruiting system have not yet been remedied. Yes, permanent residents and naturalized citizens should be encouraged to join the military, but not until they can speak, read, and understand French and/or English and are adapted to Canadian life and the military’s expectations. Yes, those with medical problems should be enlisted, but only if they have been properly screened in the recruitment process. And certainly, the CAF should not accept candidates who cannot read, write, or comprehend instruction at an acceptable standard.

To judge by his long memorandum with its substantiated recommendations, Kieley is a very able officer doing his best to deal with the difficulties he and his understrength staff face. The generals in Ottawa had changed the rules to speed up recruiting with good intentions but had failed to consider the possible consequences. The recruiting officers across the country too often pushed the unqualified to Saint-Jean, and Kieley had to clean up the mess. It’s almost as if NHL scouts sent those who cannot skate to training camp. This cannot work.

This matters because such applicants at the CAF’s Leadership and Training School cost DND money and take spots from better-qualified candidates. It also matters because General Carignan is studying options to expand the CAF to as many as 85,500 regular force members. “In the next month or so,” the CDS told the CBC in April, “we will be able to present various options, and the discussion is going very well,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest in doing this.”

Canada needs a bigger and better Canadian Armed Forces, and the Carney government is putting much money (and much of its credibility) into getting this program right. But if the recruitment process does not speed up and function properly, that investment will achieve little. The generals at National Defence Headquarters and officers in recruiting centres across Canada must fix these problems now.

Source: The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

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Century Initiative: Strategic Immigration Levels Planning for Canada’s Short and Long-Term Future

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Summary of lessons and recomendations from the Century Initiative consultations on immigration planning. I was part of those consulted. Further reflection of CI’s efforts to distance itself from its earlier overly simplistic approach to immigration. My quick comments in italics.

As for the IRPA recommended changes, unclear whether the government is planning to make any amendments to IRPA given other priorities although the CIMM immigration study may suggest otherwise:

Key Lessons for Immigration Levels Planning

  1. Misinformation and disinformation pose growing risks to the integrity of immigration levels planning. True, but arguably also applied to a number of pro-immigration advocates.
  2. Significant investments are needed in Canada’s data ecosystem to provide the evidence needed for effective immigration levels planning. While IRCC and StatsCan generate a wealth of data, there still remain significant gaps, particularly with respect to integrating different data sets.
  3. Immigration levels planning requires deeper analysis at the local and regional level. Challenge is balancing local and regional with national levels, recognizing mobility rights mean that immigrants may relocate to pursue opportunities.
  4. Immigration levels planning requires longer time horizons to avoid sudden system shocks. In principle yes, but the famous line, “in the long run, you’re dead.”
  5. Immigration levels planning must combine quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what types of immigrants are needed to meet Canada’s economic, demographic, and social objectives and how to improve outcomes for recent arrivals. Challenge is in the doing.
  6. Immigration levels planning must reflect Canada’s short and long-term absorptive capacity and social and economic objectives, rather than responding reactively to changing national and global dynamics. Good reference to absorptive capacity but there will always be political pressures to be reactive.

