12 New Immigration Ideas for the 21st Century

2020/05/14 Leave a comment

Compiled by the libertarian Cato Institute, a range of ideas ranging from the practical to the more ideological.

On the more practical side:

  • Chapter 1: Automatic Adjustment of the H-1B Visas and Employment‐ Based Green Cards Caps
  • Chapter 2: Reducing Long Wait Times for Family‐​Sponsored and Employment‐​Based Immigrants
  • Chapter 3: Shared Border, Shared Future: A US-Mexican Bilateral Worker Agreement
  • Chapter 5: State-Sponsored Visas (similar to the Provincial Nominee Program)

  • Chapter 6: The Community Visa: A Local Solution to America’s Immigration Deadlock

    Chapter 8: Immigration Moneyball (variant of points system/express entry)

On the more wish list and/or ideological side:

  • Chapter 3: Shared Border, Shared Future: A U.S.-Mexican Bilateral Worker Agreement
  • Chapter 4: Constructing a US-Canadian Bilateral Labor Agreement
  • Chapter 7: Building a Congressional Constituency for Immigration through “Earmarks”
  • Chapter 9: Immigration Designed to Enhance American Lives (IDEAL)
  • Chapter 10: Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It
  • Chapter 11: Choosing Immigrants through Prediction Markets
  • Chapter 12: Transferable Citizenship (citizenship as a traceable good)

Congress has repeatedly considered and rejected comprehensive immigration reform legislation over the past few decades. The most bitter debates were in 2006, 2007, and 2013 when comprehensive bills passed one house of Congress and not the other. Those reforms each failed for particular reasons—groundswells of populist opposition, Democratic senators working with Republicans to remove guest worker provisions, or Republican failure to bring it to the floor in the House of Representatives—but the bills were all basically identical.

Those failed immigration reforms all included three policies: legalize illegal immigrants currently living in the United States, increase border and interior enforcement of the immigration laws, and liberalize legal permanent immigration and temporary migration through an expanded guest worker visa program for lower‐​skilled workers. A domestic amnesty for illegal immigrants was supposed to clear the black market and allow those who have made a life here to settle permanently; extra enforcement was supposed to reduce the potential for illegal immigrants to come in the future; liberalized immigration was supposed to boost U.S. economic prosperity and drive future would‐​be illegal immigrants into the legal market.

In theory, this comprehensive approach was supposed to make future amnesties unnecessary by fixing the laws that encouraged illegal immigration in the first place. The bill Congress considered in 2013, the last attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, followed the same model, which is a major reason the bill failed. For instance, the guest worker provisions for lower‐​skilled workers were all clones and the result of negotiations between the same stakeholders.

Liberalizing legal immigration is the most important component of workable, long‐​term reform. The legal immigration system sets and regulates numbers, procedures, and the types of foreigners who can come to the United States from abroad to work, live, and in some cases eventually naturalize. Providing legal paths for more immigrants, either for temporary work or permanent citizenship, is the best way to secure the border and would help provide for the future prosperity of the United States. The government cannot regulate a black market of illegal immigrants, but it can regulate legal immigrants.

Expanding legal immigration is a worthy goal, but there are many ways to accomplish it. The mission of this collection of essays from policy analysts, economists, political scientists, journalists, and advocates from around the world is to provide new policy suggestions that future Congresses could use to liberalize the legal immigration system. We intentionally avoided seeking proposals from the usual stakeholders and included many original ideas that could increase legal immigration or improve the selection of legal immigrants. The essays fall into four broad categories based on how much they would transform the current legal immigration system. The first category includes proposed rule changes that would substantially improve the current system. In one essay, Daniel Griswold of the Mercatus Center proposes that Congress abolish the static numerical caps on certain visas and instead create a built‐​in numerical escalator that automatically grows the number of visas as employment grows. For example, the number of H‐​1Bs issued would increase as employment in certain hightechnology sectors increases. Similarly, Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy recommends addressing the extreme wait times that skilled immigrants currently face by guaranteeing them legal permanent residence within five years, essentially replacing numerical quotas with a specific wait time.

The second category of essays includes discussions of adding visa categories to the current system. Many of the ideas in this category are based on older visa programs that have been discontinued, visa programs in other countries, logical extensions to the current U.S. system, or admissions policies in other public institutions, such as military academies.

Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development proposes a jointly regulated migration system with Mexico based on lessons learned from the past and best practices from other bilateral migration programs enacted around the world. Michelangelo Landgrave, a political science doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside, proposes a similar policy for Canada based on the principles of reciprocity in work authorization and limited access to welfare, of which, according to survey data, Americans and Canadians alike approve.

David Bier of the Cato Institute proposes state‐​based visas that would allow state governments to accept immigrants based on their diverse economic conditions. In a similar vein, coauthors Jack Graham and Rebekah Smith propose a system whereby local governments would work with private sponsors to bring immigrants into their communities. Both essays highlight the importance of engaging state governments to implement important reforms.

Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform offers a proposal inspired by the acceptance policies of U.S. military academies. It would allow each member of Congress to sponsor 100 immigrants for legal permanent residence— similar to how they nominate recruits for U.S. military academies.

The third category includes proposed changes that would transform how the current U.S. immigration system works.

George Mason University professor Justin Gest envisions a major overhaul of the selection process for immigrants. Under his system, the government would collect much better data on various immigrant outcomes and track immigrants over time to see how they integrate. It would then assign points for immigrants with certain characteristics that the data show correlate with immigrant success.

Steve Kuhn of IDEAL Immigration proposes selling visas to employers, provided they’ve made job offers to foreign workers and paid the workers premiums that match the cost. Nathan Smith’s proposal would increase the number of immigrants admitted but charge them an extra 20 percent tax on their incomes so long as they reside and work in the United States.

The fourth category and the last two fundamental policy reform ideas come from Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University. His reforms would increase immigration, cause more Americans to profit directly from the immigration system, and provide a way to select immigrants that are more beneficial to the United States.

Hanson’s first essay is similar to Gest’s proposal but relies on a more decentralized decisionmaking process to select immigrants using prediction markets. Under this proposal, the public would place cash bets in an open market on which immigrants would succeed based on objectively measurable criteria such as net‐​fiscal impact. The immigration system would then select those priced the highest. In his second essay, Hanson suggests letting U.S. citizens sell or lease their citizenship to noncitizens abroad in exchange for leaving the country. This would monetize the value of American citizenship and create an asset held by every American.

These proposed reforms are just a few of the new and interesting ideas out there. Hopefully, some will be incorporated into future bills; others could spark new and more creative ways of how to change immigration laws. We don’t endorse every essay in this paper, but the stagnant state of the current debate shows the need for bold new ideas and out‐​of‐​the‐​box thinking that will better prepare us for the next immigration reform debate.

Chapter 1: Automatic Adjustment of the H-1B Visas and Employment‐ Based Green Cards Caps

By Daniel Griswold

Congress should tie the growth of employment‐ based visas to growth in the most relevant sectors of the U.S. labor force to assure that the annual number of visas available more closely matches the demands of the U.S. economy over time. Two of the most important visas for foreign‐​born workers are the H-1B visa and the employment‐​based green card, both for more‐​skilled and more‐​educated foreign born workers. Yet the number of such visas available has not changed significantly in almost three decades despite transformational growth in the U.S. labor market.

