Triadafilopoulos: Are Canadians really open to more migration in the future?

2020/12/14 Leave a comment

A useful warning against assuming getting back to normal:

How are we to make sense of Canadian immigration policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic? On the one hand, the Trudeau government has pledged to increase both its already ambitious admissions target for 2020 and its annual immigration levels in the next three years. The government’s expansive immigration strategy has earned the praise of immigration boosters while generating little in the way of skepticism (let alone criticism) from opposition parties. For the most part, public opinion has also fallen into line. Yet, paradoxically, the Government of Canada’s open approach to migration of all kinds has been marked by unprecedented territorial closure.

The same contradiction is evident among Canadians: their ongoing support of official multiculturalism has also coincided with increases in racist discrimination. A frank appraisal of Canada’s immigration policy must acknowledge the juxtaposition of aspirational openness, on the one hand, and de facto closure and growing hostility, on the other. Doing so makes it clear that any hope of returning to business as usual after the pandemic may be misplaced.

Canada has earned a global reputation for administering an expansive immigration policy. Bucking the global trend toward greater restrictiveness in the years following the global economic crisis of 2008-09, annual admissions rose steadily under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s right-of-centre governments from 2008 to 2015. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s centre-left Liberal Party governments have introduced even more ambitious targets. These significant increases in immigration levels have been supported by all of Canada’s major political parties. Canadian governments, regardless of their partisan orientation, have also stood firm in their support of Canada’s policy of official multiculturalism, even as leaders of other liberal democracies have cast multiculturalism as a failed and dangerous experiment. Recent efforts to strike a more restrictive stance on immigration, notably by the populist People’s Party of Canada in the 2019 federal election, have come to naught.

Any hope of returning to business as usual after the pandemic may be misplaced

Public support appears to have held, despite the challenges raised by the pandemic. The most recent iteration of the Environics Institute for Survey Research’s long-running “Focus Canada” survey (published in October) revealed that,

[S]trong and increasing majorities of Canadians express comfort with current immigration levels, see immigrants as good for the Canadian economy and not threats to other people’s jobs, and believe that immigration is essential to building the country’s population … By a five-to-one margin, the public believes immigration makes Canada a better country, not a worse one, and they are most likely to say this because it makes for a more diverse multicultural place to live.

In their commentary for this series, the Environics Institute’s Andrew Parkin and Keith Neuman note that this increase in support for immigration “may in part be a counter-intuitive response to the pandemic itself: rather than focusing inward, Canadians are expressing a greater sense of social solidarity in recognition that, in the face of the crisis, ‘we are all in this together’.”

As we move into the second wave of the pandemic, the fragility of this solidarity is clear. Spikes in infections have led to new lockdowns, which, in turn, have slowed the summer economic recovery. Although the national unemployment rate has come down from a high of over 13% in April 2020, it remains stuck at about 9%. Employment growth has stalled and long-term unemployment has increased. Canadians find themselves living through a period of profound economic dislocation, unlike any in recent memory.

Moves aimed at containing the pandemic have also transformed Canada’s approach to migration. Canadians live in a country that has effectively shut itself off from the world. Despite the announcement of ambitious immigration targets, actual admissions shrank by 64% in the second quarter of 2020. The admission of resettled refugees and protected persons declined by 83%. Trips by residents of countries other than the United States to Canada fell by almost 96% from September 2019 to September 2020.

The current status quo is one of extraordinary closure, marked by popular support for strict controls and increased racism

A majority of Canadians appear to support strict border controls. According to a Nanos Research poll, 81% of Canadians “believe the Canada-US border should stay closed for the foreseeable future.” A 29 October 2020 report by the Association for Canadian Studies noted that 52% of Canadians would prefer to maintain currently low levels of immigration over the next twelve months. Only 24% supported “gradually [increasing] immigration levels” over the same period. An August 2020 survey by researchers at McMaster University and Dynata Research arrived at similar results.

Canada’s embrace of territorial closure has coincided with a spike in xenophobia and racism. A July 2020 poll by IPSOS Global Public Affairs revealed that nearly 30% of Canadians reported that they had “personally been a victim of racism, up five points since [2019].” A survey by the Angus Reid Institute noted that 50% of 500 respondents of Chinese descent had been “called names or insulted as a direct result of the COVID-19 outbreak … [A] plurality (43%) further say they [had] been threatened or intimidated.” A Statistics Canada report drawing on responses submitted from “more than 43,000 Canadians … to a crowdsourcing data collection [research project] on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian’s perceptions of safety” found that

The proportion of visible minority participants (18%) who perceived an increase in the frequency of harassment or attacks based on race, ethnicity or skin colour was three times larger than the proportion among the rest of the population (6%) since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This difference was most pronounced among Chinese (30%), Korean (27%), and Southeast Asian (19%) participants.