Recommendations

  1. Amend s. 94(2)(b) of IRPA to require the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to include the total number of annual arrivals in the immigration levels plan (permanent and temporary). Long overdue.
  2. Amend s. 3 of IRPA to explicitly recognize permanent residence and citizenship pathways as core objectives of Canada’s immigration system and require that immigration levels planning account for expected transitions from temporary to permanent status. Also overdue. Always struck me as odd no reference to citizenship in the plan.
  3. Amend s. 94(2) of IRPA to require the Government of Canada to consider Canada’s absorptive capacity in the immigration levels planning process. Also overdue.
  4. Amend IRPA to introduce accountability and reporting mechanisms to the immigration levels planning process. Would be nice! Particularly with respect to outcomes, not just outputs.
  5. Develop a core set of indicators to inform immigration levels planning across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons, and provide transparent public information on how these indicators are used in future immigration levels plans. To a certain extent, the core CRS human capital criteria provides the basis for the indicators and the CRS and any indicators should be coherent and mutually reinforcing.
  6. Strengthen collaboration with other orders of government by more transparently reflecting regional priorities and realities within the national immigration levels planning process. Arguably, regular fed-prov consultation provide for this.
  7. Establish a formal long-term immigration planning framework that defines Canada’s demographic, economic, and nation-building objectives and explicitly guides future immigration levels plans. Again, in the long run we’re dead.
  8. Clarify and harmonize the Government of Canada’s language regarding immigration levels and targets. Always an area for improvement.
  9. Strengthen research and data infrastructure on two-step migration to better inform immigration levels planning. Agree.
  10. Increase the time horizon of immigration levels plans beyond 3 years, recognizing that longer-term projections are a forecast and subject to adjustment over time. In theory, yes, in practice not sure how meaningful given electoral cycles and events.
  11. Make strategic investments in the data ecosystem on immigration-related issues to better inform policy and planning. Always in favour of better data and analysis.
  12. Increase the depth, rather than breadth, of the Government of Canada’s immigration levels planning consultation process. Makes sense.

Source: Strategic Immigration Levels Planning for Canada’s Short and Long-Term Future

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ICE Immigration Enforcement Has Harmed U.S. Workers, Research Shows

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Not that surprising:

New research finds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has harmed U.S.-born workers. The findings contradict a central policy justification for ICE raids and arrest quotas in U.S. cities. Earlier this year, ICE and Border Patrol agents killed two Americans in Minneapolis and generated widespread protests. The new research shows ICE activity also caused economic disruption and failed to deliver on the administration’s promise to improve the economic situation of U.S. workers.

Immigration Surge Did Not Help U.S.-Born Workers

Under the Trump administration, ICE and Border Patrol agents surged into Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other major cities. Economists Chloe N. East and Elizabeth Cox at the University of Colorado Boulder examined the impact of immigration enforcement actions in a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. While immigration enforcement has increased nationwide during the Trump administration, the researchers compared areas that “experienced a sudden, large increase in ICE arrests” to places that did not.

One research finding is unsurprising: Among individuals identified as likely undocumented immigrants not physically removed from the labor market, ICE activity produced a “chilling effect” of interacting with ICE, leading to a 4% reduction in employment. According to the research, in an average area, approximately six undocumented immigrants dropped out of the labor force for every one ICE arrest. That may help explain why employers often express difficulties in finding workers well beyond the number of people arrested or deported.

The research finds ICE arrests have not helped and, indeed, likely harmed U.S.-born workers, including those with a high school education or less. “There is a negative and significant impact on employment of U.S.-born male workers with at most a high-school education, who work in likely affected sectors,” according to the study. “This is consistent with a model where undocumented immigrants and U.S.-born workers are complements, rather than substitutes for each other in the labor market.”

There are additional disappointing results for administration officials, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, to ponder: “We see no evidence that employers increase wages to attract U.S.-born workers to fill these jobs in the face of immigration enforcement,” write East and Cox. “Instead, our results are consistent with employers reducing labor demand overall, including for jobs more often taken by U.S.-born workers.”

Source: ICE Immigration Enforcement Has Harmed U.S. Workers, Research Shows

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New international student numbers in Canada down significantly, but overall decline more moderate, study says

2026/05/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

Ottawa’s measures to cut foreign students may have dramatically reduced the number of new cohorts entering the system in the last two years, but the decline in total international student enrolment has been “more moderate,” says a new report.

The study by Statistics Canada on international enrolment in public post-secondary institutions estimated that the number of new students had dropped by 64 per cent from 216,867 in the 2023-24 academic year to just 77,939 in the current school year.

Over the two-year period, colleges saw their new international student intakes nosedive by 102,188 or 75 per cent, while universities saw a decrease of 36,740 or 46 per cent, it said. 

However, the agency’s estimates showed that the total number of international students decreased by only four per cent in 2024-2025 and by 26 per cent in 2025-2026. Over two years, it represented a loss of about 124,000 students, bringing the population back to nearly 300,000, levels similar to the second academic year of the pandemic (2021-22).