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Chapter 2: Reducing Long Wait Times for Family‐​Sponsored and Employment‐​Based Immigrants

By Stuart Anderson

Congress should tie the growth of employment‐ based visas to growth in the most relevant sectors of the U.S. labor force to assure that the annual number of visas available more closely matches the demands of the U.S. economy over time. Two of the most important visas for foreign‐​born workers are the H-1B visa and the employment‐​based green card, both for more‐​skilled and more‐​educated foreign born workers. Yet the number of such visas available has not changed significantly in almost three decades despite transformational growth in the U.S. labor market.

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Chapter 3: Shared Border, Shared Future: A U.S.-Mexican Bilateral Worker Agreement

By Michael Clemens

The U.S. government has mismanaged labor mobility and failed to cooperate meaningfully with migrant countries of origin for the past half‐​century. Foreign workers have come for fundamental jobs, which are those that are critical to the U.S. economy and that do not require formal higher education, such as personal care, construction, warehousing, and others. They have come almost exclusively via family‐​based green cards, “low‐​skill” temporary guest worker visas for seasonal jobs tied to a single employer, or through a vast black market in labor. Many of the ills associated with migration arise from this regulatory system, not from migration itself. The United States needs a bilateral system of labor mobility for fundamental jobs that should begin

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Chapter 4: Constructing a U.S.- Canadian Bilateral Labor Agreement

By Michelangelo Landgrave

The U.S. government has mismanaged labor mobility and failed to cooperate meaningfully with migrant countries of origin for the past half‐​century. Foreign workers have come for fundamental jobs, which are those that are critical to the U.S. economy and that do not require formal higher education, such as personal care, construction, warehousing, and others. They have come almost exclusively via family‐​based green cards, “low‐​skill” temporary guest worker visas for seasonal jobs tied to a single employer, or through a vast black market in labor. Many of the ills associated with migration arise from this regulatory system, not from migration itself. The United States needs a bilateral system of labor mobility for fundamental jobs that should begin

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Chapter 5: State‐​Sponsored Visas

By David J. Bier

The federal government has maintained a near monopoly on the criteria for the admission of foreigners to the United States since the late 19th century. This centralization makes little sense in such an economically diverse country. Every state and locality have specific social and economic circumstances that the current centralized immigration system ignores. This centralization has ultimately polarized and paralyzed the national immigration debate and directly led to a threedecades‐ long delay of major reforms to a system that most agree desperately needs it. For this reason, Congress should allow state governments to sponsor migrants based on their own criteria under federal supervision.50

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Chapter 6: The Community Visa: A Local Solution to America’s Immigration Deadlock

By Jack Graham and Rebekah Smith

Immigration is one of the most significant drivers of prosperity, but its potential is suppressed by restrictionist politics, centralized bureaucracies, and out‐​of‐​date policies. Furthermore, its benefits are concentrated in a few regions. Communities with the greatest need for immigrants, especially in rural areas and the Rust Belt, are receiving few immigrants as the majority move to big coastal cities. Rural areas also tend to have the highest levels of anti‐​immigrant sentiment, in part because they do not benefit from migration the same way that people in big coastal cities do.77 The United States needs a new approach to help businesses of all sizes get the workers they need, to renew communities threatened by demographic decline, and to build local support for more liberalized immigration.

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Chapter 7: Building a Congressional Constituency for Immigration through “Earmarks”

By Grover Norquist

For many years, U.S. presidents have had significant discretion to make immigration policy, liberalizing or restricting rules on entry and setting deportation priorities. Congress has enacted little legislation of its own because it lacks the overwhelming national consensus required to pass reforms on the issue. But giving individual members of Congress more authority to select immigrants for permanent residence could overcome this stalemate.

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Chapter 8: Immigration Moneyball

By Justin Gest

President Trump wants to overhaul the U.S. immigration system so that it stops favoring visa applicants with U.S. family ties and instead gives priority to highly skilled applicants and those with job offers.94 His proposal is based on the assumption that immigrants’ educational credentials—what the administration calls “merit”—will lead to increased U.S. wages and immigrants who better integrate into U.S. culture.

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Chapter 9: Immigration Designed to Enhance American Lives (IDEAL)

By Steve Kuhn

The immigration reform proposals most likely to succeed are those that create benefits for Americans and immigrants and that garner bipartisan support. The Immigration Designed to Enhance American Lives (IDEAL) proposal strikes a balance between competing interests by allowing more legal immigrants to work in the United States by paying the federal government for the opportunity. That revenue could then be used to reduce the tax burden or otherwise benefit native‐​born Americans. This essay and planks are based on the IDEAL Immigration Policy.100

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Chapter 10: Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It

By Nathan Smith

Many economists—including Nobel laureate Gary Becker—favor taxing immigration because charging a “price” can produce a more efficient result than restricting it with government‐​established caps or quotas. Good immigration policy ought to bring the greatest good to the greatest number, subject to the constraints of being compatible with human rights and incentives and of making many people better off without making others worse off. Consistent with those principles is a proposed policy called “Don’t Restrict Immigration, Tax It.”

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Chapter 11: Choosing Immigrants through Prediction Markets

By Robin Hanson

On immigration, the big political camps are in a tug of war. One side favors more immigrants; the other side wants fewer immigrants. But when faced with such a struggle, policymakers who care more about influence than about feeling solidarity should consider tugging the rope sideways, where fewer might oppose their efforts. To tug the rope sideways on immigration, policymakers should take a policy position that is perpendicular to the axis of more versus fewer immigrants. One sideways‐​pull policy would be to reform immigration laws to use prediction markets to admit different immigrants, without increasing the total number.

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Chapter 12: Transferable Citizenship

By Robin Hanson

Governments have long worked hard to create strong feelings of solidarity between citizens. National leaders often appeal to a common history of mutual aid, sacrifice, and even ethnic and cultural ties to garner support for government actions. All of this has helped create a relatively sacred and exclusive aura regarding citizenship that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, is “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle‐​field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”112 According to long‐​standing human norms, such associations are not to be created lightly and are debased when they are mixed with material motives such as money or other expressions of self‐​interest.

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Source: 12 New Immigration Ideas for the 21st Century

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Immigration Policies Threaten American Competitiveness

2020/05/13 Leave a comment

Interesting Harvard Business School alumni survey regarding perceived undermining of US competitiveness by Trump administration policies:

It is no secret that immigration has reshaped American innovation. Immigrants are the backbone of America’s most innovative industries, provide a quarter of our patent applications, and are numerous among our science and engineering superstars.

Taken from World Intellectual Property Organization data (Miguelez and Fink, 2013), Figure 1 shows that America received more than half of migrating inventors from 2000-2010.

Figure 1: Migration of inventors, 2000-2010
Figure 1: Migration of inventors, 2000-2010

 

Immigrants can be found in times of success and times of crisis. Examples include:

  • Among the American companies leading the race toward a vaccine to end the COVID-19 pandemic is Moderna, a Cambridge company with an immigrant co-founder and an immigrant CEO.
  • Another firm already conducting vaccine trials is Inovio Pharmaceuticals of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, led by cofounder J. Joseph Kim. Kim, who came to the United States from South Korea at age 11 without speaking English, was among the pharmaceutical leaders who briefed President Trump on vaccine development in March.