My fear is that aspirational openness may lead to misplaced confidence in a relatively painless return to business as usual once the pandemic has lifted. This is not to say that the reasoning underlying the decision to expand Canada’s immigration program in the coming years is not compelling. It is to draw our attention to the fact that the current status quo is one of extraordinary closure, marked by popular support for strict controls and increased racism. The pandemic has amplified tendencies that have long been present in Canadians’ opinions on immigration: support for mass immigration has depended on the strict policing of irregular flows; and favorable views on multiculturalism have always included demands that immigrants adopt “Canadian values.” This reality needs to be acknowledged and dealt with if Canada is to successfully resume its immigration program in a post-pandemic world.

Source: Are Canadians really open to more migration in the future?

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COVID-19 Impact on Immigration: October data

2020/12/14 Leave a comment

The latest October numbers for Permanent Residents, asylum seekers and study permits (international students). Unfortunately, the data tables for temporary residents have not been updated since August, and citizenship not since June.

Permanent residents

Overall, permanent resident admissions are down by 51.8 percent in October 2020 compared October 2019, and  42.9 percent year to date. Family and refugee categories have declined more than the economic category.

With respect to Provincial Nominee Program, declines have been less in Alberta and British Columbia than other provinces.

Transition from temporary residents to permanent residents account for close to 40 percent of total admissions in 2020 year to date, with the post-graduate work program and the International mobility program being relatively less affected that international students and the temporary foreign worker program (note some double counting between these programs and overlap with the Provincial Nominee Program). 

Asylum claimants have declined dramatically given travel and border restrictions (particularly airport arrivals), from an average of over 5,000 a month in 2019 to an average of less than 1,300 April to October 2020. Inland claims accounted for 56 percent of all claims in 2019, and for 81 percent April to October 2020. 

International students (study permit holders have declined from an average of 35,000 per month in 2019 (with summer seasonal peaks) to 27,000 April to October 2020, with some variation among countries of origin (citizenship) year to date as well as by province of destination.

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Survey shows support for migrant workers getting more benefits and protections, as senators introduce motion for change

2020/12/12 Leave a comment

Good initiative by Senators Black and Omidvar in commissioning this poll:

Eight in 10 Canadians say temporary foreign workers should be entitled to the same benefits and protection as any other workers in this country, according to a Nanos Research poll.

The survey, commissioned by senators Ratna Omidvar and Rob Black, was released Thursday in the wake of a Star story that highlighted the plight of hundreds of Trinidadian seasonal migrant farm workers, who are stuck in Canada due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and unable to access employment insurance benefits.

The pandemic has shed light on the vulnerability of temporary foreign workers, who pay the same EI premiums as Canadian workers but who have difficulty accessing the benefits due to their precarious immigration status.

Trinidad and Tobago has closed its airports to international flights since March and the estimated 400 stranded workers are on the verge of losing their legal status in Canada as their work permits expire on Dec. 15. Many have been denied EI, with officials saying their “closed” work permit prevents the workers from looking for other employers, resulting in them being declared not “ready or available” for work.

The senators say that in addition to benefits, migrant workers should have “pathways” to obtaining permanent resident status in Canada, something that is currently very limited for these workers.

“The pandemic has highlighted the fact that temporary migrant workers and seasonal agricultural workers are essential to Canada,” said Black. “We are calling on the Government of Canada for pathways to permanency for essential workers, should they so desire.”

The poll of 1,040 Canadians was conducted in late October and independent from the Star story.

It found that 93 per cent of respondents said migrant workers are essential contributors to Canada’s agricultural sector and 81 per cent said they deserved a pathway to permanent residence.

Canada’s agricultural sector depends on the temporary migrant work force, which makes up 17 per cent of the total employment in the sector.

“We need more concrete and equitable improvements to our migrant workers program. Since the workers are essential to our well being and safety, then the safest … and the most human way forward is to provide them with more permanent residency options,” Omidvar said.

Both Black and Omidvar plan to introduce a motion in the Senate on Thursday calling on the Liberal government to create permanent residence pathways for migrant workers.

Source: Survey shows support for migrant workers getting more benefits and protections, as senators introduce motion for change

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A new ranking is giving Canada’s approach to immigrants top marks, with a notable exception

2020/12/10 Leave a comment

Good summary of the report and findings. MIPEX is policy-based and evaluates policies, not how effectively they have been implemented or the actual socioeconomic outcomes.