“These measures may have significantly reduced the size of new cohorts of international students (-64 per cent) in 2025/2026 and, more moderately, the total number of international students in public postsecondary institutions,” said the report released on Tuesday.

“A steady decline in the number of international students is anticipated in Canada.” …

Source: New international student numbers in Canada down significantly, but overall decline more moderate, study says

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Policymakers should be prepared for a ‘new reality’ after immigration cuts, think tank warns

2026/05/07 Leave a comment

Good note on how to interpret the study in this note of caution to immigration advocates:

…The think tank’s report warns that any misinterpretation of the data could lead to counterproductive stimulus, such as unnecessary interest rate cuts or new spending. 

“There’s concern that they won’t recognize that that’s the new reality,” said Don Drummond, a former senior executive at the Department of Finance and now a fellow-in-residence with C.D. Howe.  

Drummond said the recent cuts to immigration and temporary foreign worker levels were the right calls because Canada didn’t have the housing or health-care capacity to support the previous levels. The challenge, he added, is to understand that the new, lower levels will automatically have an effect on other statistics that are in part a reflection of population changes. 

The new report forecasts that total Canadian employment will decline this year and next and that inflation-adjusted economic growth will be between 0.4 and 0.5 per cent in the near term. It also forecasts that employment will fall by 54,000 this year and another 17,000 in 2027, assuming that the economy is neither overheated nor lacking demand. 

But those middling numbers are in part a function of demographic changes. “The risk is not poor performance,” the report stated, “but misinterpretation.”….

Source: Policymakers should be prepared for a ‘new reality’ after immigration cuts, think tank warns

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Ottawa to start tracking which temporary foreign residents have left Canada after permits run out

2026/05/06 2 Comments

Long overdue:

Ottawa is for the first time to track which foreign students and other temporary foreign residents have left the country after their permits to remain in Canada expire, Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab told a committee of MPs on Monday. 

Economists have been warning for years that Canada has been dramatically undercounting the number of temporary residents living here by presuming that international students and others leave the country after their permits and visas run out. 

Ms. Diab said Monday the government is conducting a pilot program to track entries and exits by temporary residents, including international students, as part of an action plan to combat non-compliance. 

From this month, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will record if they are in the country or have left, IRCC deputy minister Ted Gallivan told MPs. He said the department has been collaborating with the Canada Border Services Agency on collecting entry and exit data. 

The initiative was disclosed at the Commons immigration committee, which was questioning the minister about a critique by Auditor-General Karen Hogan into the failure of Ms. Diab’s department to investigate suspected cases of study permit non-compliance and immigration fraud….

Source: Ottawa to start tracking which temporary foreign residents have left Canada after permits run out

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Nadeau | «Aucun, c’est déjà trop»

2026/05/05 Leave a comment

Valid to discuss specifics rather than generalities:

…« On ne peut pas accueillir toute la misère du monde » : cette formule qui sert à se laver les mains me lève le cœur. Elle déplace la question pour mieux noyer le poisson. Au lieu de discuter de situations réelles — de personnes précises, de risques précis, de décisions précises —, elle remplace le problème par une abstraction gigantesque. Et face à une abstraction gigantesque, il devient toujours possible de conclure qu’il n’y a rien à faire, que c’est trop gros. Ainsi, la discussion est close avant même d’avoir commencé.

Cette rhétorique dit en réalité moins quelque chose sur la misère du monde que sur notre propre étroitesse morale. Elle exprime jusqu’où nous sommes prêts à ne pas voir la souffrance d’autrui.

L’immigration n’est pas une condition historique figée. Il suffit de peu, dans l’histoire, pour devoir chercher refuge ailleurs. Du jour au lendemain, des sociétés entières peuvent s’y trouver poussées. Entre 1880 et 1930, près de 900 000 Canadiens français ont émigré aux États-Unis pour échapper à la misère. La frontière entre ceux qui accueillent et ceux qui arrivent n’est jamais aussi claire qu’on veut bien le croire. Ceux qui parlent aujourd’hui des migrants comme de pestiférés oublient parfois qu’on peut vite devenir l’« immigrant » de quelqu’un d’autre.