The flow of global talent responsible for bringing these innovators to American shores has been a substantial driver of business creation. As I discuss in my book The Gift of Global Talent, skilled immigration is the world’s most precious resource.

Talent flows to where it’s needed

But talent is movable, and the United States must cherish and protect its prized position at the center of the global talent flow. At a time of crisis when fear is used to shift blame onto outsiders, America is at risk of signaling to global innovators and entrepreneurs, and the promising students who will one day become them, that they cannot have a future here.

Talent flows to where it is most productively utilized and welcome, and while the destination of choice has long been the United States, other countries are increasingly challenging America’s dominance.

“TALENT IS MOVABLE, AND THE UNITED STATES MUST CHERISH AND PROTECT ITS PRIZED POSITION AT THE CENTER OF THE GLOBAL TALENT FLOW.”

By some metrics, their efforts are succeeding. Between 1990 and 2010, America’s share of college-educated migrants within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations fell from about 50 percent to 40 percent.

Our recent research captures business leaders’ rising anxiety about America’s complacency in competing for this talent and the negative impact on America’s competitiveness that could result. We surveyed(pdf) thousands of Harvard Business School alumni for their views on immigration.

Our alumni were overwhelmingly supportive of skilled immigration. Over 90 percent said that foreign skilled workers have a positive effect on the US economy, and 87 percent believe that the United States should allow more highly skilled immigrants to move here to work and live (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 2: Net agreement for belief statements about immigration
Figure 2: Net agreement for belief statements about immigration

 

Figure 3: Alumni views of immigration system and politics
Figure 3: Alumni views of immigration system and politics

Alumni also confirmed the importance of foreign skilled workers to their companies’ ability to compete. Nearly one in four said that at least 15 percent of their companies’ US-based skilled workforce was foreign born. Alumni expressed that immigrants were critical for developing better products and services, increasing the quality of innovation, and reaching international customers.

Our alumni warned us, however, that this important competitive advantage is at risk. A majority believe the current political rhetoric around immigration is harming their organization’s ability to attract foreign skilled workers. Nearly 60 percent blamed the US immigration system for causing project delays. And over two-thirds reported that their companies’ operations would be harmed if denied access to foreign skilled workers.

Because immigration is often a political third rail, there are many reasons to be skeptical that the United States will soon find a broad solution. In fact, when it comes to skilled immigration, our research shows more support for minor changes to the current system than for more fundamental reforms. Over two-thirds of alumni supported increasing the number of new H-1B visas issued each year by at least 50 percent. For much of the past decade, H-1B visas have run out within a single week (see Figure 4). Despite even the COVID-19 pandemic, the government received 275,000 applications in March of this year for the 85,000 slots in fiscal year 2021.

Figure 4: Months to reach H-1B visa cap by fiscal year
Figure 4: Months to reach H-1B visa cap by fiscal year

Structural changes, such as adopting wage ranking for awarding H-1B visas in place of today’s lottery system, did not achieve much support among our alumni. The gap between alumni believing the existing immigration system is harming their businesses and alumni only supporting incremental change is surprising to us. It is unclear whether this reveals a lack of knowledge or actual uneasiness about the policies themselves.

American competitiveness at risk

Either way, the stakes get higher in times of crisis: the recent H-1B visa lottery would have given the same chances to a critical researcher being recruited by Moderna and Inovio (or J&J and GlaxoSmithKline) as it would have to a software code tester working at an outsourcing company.

“WHILE WE MAY TEMPORARILY CLOSE BORDERS AS WE FIGHT COVID-19, BUSINESS MUST ARTICULATE JUST HOW DISASTROUS CLOSING OUR BORDERS LONG-TERM WOULD BE.”

One striking finding was that our alumni were in broad agreement over increasing the allocation of employment-based immigrants within the overall US immigration pool. When asked what share of total immigration to the United States should be employment-based, alumni on average proposed to quadruple today’s 12 percent share. When we surveyed a representative sample of the general public on this same question, we found a similar result—they proposed to triple the share of employment-based immigrants. That result held across all political affiliations, with both Democrats and Republicans proposing to increase the employment-based allotment.

Implementing such a shift could be quite politically controversial depending upon technique, especially if policies shifted visas from family-based channels and diversity programs rather than creating new employment-based visas. But we believe there is a path forward. We can build momentum by getting started with simpler actions like wage ranking H-1B applicants and creating immigrant entrepreneur visas. These quick wins can be stepping-stones towards further reform by proving that we can change our system for the better, despite decades of intransigence.

Most importantly, business leaders should get involved and share the burden with policymakers and academics to educate voters and build support for these policies that ultimately benefit America’s business community.

While we may temporarily close borders as we fight COVID-19, business must articulate just how disastrous closing our borders long-term would be. Some of the recent political rhetoric to halt all immigration, even if later scaled back in practice, endangers the image of America as a welcoming beacon to the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs. Other countries are creating innovative new programs to attract talent and threaten our competitive advantage, while our government issues executive orders and espouses rhetoric that undermine our promise to the world’s brightest.

Our position at the center of global talent flows is now at risk. Business has both the pressing need, and the capacity, to accept this responsibility. It should.

About the Author

William R. Kerr William Kerr is the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Source: Immigration Policies Threaten American Competitiveness

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Leveraging international education for a globally connected and prosperous Canada

2020/05/13 Leave a comment

The education industry view. Will need a major rethink of their business model’s dependence on international students. Their business case would benefit from more rigorous evaluations of the longer-term contributions, not just the more short-term contributions while at college or university:

Canadians understand the importance of welcoming individuals from all around the world to our country. Canada is a desirable destination for trade, travel, study and immigration. We know that our prosperity and international competitiveness rely on being open to people and opportunity from every corner of the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis without modern equivalent. The actions Canada takes post-emergency can set the foundation for a sustainable growth and recovery with global opportunity in mind.

We believe that Canada’s colleges and universities– and the network of business and community leaders who came to Canada as international students– can play an essential role in responding to this crisis, and in helping Canada recover and thrive in a post-COVID-19 world.

Universities and colleges are already key drivers of Canada’s international agenda. In 2019 alone, international students contributed over $21.6 billion to the Canadian economy, more than the value of automotive parts, lumber, or aircraft exports. These contributions are made in communities all across the country, and support employment and innovation in every province and territory.

The more than 600,000 international students at the postsecondary level also bring new perspectives, ideas, and valuable networks abroad. International students become highly trained individuals who contribute to their local Canadian economies, and then either immigrate to Canada and join our labour market or return home with an appreciation for what Canada has to offer as a business partner.

Canada’s response to the economic impact of the crisis to date has been commendable. Still, we need to ensure international students feel welcome and supported so that Canadian PSE remains competitive in these uncertain times and we can continue to be leaders in a global marketplace.

Canada needs:

Responsive and informed study permit processing — Ease of obtaining a study permit is a key factor in international student decision making. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has already shown a lot of flexibility in responding to the pandemic. To remain competitive, we need IRCC to be nimble and to allow, on an exceptional basis, international students to start programs online this fall without jeopardizing their eligibility for a post-graduate work permit.

Strengthening IRCC’s capacity to facilitate business resumption — Once health and travel restrictions start to be lifted in Canada and around the world, we must ensure that there is capacity to address large volumes of new study permit applications, quickly. Measures must be put in place now to ensure that disruptions to processing for the fall intake will be minimized.