For that reason, I prefer the OECD’s integration indicators approach as they compare outcomes such as unemployment, educational attainment, low-income etc. Have not yet updated this table with selected OECD indicators yet but unlikely that these have changed significantly.

And I remain to be convinced that access to municipal voting is that important in Canada given that we have a relatively straightforward citizenship path, one that will become even more facilitative should the Liberal government implement its election commitment to eliminate citizenship fees.

Nevertheless, policy comparison indices like MIPEX are useful policy tools given their comprehensive nature to understand differences between countries as long as one also looks at the actual socioeconomic indicators:

Canada has been ranked fourth in the world when it comes to integrating immigrants, after it fell out of the top five nations under the former Conservative government in the previous survey.

The country jumped two spots in the latest Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) computed by an international network of experts in recognition of policies that emphasize equal rights, opportunities and security for newcomers.

The index, last released in 2015, puts Canada ahead of the world’s major immigration destinations: Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

“Since the last edition of MIPEX, Canada returned to its traditional path to citizenship and strengthened its commitment to equal rights and opportunities,” said the 2019 MIPEX profile on Canada to be released Wednesday.

“Over the past five years, Canada improved policies on access to basic rights and equal opportunities.”

Some improvements cited in the MIPEX profile of Canada include the 2017 Citizenship Act, by which the Liberal government removed obstacles for immigrants to meet residence and language requirements created by its Conservative predecessor; and the restoration of health care for asylum seekers.

“Five years ago, we were sixth and now we’re fourth. It’s worth saying that when you’re already so high up, it’s difficult to get an improvement,” said Anna Triandafyllidou, the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University.

“I think the improvement should be valued significantly. Overall, we should congratulate ourselves.”

Basing their ranking on numerous indicators, researchers survey international government policies as to how well they treat migrants in eight areas: labour market mobility, family reunification, education, health, political participation, permanent residence, access to nationality and anti-discrimination efforts.

The index is peer-reviewed and released every five years to identify government policies that support or hinder newcomers in their integration. The number of countries covered has increased to 52 nations from 38 in the previous edition.

Top 10 countries

CountriesImmigration integration score
Sweden86
Finland85
Portugal81
Canada80
New Zealand77
USA73
Belgium69
Australia65
Brazil64
Ireland64

Source: Migrant Integration Policy Index 2020 Get the data

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Scoring 86 points out of 100, Sweden has remained the top ranked country, followed by Finland (86) and Portugal (81), with Canada being awarded 80 points. New Zealand, the U.S., Norway, Belgium, Australia and Brazil round up the top 10.

“Among English-speaking countries, Canada is becoming a more attractive and inclusive global destination,” said Thomas Huddleston, director of research for the Migration Policy Group, lead author of the European Union-funded index.

“Canada, along with New Zealand, is taking the place of previous top-ranking countries such as Australia, the U.K. and the United States, which all go down in the MIPEX rankings this round under pressure from populist political forces.”

The index credits Canada for overall policies that encourage the public to see immigrants as their equals, neighbours and potential citizens.

“These policies matter because the way that governments treat immigrants strongly influences how well immigrants and the public interact and think of each other,” it noted.

“Integration policies emerge as one of the strongest factors shaping not only the public’s willingness to accept and interact with immigrants, but also immigrants’ own attitudes, belonging, participation and even health in their new home country.”

Bottom 10 countries

CountriesImmigration integration score
Bulgaria40
Poland40
Croatia39
Slovakia39
Latvia37
Lithuania37
China32
Russia31
Indonesia26
India24

Source: Migrant Integration Policy Index 2020 Get the data

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As the world sees the rise of nationalism, populism and xenophobia, Triandafyllidou said Canada fortunately has very well established public support for immigration, with all major political parties recognizing the importance of pro-immigration policies.

But it’s not to say Canada doesn’t have room to improve on its ranking.

MIPEX found the political participation of immigrants in Canada “halfway favourable.”

While immigrants can become active in local civil society and become full citizens, it said Canada, unlike other major destinations, does not experiment in local democracy by expanding voting rights or consultative structures.

“Canada’s score is relatively lower in (newcomers’) political participation. The reason is there are no political rights for non-citizens,” said Triandafyllidou.

“It has not been part of the objective of different governments, including the current Liberal government, to open up channels for local political participation (as in) voting rights and to be a candidate.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/12/09/a-new-ranking-is-giving-canadas-approach-to-immigrants-top-marks-with-a-notable-exception.html

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UK races to deport asylum seekers ahead of Brexit

2020/12/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Scores of vulnerable asylum seekers, including suspected victims of trafficking, are scheduled to be deported this week as the home secretary Priti Patel ramps up removal operations ahead of Brexit.