Source: Chronique | «Aucun, c’est déjà trop»

Funny how the translation program is so literal on the gender of “formula” rather than using it:

…” We cannot welcome all the misery of the world”: this formula that is used to wash your hands raises my heart. She shifts the question to better drown the fish. Instead of discussing real situations — specific people, specific risks, precise decisions — she replaces the problem with a gigantic abstraction. And in the face of a gigantic abstraction, it always becomes possible to conclude that there is nothing to do, that it is too big. Thus, the discussion is closed before it has even begun.

This rhetoric actually says less about the misery of the world than about our own moral narrowness. It expresses how far we are willing not to see the suffering of others.

Immigration is not a fixed historical condition. It takes little, in history, to have to look for refuge elsewhere. Overnight, entire societies can find themselves pushed there. Between 1880 and 1930, nearly 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the United States to escape poverty. The border between those who welcome and those who arrive is never as clear as we would like to believe. Those who today speak of migrants as plague victims sometimes forget that you can quickly become someone else’s “immigrant”.

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Here’s why Canada needs to ditch age‑based immigration points

2026/05/05 Leave a comment

It was the point system that was established in the 60’s and the CRS is the updated version used in Express Entry that was launched in 2015. Sloppy not to note that in the article.

The CRS was based on extensive analysis of the various factors that contributed to the success of economic immigrants. Like all government programs, it has to discriminate or more accurately distinguish between the various factors to assess eligibility.

Age also is a factor with respect to the overall aging of the population. Are there any points that she would agree are good policy?:

Canada’s Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) was established in 1967 to respond to historic racism and nationality bias in Canada’s immigration system. Granting points for age, education, official language skills, Canadian work experience and family ties, the CRS ranks applicants for permanent residency.

The federal government recently proposed changes to CRS points, including the elimination of some point categories. While family-related points are proposed for removal, age-based criteria are not.

My research delves into the legal, ethical and policy reasons why Canada should ditch age-based immigration points….

Ageist immigration policies

Age discrimination embedded in the points system also contradicts Canadian values. Currently, a person gets zero points for age if they are under 18 or over 45.

Imagine the public outcry if a person received zero points for being a woman? Or for being a racialized person? Many Canadians would rightly call out such overtly sexist and racist policies. 

Similarly, points for age undermine the merit-based foundations of the CRS. They contradict rights-based hiring practices that prohibit asking candidates their age and stereotyping older workers.

My archival research suggests the architect of the CRS, then-Deputy Immigration Minister Tom Kent, did not have a clear policy rationale for the initial age-based points. One historianhas argued: “The points system, as it was originally conceived, has as much to do with politics as with labour markets.”

There is also some internal contradiction within the points system between the decreasing points for age and the increasing points for education and work experience. The latter rely on the passage of chronological time, while the former subtracts points for it.

Age-based points are bad policy

Policymakers and public commentators sometimes justify age discrimination in the points system by claiming that older immigrants are likely to take more from Canada than they are to give. But research shows that this is empirically incorrect.

First, Canadian and Québec pension plans are contributory — benefits are calculated by lifetime earnings in Canada. For Old Age Security, people must be residents of Canada for at least 10 years to qualify, and they must have resided here for at least 40 years to receive the maximum benefit. 

As a result, immigrants to Canada receive fewer contributions and are more likely to be poor than any other group of Canadians when they retire.

Second, while some may assume older immigrants will be a burden on the health-care system, the “healthy immigrant effect” is well-documented. 

Newcomers also tend to under-use health services. What’s more, there’s a waiting period for universal health coverage. Some immigrants actually return to their home countries to access time-sensitive or culturally appropriate care.

Source: Here’s why Canada needs to ditch age‑based immigration points

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