Two-way mobility and international cooperation — As part of comprehensive federal government support to the Canadian postsecondary education sector, it is also imperative to maintain our commitment to a national outbound mobility program for Canadian postsecondary students to support Canada’s goals around trade diversification, skills development and the future of work.

We’ve seen colleges and universities across Canada stepping up and supporting their communities in this time of need, donating medical equipment and retooling processes to manufacture more. We’ve seen our students, recent graduates, in medical fields rushing to be of service in support of our health care systems. With the right investments, universities and colleges can also continue to play a critical role in building skills and increasing global competitiveness, helping Canada thrive in a post-COVID-19 world. Education opens doors, for students and for Canadian companies — across all sectors — looking to do business internationally. Leveraging international education, and the people-to-people ties it generates is a sound investment towards a more globally connected and prosperous Canada.

Source: Leveraging international education for a globally connected and prosperous Canada

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Feds hint at scaling back immigration due to pandemic fallout

2020/05/13 Leave a comment

Preliminary signals but we will only know when. the immigration plan is released in the fall:

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting unemployment could lead to immigration to Canada being cut for the first time in a decade.

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino hinted as much in testimony to the Commons human resources committee, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

Mendicino said cabinet will be “taking a look at our levels and what is our operational capacity.”

The review “is of course going to be driven by the context,” he said. “As we all know, we are in the midst of a pandemic,” he said.

In an Immigration Levels Plan tabled in the Commons on March 12, cabinet proposed raising immigration by about 1% of the population a year, from 331,000 immigrants in 2019 to 341,000 in 2020 and 351,000 in 2021.

But since then, Canada’s unemployment rate has risen to 13%.

“Given Canada’s massive unemployment for the foreseeable future, what is the government’s scale-back planning for economic migrants and refugees for the next two years?” asked Conservative MP Peter Kent.

“Given that the economic crisis will linger after the health crisis has passed, can Canada accommodate an additional 1% of immigrants and refugees added to our population in the foreseeable future?”

Mendicino said the feds will continue to look “at the circumstances including the surrounding context of Canada’s response to COVID-19 as we plan for the future,” and will provide an update in the fall.

Source: Feds hint at scaling back immigration due to pandemic fallout

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A study urged better standards for migrant workers’ housing. Nothing was done. Now COVID-19 has struck

2020/05/12 Leave a comment

One can just imagine the lobbying that occurred, given the likely competitiveness impact on the sector, with the health and pandemic consequences that have now become more widely apparent.

The same pattern of greater risk to temporary workers living and working in crowded conditions is seen everywhere, whether pristine Singapore or the Gulf countries:

Across Ontario, nursing homes are the province’s deadliest epicentres for the COVID-19 pandemic. But in Chatham-Kent, the county’s largest outbreak of the virus is on a farm — where 49 migrant workers have fallen ill.

Labour advocates warn that living conditions are hastening the virus’s spread on farms across the country, where bunkhouses often make it impossible for temporary foreign workers to social distance.

Those workers are essential to the country’s food supply, leading agricultural groups to push for their exclusion from Canada’s COVID-19 travel ban.

But prior to the pandemic, many of these groups also lobbied against the creation of a national housing standard that a government study recommended “to reduce the risk of negligence and possibly of harm” to migrant workers, documents obtained by the Star show.

The national standard for migrant worker housing has not been implemented — despite a study commissioned by the federal government that found “gaps in the housing inspection process” and an “extremely wide variation of what is deemed an acceptable housing standard.”

Substandard, overcrowded housing for migrant farm workers is an issue that workers have raised literally “literally for decades,” said Fay Faraday, a Toronto-based lawyer and York University professor who has written numerous studies of migrant workers’ conditions.

“From the very beginning of the outbreak the first concern that workers were raising was whether they would have housing facilities that would be safe.”

In consultations initiated by the federal government in 2018 on updating migrant worker programs, agricultural groups including Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the Ontario Federation of Agriculture pushed back against stricter auditing of living and working conditions, according to submissions obtained by the Star.

The groups argued that the process treats employers “like they are guilty of an infraction before proven innocent” and represented an “excessive” administrative burden.

“The approach from government has caused a great deal of concern, stress, and anxiety,” says one submission.

Employers’ eligibility to hire workers through Canada’s temporary foreign worker schemes is contingent on submitting housing inspection reports to the federal government. But the 2018 study conducted by the National Home Inspector Certification Council found no “uniformity” in housing standards and confusion over who enforces them: “complex jurisdictional roles and responsibilities can make it unclear what housing standards applies,” and whether housing makes the grade.

The study recommended updating and standardizing guidelines across the country, and letting inspections include a “broader scope” of issues — including bunkhouses’ electrical systems, and the age of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.

In response to questions from the Star, a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said the government’s review of its temporary foreign worker program “identified some opportunities to improve housing for foreign workers” that would be addressed with the provinces.

“Because of the urgencies related to the COVID-19 pandemic, this work has been delayed.”

Workers say the delay comes with a price tag that is now more costly than ever.

As the tomato capital of Canada, Leamington runs on farm labour, provided mostly by migrant workers who plant, pick, and pack the fruit and vegetables the country relies on.

Some come for eight months a year; others have work permits for up to two years. None can gain permanent residence through the country’s temporary foreign worker streams.

Leamington has always been a town of immigrants, its evolution tied to successive waves of workers who powered its economy.

This year, as the COVID-19 crisis deepened, the town transformed once more.

Local hotels became self-isolation quarters for workers just in from Mexico and the Caribbean. The community health centre launched an education campaign, urging migrant workers to practice social distancing. Police circulated videos in Spanish, warning of the penalties for failing to do so.

For some workers, the rules seemed impossible to heed.

One Mexican worker here on a two-year permit said he shares a house with 10 other workers; he is picked up by a bus full of other workers to get to his job at a mushroom farm’s packing plant, where there are some 200 other employees.

“We cannot social distance because we have to work very close,” he told the Star. In April, several workers across his employer’s facilities were diagnosed with COVID-19.

In Ontario, housing inspections for migrant workers are usually done by local public health units. In Leamington, the Windsor-Essex County unit conducted 121 bunkhouse inspections between the beginning of March and mid-April, a spokesperson told the Star. Around 100 were for housing permits or licensing; the rest were reinspections or responses to complaints.

In many regions, Faraday says, the inspection process has long been flawed. In Ontario, for example, health units can’t fine employers for shoddy or unsafe housing because there are no legislated standards for worker accommodation.

Inspections “have typically been done before any workers arrive,” said Faraday. “So they are seen in a pristine condition without the workers there and without necessarily a realistic assessment of how many workers will be in that space.”

According to the 2018 housing study, where provincial standards exist, “enforcement is only done on an ad hoc, complaints based basis.”

For some migrant workers, the pandemic now prompts other concerns.

One worker, originally from Guatemala, said he has not been allowed to leave his bunkhouse since the pandemic started, other than to go to work. Even shopping for groceries is off limits — instead, he said, the farm’s secretary brings a weekly supply.

His bed is in a large open space shared by 12 workers, he said. He usually works nine-hour days, Mondays to Saturday. Sunday is a half day, leaving hours, pre-pandemic, that were the only time that felt like his own. Often he would go for walks, or visit Leamington’s scenic lakefront.

“It’s really nice for us to go out, to do other things, and stop thinking about work,” he said. “That’s how we were able to relax.” Now leaving the bunkhouse could be grounds for suspension, he said.