Three flights this week, two to Germany and one to France, with possible transfers to Austria, Poland, Spain and Lithuania, are planned amid opposition from campaigners who say they have evidence that cases are being “rushed” through to avoid Patel’s own published policy on identifying trafficking victims.

The development comes days after Patel branded those calling for last week’s deportation flight to Jamaica to be stopped as “do-gooding celebrities”, a label that prompted victims of the Windrush scandal to describe the home secretary as “deeply insulting and patronising”.

Source: UK races to deport asylum seekers ahead of Brexit

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How Canada is fighting the war on talent

2020/12/09 Leave a comment

Good analysis:

Some might look at Noubar Afeyan’s career as a frustrating example of a talented Canadian scientist who got away. The chairman and co-founder of Boston-based Moderna, one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers, was born in Lebanon, immigrated to Canada with his family in the 1970s and did his undergraduate studies at McGill University.

Then we lost him. Mr. Afeyan left to get his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, eventually becoming a star scientist and entrepreneur. He has founded several successful U.S. biotech startups and registered more than 100 patents.

The good news is that Canada’s technology landscape has dramatically changed in the past three-plus decades.

Yes, like Mr. Afeyan, many Canadians are still drawn south by the reputations of U.S. colleges and tech giants. But the evidence suggests Canada has largely reversed its brain drain. This country’s fast-growing technology sector is more than holding its own in the global race for talent, even after the deep economic shock of the pandemic, according to an analysis of employment data contained in a new report for the Innovation Economy Council.

Despite the terrible toll of the pandemic, Canada has become more competitive because there are more opportunities here than ever for people to learn, to build companies and to thrive. And that’s making the market for technology jobs remarkably resilient.

Indeed, there are nearly 100,000 more jobs now in so-called STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and math – in this country than there were before the pandemic. There is still a gaping hole in Canada’s job market, but not for these people. For the most part, Canadian startups and technology companies absorbed the shock, moved to remote work and in some cases have expanded aggressively.

The resilience of tech employment in these uncertain times is a testament to the Canadian sector’s core strengths – an immigration system that welcomes talented foreigners, a growing crop of promising homegrown STEM graduates and a thriving ecosystem of companies.

It’s a tale of two economies, of course. While there was a net gain of 98,500 STEM jobs, Canada had 431,000 fewer non-STEM jobs in October than it had in February, in sectors such as retail, tourism and airlines.

And there is a cautionary note about the STEM jobs. The number of job postings for these workers is down roughly 50 per cent since February, according to an analysis of data from the Labour Market Information Council. This suggests that companies are still hiring, but perhaps not as enthusiastically as they were before the pandemic.

Another consequence of COVID-19 is that it has accelerated the shift to distributed work forces in the tech industry – teams of employees scattered across different cities and countries. Companies have learned that it’s no longer essential to bring people to them. They can just as easily go where the talent is.

Tech giants – including Google, Facebook and Amazon – have set up large Canadian research and development operations in recent years. A growing number of foreign startups are doing the same. They are moving here to tap our plentiful and affordable supply of programmers, engineers, artificial-intelligence experts and scientists.

Talent flows both ways. Thousands of Canadians continue to pursue careers and education in the U.S. despite four years of anti-immigration rhetoric by outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump. Mr. Trump threatened to tighten H-1B visas, but it turns out Canadian STEM workers are still successfully applying for them – more Canadians were issued H-1Bs in 2019 than in 2018.

Still, that exodus is significantly smaller than the inflow of foreign students, workers and entrepreneurs. Most of our departing STEM workers go to the United States – IEC research shows that more than 10,000 Canadians went south in 2019 with H-1B visas and green cards. But Canada gained nearly 23,000 global STEM workers through permanent residency and temporary foreign worker visas that year.

These newcomers are more likely than Canadians born here to work and study in STEM disciplines. It’s proof that Canada is a place where talented foreigners want to live, work and start companies.

There is also some evidence that the combination of U.S. political strife and China’s democracy crackdown in Hong Kong may be drawing Canadian expats home. As many as 300,000 of the roughly three million Canadian passport holders living outside the country may have returned home since COVID-19 hit, many for good.

But without opportunity, none of that would happen.

Today, it’s tempting to imagine a different a different life story for Moderna’s Noubar Afeyan. Instead of leaving, he stays in Montreal and goes on to found a biotech company that develops a Canadian-made COVID-19 vaccine that the rest of the world desperately wants. His company is worth more than $60-billion and employs thousands of Canadian scientists.