He understands the need to social distance, he said. But Canadians, he noted, can still go out occasionally — “We feel like prisoners.”

One county over at Greenhill Produce, site of 51 of the region’s 89 COVID-19 cases, one migrant worker said he shared a room with six others before the outbreak. In total, 24 workers lived in his bunkhouse.

“I feel like I want to cry,” the worker said.

Chatham-Kent’s public health unit said the workers are believed to have been exposed to the virus by a local farmhand. The unit’s spokesperson Caress Lee Carpenter said the bunkhouses received routine inspections prior to the outbreak, and said living arrangements make it “easy to transmit this kind of infection.”

That risk, she added, was “similar to if someone in your own household had the virus but did not yet know. The chances of other household members contracting the virus is likely.”

But few Canadians live in conditions like migrant workers, said Faraday, where “it is completely normal to have eight people living in a two-bedroom space.

“It’s so common to have workers in storage sheds or tool sheds that have been repurposed into dormlike housing with dozens of workers separated only by hanging sheets.”

The worker at Greenhill said the quality of his bunkhouse was good, other than the number of people who shared it.

By the end of April, Greenhill workers were rehoused to separate those who tested positive and negative, he said. “I think they could have moved us much much earlier.”

The public health unit said it has provided support to workers on a daily basis and the company has followed “all public health measures directed at them.”

In a statement posted to its website, Greenhill said it cared “deeply for our employees and takes all steps to protect their health and safety … we are proud to provide some of the best quality living quarters for our workers, meeting and greatly exceeding federal government regulations.

“Examples of amenities we provide in all residences is free Wi-Fi, telephone, satellite TV in each bedroom, extremely high quality furnishings, kitchen and sanitary amenities, fire alarm system, in floor heating and air conditioning.”

After authorities in British Columbia began investigating a COVID-19 outbreak amongst migrant workers in Kelowna in March, advocates warned that more would follow. Since then, agricultural employers such as Greenhill have been hit; so too have food processing facilities that rely heavily on temporary foreign workers, such as a Cargill meat-packing plant in Alberta.

Responses have varied from employer to employer. But to Faraday, the structural issues remain.

Migrant workers’ precarious immigration status and fear of reprisal makes it difficult to voice concern about conditions, Faraday said: “There is also the undeniable racism” behind employers providing conditions for migrant workers that locals wouldn’t accept.

And while employers’ responses to COVID-19 have varied, their submissions to the consultations that addressed housing concerns two years ago were consistent: stronger enforcement is not necessary.

“We urge the government to not only consider the rights of the workers but also the right of the employer to due process as they deliver these inspections,” said one submission from the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers.

Noting the “importance of ensuring that our (temporary foreign worker) workforce is treated fairly,” the submission added that “fairness is only one aspect of what individuals need to feel included and secure” and suggests that the federal government reallocate “funds from compliance activities to initiatives that support the inclusion and acceptance of our TFW workforce in rural communities across Canada.”

Last year, a Star investigation exposed thousands of complaints that migrant workers made to Mexican authorities. Housing was the biggest concern, with allegations of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and pest infestations. Only a small number of the complaints are ever shared with Canada’s government.

Now, the pandemic has brought the enforcement issue into sharper focus. Canada announced a $50-million program last month to help farms modify accommodation and subsidize migrants’ wages when they are in self-isolation.

Accessing the money, said Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, is dependent on employers following public health guidelines and will be accompanied by targeted inspections from federal ministries and local health units.

In a statement to the Star, Employment and Social Development Canada said it had “ceased conducting proactive inspections” in mid-March so it could “abide by local travel restrictions” and protect the health of communities and departmental staff. .”

The ministry said it expected to resume proactive inspections “in the coming days” by video and other means.

In Ontario, advocacy group Justice for Migrant Workers wants the provincial Ministry of Labour to include housing in health and safety inspections.

Farm employers get subsidies, grants and regulatory exemptions, and “It is time that the workers receive the benefits that are due to them,” the group said in a recent letter to Premier Doug Ford.

Faraday said the pandemic has also brought migrant workers’ value into sharper relief.

“These are essential workers,” she said. “We would not eat without them.”

Source: Star ExclusiveA study urged better standards for migrant workers’ housing. Nothing was done. Now COVID-19 has struckA study urged better standards for migrant workers’ housing. Employers objected and nothing was done. Now the virus has struck.

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Has Brexit affected the way Britons think about immigrants? The recent ‘national mood’ on immigration

2020/05/12 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of immigration-related public opinion data and Brexit:

Back in 2018, I wrote a piece showing how British public opinion on immigration had changed since the 1980s by analysing responses across waves of repeated, high-quality research surveys carried out in Britain. Then, the research showed that British opinions toward immigrants and immigration had been softening dramatically over the last decade since a peak in public hostility around 2010.

Recently I was able to update this information with a plethora of new results from the British Election Study (BES), the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, and the European Social Survey (ESS) which were fielded over the past two years. Figure 1 below shows what has changed since then, and how the new information has impacted the model’s estimation of the ‘national mood’ about immigration.

The line represents the proportion of survey respondents in each year answering negatively when faced with questions regarding their views on immigrants and immigration. The grey line running through the middle of the plot cuts the y-axis at 50% – half of the population having negative feelings toward immigration, with the other 50% holding a more positive perspective. The aggregation is carried out using Jim Stimson’s dyad-ratios calculator, which is able to standardise different survey measurements on the same topic. From this, individual survey items can be ‘blended together’ into a single series, such as above. (The code to run Stimson’s calculator in R can be found on my GitHub repository).

What the updated data shows is that the dramatic decline in anti-immigrant sentiments, which had reached a peak (in the study) around 2010, has continued up to the conclusion of the decade. According to the data analysed in this study, a majority of the British public now have positive views toward immigrants and immigration.

When I posted these results on Twitter, they became the subject of quite some discussion among various Brexit tribes (bot supporting and against), with much conversation surrounding the impact that Brexit (and specifically, the campaign) may or may not have had on feelings toward immigrants in this country. It is toward this debate that I wish to turn the rest of the article – namely, did Brexit cause an increase in anti-immigrant hostility in Britain?

Firstly, the evidence is quite clear that neither the Brexit campaign nor Brexit itself has caused any increase in negativity or hostility toward immigrants or immigration in the aggregate sense. There is nothing in the public opinion data, presented here or indeed elsewhere, that I have seen which would support the hypothesis that Brexit has unleashed some kind of wave of anti-immigrant hostility when we look at the nation as a whole.

However, the emphasis above is intended and important. There is nothing to say that just because aggregate levels of hostility toward immigration among the British public have declined, that there could not have been a simultaneous hardening or strengthening of negativity since Brexit among those with deep-rooted, very hostile opinions about foreigners in Britain. Both of these things could be true. Similarly, this measurement is not one of racism, or individual experiences/incidents of racism or indeed discrimination on the grounds of immigrant (origin) status.

Finally, Brexit might not have caused a rise in aggregate anti-immigrant hostility, but there is also little evidence to suggest that it caused this drop. For one, attitudes have been softening since 2010, and Brexit comes right in the middle of this near-linear decline. That said, the rate of decline has clearly accelerated since 2016, so perhaps there is some merit in the suggestion the Brexit vote may have ‘released some frustration’ regarding policy/control over matters of immigration among the population.

Inspecting the quarterly data also gives us some further, more nuanced insight into what the various narratives around Brexit might have done to attitudes surrounding immigrants and immigration. Figure 2 shows a more detailed snapshot of Figure 1, with 100 survey items analysed from 2009 to 2019.

Note: the mean level of sentiment here has shifted downward from in Figure 1, where the series included here and other series stretching back further into time anchor the overall trend line around 5-10% higher.

Here we see in greater detail the average decline in negativity from the turn of the last decade, with the peak around 2010 followed by something more resembling a jagged mountain face than a cliff edge. The sharp, short-term peaks in anti-immigrant mood as we travel down the ten-year slope are seemingly clustered around important electoral events surrounding Brexit: the 2014 European Elections won by UKIP, the build-up to the referendum itself in 2016, the General Election in 2017 where Theresa May sought a parliamentary majority for her Brexit plan, and then the 2019 election campaign featuring Boris Johnson’s pledge to “get Brexit done”.

Are these moments of intense scrutiny and pressure on Brexit producing these little sparks of negativity among the British public? It seems reasonable to think so – around these moments, media coverage and political commentary around immigration (specifically in relation to the EU) intensifies, parties actively campaign against the current immigration regime, and voters may be connecting immigration closer to their voting intention than they otherwise might, and respond to survey questions accordingly.

Whatever the case, what is certain is that these moments of upturn in the data do not last long. Once the moment passes, the decline in negativity continues – and even arguably picks up pace. Furthermore, given that margins of error apply to these aggregated figures just as much as they do to individual polls, the various quarterly spikes within the last ten years could just be statistical noise.

So, did Brexit cause an increase in anti-immigrant hostility in Britain? There is little evidence in the public opinion data analysed here to suggest that it did – particularly in the medium term. Did it, on the other hand, cause a big increase in positivity? Again, I would argue that it did not. Brexit has coincided with a plummet in British negativity about immigration, the start of which proceeded Boris Johnson’s successful attempt to pass a Brexit deal through the Commons, the referendum itself, and Nigel Farage’s electoral successes in the early 2010s.

In short, I would say that Brexit has not much at all to do with what Britons think about immigration.

Source: Has Brexit affected the way Britons think about immigrants? The recent ‘national mood’ on immigration

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Quebec relies on hundreds of asylum seekers in long-term care battle against COVID-19

2020/05/11 Leave a comment

The irony given all the Quebec (and elsewhere) rhetoric regarding irregular asylum seekers:

Sarah watches her four-year-old daughter jump around a play structure she’s not allowed on because of the pandemic.

They’re just happy to be outside.

For eight days, Sarah — an asylum seeker from Haiti who crossed the U.S. border into Quebec at Roxham Road three years ago — was bedridden in their small Montréal-Nord apartment, her body feverish and aching.

It had started with some coughing and a slight fever she had tried to brush off at first. Her manager at the private long-term care residence in Ahuntsic where she works as an orderly wasn’t happy when she’d asked to stop working, for fear of bringing the infection home to her asthmatic daughter.

Then more symptoms appeared. She was nauseous, and the cough and fever got worse. A test a couple days later confirmed she had COVID-19.

Now on the mend, three weeks after testing positive, Sarah says: “I’m proud. I was on the battlefield.”

Sarah’s refugee claim was rejected after her first hearing, then again on appeal. Her only hope at staying in the country now is to be granted residency on humanitarian grounds, a process for which she began the application before the pandemic.

Given her precarious immigration status, CBC has agreed not to identify her by her real name.

Sarah is far from the only asylum seeker working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many ‘guardian angels’ are asylum seekers

Marjorie Villefranche, executive director of Maison d’Haiti in Montreal’s Saint-Michel district, estimates that about 1,200 of the 5,000 Haitian asylum seekers the organization has helped since 2017 have become orderlies.

Frantz André, who helped found the Action Committee for People without Status, an advocacy group that helps asylum seekers settle in Montreal, says there are many more who’ve flown under the radar.

Asylum seekers make up a large portion of the “guardian angels” Quebec Premier François Legault has praised in his daily briefings — the orderlies, or préposées aux bénéficiaires (PABs), working in long-term care homes — who have no guarantee they’ll be allowed to stay in Canada.

“As quickly as they can, they want to find a job — and they’re being directed to jobs that no one else wants to do: the caregivers, PABs, security agents,” André said.

Without status, on the front lines

He and other refugee advocates have been calling on the Canadian government to allow asylum seekers already in the country to stay.

Many of them are hired by temp agencies, which offer people eager to work easy access to the labour market. For seniors’ homes desperately short of staff, the agencies are a source of cheap labour, but they operate with little government oversight.

The workers are often shuffled from facility to facility — a practice Quebec’s public health director, Dr. Horacio Arruda, has acknowledged is contributing to the spread of COVID-19 in long-term care centres, known in the province as CHSLDs.

André says the long hours they put in make the workers more prone to catching the virus and spreading it to their families.

He says it explains why Montréal-Nord, a low-income neighbourhood filled with newcomers, has the highest number of cases in the city.

“When you’re tired, you don’t eat well. You will go back home, and there’s four, five, six and sometimes seven people living in a [one-bedroom]. The chances of the people catching it, the family catching COVID-19, is greater than anywhere else,” André said.

It is also difficult for orderlies working for agencies to adhere to the province’s request that they work in only one long-term care residence, because accepting shifts wherever they’re asked to go is the only way to cobble together full-time work.

Another woman CBC spoke with works part time for a private residence and part time for an agency providing home care. Bouncing between visits to patients’ homes and shifts at the long-term care residence increases the risk of spread, but the woman said she feels she has no choice.

Problematic use of agencies predates pandemic

Long-term care homes have long been reliant on temp agencies to fill staffing holes — and the people the agencies sign on are most often women and newcomers to Quebec.

“Even before the pandemic, they had a lot of trouble finding people to do the orderly work,” said Prof. Nicolas Fernandez, a specialist in the relationship between health-care workers and patients who teaches family and emergency medicine at Université de Montréal.

“The short-term solution is to go to agencies.”

The reliance on temp agencies puts additional stress on CHSLDs struggling to contain outbreaks, said Fernandez, who has also served as a translator for asylum seekers.

CBC reached out to both federal and provincial departments requesting statistics on PABs, including how many are asylum seekers. Quebec’s Labour and Immigration ministries said they did not collect that information.

The Health Ministry didn’t provide a breakdown either, but offered up figures showing the vast majority of PABs are women — 34,821 of 42,340 in both private and public facilities. The average salary in 2019 was $40,551.

Fernandez says the job of a PAB is gruelling and crucial: they are the backbone of CHSLDs.

From the moment they wake up, most residents require extensive care — at least three hours a day — to have qualified for a bed.

“In order for the person to feel cared for, and not just a number, you need someone who is going to be there every day,” he said.

‘There’s no stability’

Sarah worked for two agencies to gain work experience after she finished her PAB course last year. She hated it — travelling as far away from Montreal as Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, in the Montérégie, a 50-minute commute made longer by the stops the agency’s van made to pick up other workers.

“There’s no stability. Every time, you’re sent to a different place. It gets really stressful,” she said.

For the past couple of months, Sarah has worked in the same private long-term care facility in Ahuntsic.