The resilience of Canada’s STEM work force through the pandemic suggests this kind of homegrown-hero story is not so far-fetched.

Canadians will always leave to find their way in the world. This week’s sale of highly touted Montreal startup Element AI to a California software company marked an unfortunate loss of both intellectual property and talent. Canada isn’t the world’s biggest pond and we’ll never retain all of our companies and people. But we’ve shown that we can win the war for talent.

The Trump presidency peddled its anti-immigration messaging, eroding the false narrative that the best and brightest were always welcome in America. Canada countered with policies and public-relations efforts aimed at attracting talent, such as the highly successful Global Talent Stream program and Communitech’s “We Want You” campaign. It has worked.

But the talent war isn’t over. The key is to continue to create – and promote – opportunities and incentives for the best and brightest here in Canada. If we’ve learned anything from the past few years, it’s that narratives matter. And Canada has a good story to tell.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-how-canada-is-fighting-the-war-on-talent/

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Is anyone on Earth not an immigrant?

2020/12/08 Leave a comment

The very long view but one worth reflecting on:

Human beings tend to be fascinated with their beginnings. Origin stories are found across cultures, religions, ethnicities and nationalities — and they are all deeply important. These stories tell people where they come from, how they fit in and how everyone fits together.

One of these stories, of course, is the story of human genes, and it’s a story anyone with human DNA shares.

As scientists find more ancient human DNA, sample more modern DNA and develop more ways to analyze this genetic material, it’s revealing a lot about how early humans moved — and moved and moved — around the world, coming to inhabit nearly every swath of land.

So after thousands and thousands of years of nearly constant migration, are there any people out there who have never left the spot where it’s thought Homo sapiens evolved? Put another way, is there anybody on Earth who isn’t an immigrant?

“From a scientific point of view, maybe the only people that you could consider not to be immigrants would be some Khoe-San-speaking groups in southern Africa,” said Austin Reynolds, an assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in human population genetics.

The designation Khoe-San (pronounced coy-sawn) refers to certain African communities in the areas of Botswana, Namibia, Angola and South Africa who speak similar languages with distinctive clicking consonants, Reynolds told Live Science.

Reynolds said there are two main factors indicating that Khoe-San groups may be non-migratory descendants of original humans: They live in the place where it’s likely humans first appeared, and they have a high amount of genetic diversity. A good way to understand why high genetic diversity indicates original ancestry is by comparing genes to a bowl of M&Ms, Reynolds said. Handfuls taken out of the bowl — i.e. people who broke off from the original human population — might have only a couple M&Ms colors in them, but the original bowl will have all the colors.

Yet despite the Khoe-San groups’ proximity to the proverbial “cradle of humankind” and their significant genetic diversity, identifying them as the last genetically aboriginal peoples is not cut and dry.

Firstly, researchers don’t know for sure that southern Africa is the cradle of humankind. Some scientists think humans first evolved in East Africa, said Reynolds, and scientists haven’t amassed enough archaeological evidence in either area to be completely certain just where Homo sapiens first came on the scene.

There’s even a possibility people evolved in western Africa, Mark Stoneking, a molecular geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Live Science. Different environments do a worse or better job at preserving fossil remains, Stoneking said, so just because human remains were or were not found in specific places doesn’t mean humans didn’t live there long ago.

Stoneking doesn’t think there are any folks left on Earth who aren’t — scientifically, at least — immigrants.

“People have always been on the move,” Stoneking said. His recent genetic research on populations across Asia has shown that there’s a touch of just about everyone in everyone else. “All human populations have been in contact with others,” including the Khoe-San, he said, denoted by evidence in their genes, their cultures and their languages.

Early humans moved extensively around Africa for more than 100,000 years before leaving, at which point they probably moved out of eastern Africa into the Middle East, Stoneking said. It’s likely that not long afterward, people headed southeastward along the Indian coast, with many more waves of migrants following these original adventurers over a span of tens of thousands of years. Along the way, there would have been a great exchange of DNA, Stoneking said, and these two components — movement and intermixture — is what he sees as a defining characteristic of the human species.

“Humans — what they like to do is migrate, and they like to have sex,” Stoneking said. And so it seems to have been since time immemorial.

Source: Is anyone on Earth not an immigrant?