She loves her work. She likes helping and caring for people. It’s a far cry from the job she had in Haiti, working with a sports organization, but she hopes to be able to stay in Canada and work her way up in the health-care field, possibly becoming a nurse.

In the midst of this crisis, Sarah hopes the federal government recognizes how much asylum seekers have contributed to Canadian society and finds a way for them to stay.

“I hope the government will hear our calls, hear our voices.”

Group wants special immigration program

Those calls grew louder on Thursday, with a community group devoted to the rights of Haitians who crossed into Canada in 2017 asking the provincial and federal governments to implement a special immigration program for those working in CHSLDs.

“We find it hard to believe that these guardian angels may be expelled from the country once the battle is won,” the Concertation haïtienne pour les migrant.es said in an open letter.

“We are counting on your leadership to make a humanitarian gesture to these citizens who are fighting alongside us every day.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada responded to a CBC inquiry about whether the federal government was considering giving asylum seekers already in Quebec special status.

A spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the government would stick with the current process.

“Our immigration system continues to be based on compassion, efficiency and economic opportunity for all, while protecting the health, safety and security of Canadians,” spokesperson Shannon Ker wrote.

Source: Quebec relies on hundreds of asylum seekers in long-term care battle against COVID-19

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They hoped for jobs and to immigrate to Canada. For international students, the pandemic has dimmed that hope

2020/05/11 Leave a comment

Will be interesting if the government relaxes the one-year requirement given COVID-19 and if so, how and under what conditions:

The dream of becoming a Canadian was within reach for Joyce de Paula until COVID-19 hit in March. All she needed was four more months.

Instead, that dream is now shattered after she was laid off as a marketing analyst, just four months shy of the one year of Canadian work experience she required to be eligible for permanent residence in Canada.

The Brazilian woman is among tens of thousands of former international students whose immigration plans are now in limbo because they are running out of time to secure a job in the midst of massive layoffs and an economic slowdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of us, but there is nothing we can do,” lamented de Paula, 28, who graduated from Centennial College with a postgraduate certificate in market research and analytics last May before landing a 12-month contract with Dufflet Pastries in July.

Studying in Canada has become a shortcut to immigration in recent years, with Ottawa putting more emphasis on Canadian education and work experience in the selection process.

Those who graduate from a Canadian college or university are granted a postgraduate work permit that lasts between one and three years, depending on the duration of their academic programs.

Immigration candidates must have at least one year of Canadian work experience before their work permits expire in order to get the bonus points for their applications. Anything short of that threshold won’t count.

Attaining the coveted permanent residence status should have been smooth sailing for de Paula, who would’ve had her 12-month experience under her belt when her work permit expires in August.

“It’s so hard to get any job now. Who is going to hire someone with a work permit expiring in four months?” asked de Paula, who has started an online petition urging Ottawa to extend the postgrad work permits of international graduates affected by COVID-19. The petition has already collected more than 1,270 signatures.

Phil Lao, who just finished the one-year construction project management postgrad program at London’s Fanshawe College in April, said the window for getting a relevant job in his field is narrowing.

“For many of the international students, our end goal is permanent residence. This is very disconcerting and we need more time to wait out the storm,” said the 29-year-old, who has an undergrad degree in architecture from the Philippines and earlier this month started working in a factory assembling respiratory equipment like nebulizers and inhalers. “This is so stressful.”

The pandemic has also wreaked havoc for international students seeking internship opportunities, which many had hoped could lead to jobs upon graduation.

Ashton Samson, also from the Philippines, was supposed to start a placement at a visual effects studio in Toronto in late March, but it was cancelled. Now, he has finished the visual effects and editing for contemporary media program at Fanshawe without any Canadian experience.

He said most productions have shut down their offices and there are few job openings even in graphic design, something he used to do in the Philippines.

Some graduating international students have chosen to take more courses or enrol in another program to buy time to delay applying for a postgrad work permit, but Samson said he has already spent $28,000 studying here — including $17,000 in tuition — and has no money left.

“The pressure is immense,” said the 24-year-old. “We have invested so much in this country that we hope Canada can see our effort and help us in any way it can. We just need to buy more time.”

Marcelo Moraes, who completed his postgrad certificate in digital media content strategy at Humber College in April, was fortunate enough to secure a paid co-op placement at the school, but said trying to find a job will be a tall order even after the pandemic is over, let alone for someone on a work permit.

“I have sent out more than 70 resumes. Everyone is putting their hirings on hold,” said the 46-year-old Brazilian, who has years of experience in assessing, implementing and managing media content strategies. “It’s a challenging job market. COVID just makes everything that much more difficult.”

For Meenal Devgan, going back to school is not an option because she is already on her work permit, which is only given out to an international student once.

The 28-year-old, who has a degree in legal studies from India, enrolled in the human resources management program at Conestoga College in Kitchener in 2018 and started a job as a restaurant supervisor last August before her layoff on March 22. She has since applied to 100 jobs, but is still unemployed.

“This is a big deal for our future. It is not our fault that businesses are closed,” said Devgan, whose work permit expires in August. “A lot of people are in the same boat. We have no options. I just hope immigration (officials) can count our layoff time toward our permanent residence applications.”

Source: They hoped for jobs and to immigrate to Canada. For international students, the pandemic has dimmed that hope

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Fisher: The Liberals promised more immigration by 2021. Can that still happen?

2020/05/11 Leave a comment

Starting to see more articles like this although Fisher isobviously not familiar with the available data or with the immigration program in general although his call for a discussion is a reasonable one.

However, his suggestion that the COVID-19 aftermath may lead to a 90 percent drop is fanciful as no major Canadian political party, federally or provincially, would support such major drop.

(IRCC has been releasing monthly data for a number of years now so we should start to see emerging trends in a few months, the monthly data is typically released after two months):

Justin Trudeau‘s government has not yet told Canadians whether or how it intends to keep its long list of pre-COVID-19 promises.

One signature pledge was to take in 350,000 immigrants a year by 2021, or about one per cent of the population annually. That commitment was made in October 2018. At that time Canada was welcoming 310,000 newcomers a year.

Where does that major undertaking on immigration stand now, given that virtually nobody who is not already a citizen or resident of Canada has been allowed into the country for nearly two months? Or that Canadian embassies and immigration offices have almost all been closed or placed on greatly-reduced hours with much smaller staffs since sometime in February with little likelihood of much about that changing soon?

Official figures about immigration don’t tend to be released until one or two years after the fact, so it is guesswork trying to figure out how many newcomers Canada has welcomed this year or how many are in the pipeline. Surely, though, given that there are far fewer flights from overseas and that the required interviews and medical and security checks are clearly not taking place with most of the world shut down, there will be far fewer of these folks arriving this year. Because the immigration process is chronically slow and a maze for most potential immigrants, it is possible that there will be even fewer of them next year, too.

There is little public information available to help puzzle out the future of immigration to Canada during and after troubling times. But charts showing historical immigration numbers that were published by Statistics Canada five years ago may be instructive.

Whatever the boasts of the Harper and Trudeau governments about their openness to immigration, the fact is that immigration to Canada reached a peak of just over 400,000 people a year more than a century ago under then prime minister Sir Robert Borden. It then dropped to less than 40,000 a year for 15 years from the beginning of the Depression until the end of the Second World War under the Conservative and Liberal prime ministers, R.B. Bennett and Mackenzie King.