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Feds say increased immigration targets key for economic recovery, but critics wary of ambitious plan’s feasibility

2020/12/08 Leave a comment

The more fundamental question is not whether the government can manage these levels of immigration but rather whether they are appropriate given the COVID-induced recession and the impact on immigrant economic integration. Nick Nanos’ comments noteworthy:

The government plans to welcome more than 400,000 newcomers to the country next year, but Conservative MP Raquel Dancho is warning that backlogs in Canada’s immigration system could be a problem.

Ambitious immigration targets are part of the Liberal government’s economic recovery plan. The arrival of new permanent residents has plummeted this year as the COVID-19 pandemic has shut borders and restricted travel across the world.

Leading pollster Nik Nanos said the government doesn’t need to defend bringing in more Canadians, but “I think they have to explain what the urgency is to bring more Canadians in now when we’re in the midst of a pandemic—and I think those are two different issues.”

In late October, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino (Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont.) announced a new government target of 401,000 new permanent residents in 2021 as part of Canada’s economic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic, the first step in a plan that would see immigration levels increase by a little over one per cent of the Canadian population every year for the next three years.

As part of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s fall economic update on Nov. 30, the government highlighted their commitment to “an immigration system that supports economic growth, diversity, and helps build vibrant, dynamic and inclusive communities.”

“Immigrants play an important role in driving Canada’s economic growth, contributing to half of the average real GDP growth over 2016-2019,” according to the statement.

But Ms. Dancho (Kildonan-St. Paul, Man.), her party’s immigration critic, told The Hill Times that the Conservatives “absolutely believe that economic growth is also tied to immigration, and the family reunification that goes with it,” but she said she was skeptical of how the government would reach such an ambitious goal.

“They won’t even achieve half of their goal this year, and now they’re promising what we understand to be the largest influx of permanent residents ever in any single year in Canadian history next year. But I just don’t see how that’s going to happen,” said Ms. Dancho.

Conservative MP Raquel Dancho, her party’s immigration critic, says she has ‘a lot of concerns’ around the feasibility of bringing in more than 400,000 newcomers given backlogs in the system caused by the pandemic.

“If you look at what’s happening with confirmations of permanent residents, there’s well over 10,000 that we’re aware of abroad that were approved, did everything right—were highly skilled, set to come to Canada, sold their homes, took their kids out of school, quit their jobs—and then the government with their [Order In Council] that closed the border, said that they need the travel authorization form, and they haven’t issued those to most of those 10,000 people,” said Ms. Dancho.

“So if they can’t even get these 10,000 people already approved—real people that are suffering—I’m not sure how they’re going to get 401,000 permanent residents approved next year,” said Ms. Dancho. “I have a lot of concerns about that, even beyond the economic growth opportunity of immigration, just the feasibility of bringing in this many people when they’re frankly mistreating the people that they tried to bring in this year.”

Mr. Nanos’ firm Nanos Research took a poll on the issue in November and found that just under two in five Canadians think that Canada should accept the same amount of immigrants in 2021 as we did in 2019.

“What clearly exists is that when Canadians are asked about their support for immigration, accepting refugees and bringing new Canadians into Canada, when anyone tests on that principle, there’s a significantly high level of support,” said Mr. Nanos.

“Canadians understand that most Canadians have come from another place, that new Canadians contribute to the economy, and that we need new Canadians in order to stay prosperous,” said Mr. Nanos. “What we found, in the specific research that we’ve most recently done on immigration, is that there’s not a lot of appetite to bring in more people at this particular time.”

“There’s support—but we tested on the specific numbers,” said Mr. Nanos. “We tested on the 340,000 number—do people want more, do they want to keep it at the same level, or do they want less, and what was clear was that the appetite to bring in more than 340,000 at this particular point in time is actually quite weak.”

Mr. Nanos said he didn’t believe these findings means that Canadians are xenophobic or that they aren’t accepting of refugees.

“But they do see that the economy is in different levels of shutdown right across the country, that Canadians have uncertainty about their own job prospects because many people are being paid to stay home,” said Mr. Nanos.

Part of the personal brand of the prime minister and the Liberal government is being welcoming of refugees, according to Mr. Nanos, pointing out that one of the dividing lines when Mr. Trudeau won his first election in 2015 was the welcoming of Syrian refugees.

“So I see the welcoming of new Canadians as part of the DNA of the prime minister and the Liberal Party at this point in time, and it’s pretty clear [they] believe that it’s not only the right thing to do, but that it’s good for the Canadian economy in the long run, and is part of the growth strategy for Canada,” said Mr. Nanos.