Considering this data and the grave current economic and logistical complications, if the current pattern mirrors the experience of the Depression, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that what looms is a drastic drop — as much as 90 per cent — in immigration for several years.

There is no argument here about the merits of immigration, which I strongly support. It is about how many newcomers Ottawa now envisages Canada accepting and whether the public, faced with serious personal economic distress caused by unemployment and savings that have been wiped out, will be as supportive of immigration today or in, say, 2022 or 2023, as it was before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted lives and created so much uncertainty about the future.

It was the Mulroney government that decided to greatly increase the number of foreigners let into Canada. The policy was subsequently embraced by the Martin, Chrétien and Harper governments and expanded a bit further by the Trudeau government.

Recent immigrants, like generations of immigrants before them, have almost always been good for Canada. It is a generalization, but most of these settlers — if I may use a not so fashionable 19th and 20th-century term — have a reputation for working hard, often at jobs that those already lucky enough to be Canadians won’t do.

The newcomers help the economy by paying federal, provincial and municipal taxes. Their need for housing has pushed up the value of real estate, especially in the immigrant-magnet cities of Vancouver and Toronto (although a case can be made that this has sometimes been a mixed blessing).

The presence of so many immigrants can only be good for a country where the spectre of depopulation has become real since many couples who can trace their Canadian roots back decades or centuries have become famously uninterested in having more than one or two kids.

Besides, the points system used to decide who qualifies to come to Canada has attracted many highly educated, highly motivated immigrants. The longstanding family sponsorship program has been a boon to, well, families. The legal refugees that Canada has taken in have helped people otherwise trapped in hellish situations. It has also given a little relief to poor countries such as Jordan and Lebanon that have unfairly had to bear far too much of the refugee burden.

But as during the Depression, Canada’s economic landscape has shifted dramatically in the past couple of months. The federal deficit for this year alone could be $252 billion. Similarly, big deficits are a prospect for 2021 and 2022. And the books of several provinces are worse than those of Ottawa.

The federal government has been very busy with the coronavirus. It is, after all, an epochal event.

But increased immigration was a strong theme as well as a firm promise of Trudeau’s government. The current pandemic should not prevent the immigration minister and senior department officials — who have lots of time on their hands since few new immigration applicants are being processed — from sharing their thoughts with Parliament and Canadians about how the COVID-19 shock has informed and affected their thinking and planning.

It is not too soon to start a national discussion about how many immigrants Canadians, their elected leaders and various business and ethnic communities think the economy and job market can digest.

Source: COMMENTARY: The Liberals promised more immigration by 2021: Can that still happen?

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Douglas Todd: COVID-19 lockdown triggers foreign-student flight from Canada

2020/05/09 Leave a comment

Good article by Todd and likely more realistic than the overly optimistic International students determined to study in Canada despite coronavirus, with some initial data highlighting the difficulties facing the current business models of universities:

Jenny Kwak, an international student from South Korea, remembers in March how four of five young people in her university dorm packed their luggage and just disappeared.

“They went home to China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, the U.S. — you name it,” said Kwak, a 21-year-old arts student interviewed on the large empty campus of the University of B.C., which last year enrolled more than 17,000 international students.

It’s hard to forecast how many international students will return, either to Canada or other nations. But the mass exodus of foreign students is brewing into a crisis for colleges and universities in the West that rely on their high fees to hire faculty and staff and construct new edifices.There were 642,000 foreign students in Canada at the end of 2019, double the number of five years earlier. International students account for 20 per cent of post-secondary enrolment in Canada, where many politicians view them as essential to the country’s economic expansion.

Foreign-students programs around the Western world will take “a massive hit” from the coronavirus, says Oxford University professor Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education.

Post-secondary schools can expect at least 12 months of “abnormal conditions” from the COVID-19 pandemic, with at least five years before global student mobility recovers, says Marginson, whose centre is a partnership of 14 major universities.

Many smaller private colleges, especially those that rely almost entirely on foreign-student fees, will likely collapse, predict higher education specialists Philip Altbach, of Boston College, and Hans de Wit, from the Netherlands. Large respected universities, many of which continue to draw taxpayers’ dollars, will likely survive.

Even though the state of affairs will be different for each nation, Altbach and de Wit say global competition will become fiercer for what will remain of what was until last year the 5.2 million students studying abroad, the largest cohort coming from China.

There are lessons to be culled from the contrasting ways the leaders of Canada and Australia — which take in the most foreign students per capita, including from China — are responding to the dramatic exit of so many.While Canada’s immigration department and schools are not providing much information on how many foreign students have left or may not come back because of the pandemic, Australia’s politicians are more frank. They say many of the 720,000 foreign students in the country have left, in droves.Australia’s acting immigration minister says 300,000 people on study visas (and temporary work visas) departed since January. And a former senior immigration official in Australia, Abul Rizvi, predicts one-quarter more foreign students and workers will depart by year’s end.

It’s not surprising. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told non-Australians to return to their home countries if they could not financially support themselves during the coronavirus crisis. Like most nations, he did not offer wage subsidies to foreign nationals.Politicians in Australia and elsewhere are worried international students will compete for jobs with the millions of citizens who have been frozen out of work due to COVID-19. And a segment of Australians appreciate the departure of many could lead to reduced house and rental costs.In contrast, Canada is more generous to foreign students.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has quietly confirmed foreign students with a SIN number can apply for the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which gives up to $2,000 a month to residents of Canada who have lost their jobs because of COVID-19.The government also removed the 20-hour-per-week limit on how much international students could work during their term. Ottawa will now allow them to work unlimited hours if it is with an essential service. In B.C., foreign students also receive subsidized government medical care.Unfortunately, in Canada it’s almost impossible to obtain solid data on how many students have left Canada or don’t intend to return. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told Postmedia it doesn’t keep “exit” information. And media officials from both UBC and Simon Fraser University said their numbers don’t indicate any change, adding they won’t speculate about the fall.

Canada stopped issuing study visas on March 18, but will let anyone who had a visa before then return. The only data the immigration department offered about how COVID-19 has affected study visa holders comes from before Canada locked down.That data shows, during January and February, when COVID-19 was exploding out of Wuhan in China, the number of students from China applying for Canadian study visas dropped by almost half — to 5,164 from 9,495, compared to the same period a year earlier. Applications from South Korean also fell sharply.The decline in study visa applications is a sign of a more permanent trend for the next five years, according to Marginson. He warned student movement patterns will shift for East Asians, with fewer opting for North America, Western Europe, the U.K. and Australia — and more deciding to stay closer to home and study in Japan, South Korea or China.

How Canada and Australia will handle their foreign-student relationship with East Asian countries, especially China, will be telling. At the end of 2019, Australia had 212,000 students from China and Canada had 142,000.But while Australia is not afraid to talk bluntly to China, including about wanting an international investigation into how COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, Canada’s Liberal government stays silent about China’s transgressions.Ottawa goes out of its way to encourage international students because its aim, rarely discussed, is to give them preferential treatment as future permanent residents, moving into Canadian jobs and housing.

Since the impact of foreign students on Canada’s cities is profound, one would hope the country’s public officials would be more transparent about a strategy that is now seriously in jeopardy.

Source: Douglas Todd: COVID-19 lockdown triggers foreign-student flight from Canada

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