Number of new permanent residents has ‘plummeted’ in 2020

Immigration Lawyer Colin Singer, who is the managing partner at Immigration.ca, told The Hill Times that the number of permanent resident arrivals has plummeted in 2020 compared to the year prior, with only 143,465 new arrivals in the first nine months of the year compared to 263,945 in 2019.

“With immigration levels set to rise above 400,000 newcomers per year [starting] next year, the federal government first plans to invest $72.1-million in a modern, digital platform for receiving and processing immigration applications,” according to Mr. Singer.

“It will then spend a further $15-million on enhancing foreign credential recognition, aiming to cut the time it takes for newcomers to integrate into Canadian society by finding jobs in their field more quickly,” wrote Mr. Singer in an emailed response to The Hill Times.

Claudia Hepburn, CEO of Windmill Microlending, a charity that offers microloans to help skilled immigrants and refugees to continue their careers in Canada, said the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on the labour market shortages that Canada faces in many sectors, including health, IT, engineering and STEM, as well as transportation.

“Skilled immigration is crucial to any plan to solve those shortages, but sometimes they need help to become job ready,” wrote Ms. Hepburn in an emailed response to The Hill Times. “The not-for-profit sector plays a crucial role in helping immigrants become job ready. A successful plan for integrating immigrants into the labour force is as important to solving labour shortages as an ambitious immigration target. We need both.”

Along with increasing the numbers of immigrants, Canada also needs to make the pathways to employment as accessible as possible, according to Ms. Hepburn.

“This means investment in the communication of the resources available to assist in their employment journeys,” said Ms. Hepburn. “Support is also required for those resources and organizations with experience in assisting immigrants on their employment journey in order to enable them [to] scale and facilitate the increase in numbers.”

‘We need newcomers to help our economy bounce back’

Alexander Cohen, Mr. Mendicino’s press secretary, said Canada’s short term recovery and long term prosperity rely on immigration.

“We need newcomers to help our economy bounce back after the pandemic, and address the stark demographic challenges we face with an aging population,” wrote Mr. Cohen in an emailed response to The Hill Times. “Put simply: immigrants create jobs.”

“One in three business owners is an immigrant, and our plan sets out a path for responsible increases to immigration to help the economy recover, with about 60 per cent of admissions in the economic class,” according to Mr. Cohen. “Newcomers also represent about a third of those working on the front lines of the pandemic, like family doctors, pharmacists and nurse’s aides.”

“We’ll continue welcoming the best and brightest from around the world, who have contributed so much throughout the pandemic and bring the skills our businesses need to thrive.”

Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin, her party’s immigration critic, told The Hill Times that the province of Quebec is not necessarily looking to raise it’s immigration level moving forward—and that the province has in fact decided in past years to lower the rate of selection in order to deal with backlogs in the system.

Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin, her party’s immigration critic, says ‘we can be quicker on our feet to select people that will able to join the job market’ once tens of thousands of open case files for skilled workers are closed.

“There’s still something around 35,000 open case files for skilled workers that we want to have processed, so when it’s done, we can be quicker on our feet to select people that will able to join the job market,” said Ms. Normandin.

But in recent conversations with her constituents, Ms. Normandin said that she’s spoken with many industry representatives and business owners and has found that even in a context of high unemployment, it’s also possible to have workforce shortages.

“It’s possible to have both at the same time, and they’re a bit afraid that at some point, immigration will decide to cut on some streams of immigrations, for example the low wage stream, because of the high rate of unemployment,” said Ms. Normandin. “But it’s still hard to find members of the local workforce in some cases. Or when it comes to skilled workers, even though there’s a high rate of unemployment in Quebec, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you’ll find welders with 10 years of experience.”

“So we still need immigration even though there’s a high rate of unemployment, and that’s something we hear a lot,” said Ms. Normandin.

Source: Feds say increased immigration targets key for economic recovery, but critics wary of ambitious plan’s feasibility

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Douglas Todd: Hidden foreign ownership helps explain Metro Vancouver’s ‘decoupling’ of house prices, incomes

2020/12/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

The lack of connection between soaring housing prices and tepid local wages in Metro Vancouver is caused in large part by hidden foreign ownership, says a peer-reviewed study from Simon Fraser University that is being welcomed by the B.C. minister responsible for housing.

Based on data Statistics Canada has been collecting only recently, SFU public policy specialist Joshua Gordon’s paper shows the “decoupling” of housing prices from incomes in Metro Vancouver has been caused by “significant sums of foreign capital that have been excluded from official statistics.”

Gordon’s research set out to solve a puzzle in Greater Vancouver and, to a lesser extent, Toronto. How can tens of thousands of owners who tell Revenue Canada they are low income (earning less than $44,000 a year) consistently afford homes valued in the $2- to $10-million range?

Source: Douglas Todd: Hidden foreign ownership helps explain Metro Vancouver’s ‘decoupling’ of house prices, incomes

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The U.S. Has Embraced Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs. Now It’s Europe’s Turn

2020/12/04 Leave a comment

Interesting that this article is silent on the impact of Trump administration policies with respect to H1-B visas and reducing the attractiveness of the USA for international students. Major oversight of blind spot notwithstanding his points on Europe:

The world is on the cusp of a counterattack on COVID thanks to several vaccines that are currently seeking regulatory approval and a swift rollout.For entrepreneurs and the tech industry, this is a moment when their value to society is demonstrated: business and technology is (along with medicine) leading us out of the pandemic.

But Germany’s Turkish community, and Europe’s minorities in general, are celebrating for a different reason. Turkish-Germans are an often marginalized group, similar to other minorities around the world. Like any community, they are proud of their success stories, such as Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the husband-and-wife co-founders of BioNTech, the firm behind the first vaccine to report a successful phase three trial, based on cutting edge mRNA technology.

These highly visible success stories are relatively rare. Germany, just like much of Europe, has boardrooms that are almost uniformly white. This even includes the tech sector, which in the United States is one of the most open and meritocratic places in the world.

In my 20 years in tech, including in Silicon Valley, I have worked with founders with roots all over the world.

This shouldn’t be surprising: many of America’s biggest tech success stories are those of immigrant backgrounds. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Moscow. Tesla’s Elon Musk is South African. Steve Jobs’s biological father is from Syria, and Jeff Bezos’s stepfather, Mike Bezos, is Cuban-American.

In the past, things have been very different on the other side of the Atlantic, where the only possible equivalent would have been Paris-born eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who moved to the United States as a child, along with his Iranian-born parents.

Arguably it is Silicon Valley’s open attitude to investment and entrepreneurship that makes these American successes possible. Despite there still being no European Silicon Valley, I’m amazed at the level of innovation I’m seeing from start-ups across the continent, including places like Spain and France which are not always thought of as tech hubs. Many of those founders are from minorities, which are a natural fit for techpreneurship.

The huge expansion of tech jobs and tech-based entrepreneurship in the U.S. over the last two decades has created exponential demand for technical skills. Those are the types of skills that many immigrant kids are nudged towards, thanks to parents from developing nations who often see the value of science rather than, say, liberal arts.

A similar expansion is underway in Europe, despite a large portion of the continent’s industries still being traditional. To continue with the German example, only one of the country’s fivelargest companies, Siemens, is tech-related; its culture is very different from the “move fast and break things” attitude of Silicon Valley, with the firm being founded in 1847 (32 years before Edison filed a patent for his light bulb).

It is only in new, innovative industries that the immigrant work ethic and appetite for risk can come into their own.

To create more BioNTechs, European firms have to be ready to make way for the new wave of start-ups—whoever their founders are—without being suffocated by legacy businesses that are centuries-old and may be set in their ways.

At a more basic level, the relationship between host communities around the world and those of immigrant background needs to change. Most societies are very good at tolerating immigrants as much-needed Uber drivers and restaurant servers, less so at supporting them to develop their skills—and their children’s—to equip them for the top.

This isn’t sustainable, because each generation has grander designs than the one before. My parents moved to America in 1971, and as a second-generation immigrant my goals in life are even broader and more assertive than theirs. I have started a business, for example, when they didn’t. Just as I was given the opportunity to think bigger than my parents, my children are even more ambitious than I am.

Europe needs to move from a tactical, transactional mindset with migration towards a strategic, vision-based one. It should be more positive and aspirational: “We want to be the best, and we need to attract the world’s dreamers, innovators and disruptors if we are going to achieve that.”

As an American, I sometimes feel that Europe is stuck in the past. As a young country, America is not as set in its ways as many European nations. The U.S. still seems to act like a teenager: excited about the opportunities of the future, and perhaps sometimes being naive and getting itself into tricky situations (like a disputed election result).

Europe, on the other hand, acts more like a retiree. It prizes stability above all else—and many of its businesses are the same. Sometimes the price of stability has meant sacrificing innovation and opportunity.

The European Union is trying to create a similarly strong narrative to the American Dream to drive it forward. The post-Brexit United Kingdom is attempting the same with the image of “Global Britain.”

Whether they succeed will be demonstrated in the names and faces that shape their economies in the 21st century, and how similar they are to those that dominated the 20th.

Source: The U.S. Has Embraced Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs. Now It’s Europe’s Turn

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