Global citizenship catching fancy of super rich in India, China

2014/05/07 Leave a comment

A reminder to our small-business minded policy makers and politicians, any investment immigration program will be small change for the very wealthy. If we are to sell immigration visas, the Malta approach of being open about it and taking the money, is more honest than the various other schemes. But these programs undermine the immigration-based culture of building a country together:

Measured solely in investment terms, the majority of investor immigration programmes are very attractive to UHNW [Ultra High Net Worth] individuals, costing as little as 0.5 per cent of their liquid assets, or 0.1 per cent of their net worth, and providing a host of positive benefits.

Some of the reasons for seeking a second citizenship include, greater stability and security, tax efficiency, ease of travel, higher standard of living, increased options for children’s education, and investment opportunities that may not otherwise be available.

As education and awareness of global citizenship programmes continue to increase, so too will the number of applications being made by UHNW individuals, Wealth-X said.

Global citizenship catching fancy of super rich in India, China | The Indian Express.

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More on Temporary Foreign Workers

2014/05/03 Leave a comment

Some of the more interesting commentary on the TFW program from both the right and left following Minister Kenney’s suspension of the program for the fast food sector pending review (I suspect officials and staffers are scrambling). McDonald’s has also suspended the program given the damage to its brand and has its own internal review.

Starting with Martin Collacott:

One solution that has been suggested to reduce their vulnerability is to provide them with a clear path to permanent residency, so they do not have to worry about losing their status in this country. This, however, is not a solution that is in the interests of Canadians. Allowing low-skilled workers to remain here on a permanent basis is what immigration experts have described as “importing poverty” — because these workers can then bring in family members who will consume far more in public services than they pay in taxes. They would be likely to form a new underclass of impoverished Canadians.

Yet another factor that has to be considered in connection with the TFW program is that many who come here would like to stay permanently because of the much higher wages available in Canada than in their home countries. There is a distinct possibility, therefore, that many will choose to stay here illegally when their contracts expire — which would create another series of problems for Canada.

Canadians are well aware that there are already large numbers of people in the country who are unemployed and prepared to work for reasonable wages. These include unemployed youth, aboriginals, recent immigrants and people laid off from the manufacturing industry. Public opinion is, therefore, increasingly in favour of a drastic reduction in the temporary foreign worker program. The sooner the government takes action on this, the better.

Martin Collacott: Time to end Canada’s temporary foreign worker program | National Post.

The more left-wing approach, by Rick Salutin of the Star:

In an especially misanthropic Globe column, Margaret Wente rejects that model because “it amounts to importing poverty.” Sorry but that’s what built Canada. “We” imported poverty and gave it a chance to mutate. What does she think the poor are? They’re human, for starters. They have dreams and motivation — with a little encouragement. And energy, often far beyond the rest of us. Without it, many would never have survived.

She says, “Canada’s immigration policy is the most successful in the world because we select people with a lot of skills and education — not ditchdiggers and hotel maids.” But that’s exactly who we brought in: ditchdiggers and hotel maids. Their kids, with the benefits of decent schools, are now teachers, artists, bankers, hockey players. She’s ticked about letting Filipina nannies apply for citizenship because they don’t “move up the income ladder.” Well, uptitle nanny to early childhood educator, improve the pay, include benefits and see what follows. And by the way, who says ditchdiggers and nannies aren’t skilled? You try it.

And what’s preventing people like nannies from doing better? Temporary foreign workers, that’s who. They have no stake in the country and are insecure, so they work for less. If they were immigrants and not TFWs, they wouldn’t do that. This policy isn’t a law of nature that you can’t repeal, or an innate instinct among “true” Canadians. Come to think of it, that’s what I meant to write about before I got exasperated by Wente’s column.

Temporary foreign workers a global phenomenon: Salutin

Tim Harper focuses on the International Experience Canada program, one that encourages Canadian youth to work abroad:

Less than a decade ago, 21,656 Canadian youth travelled abroad while 30,467 foreign youth worked here. Today, fewer than 18,000 Canadians are working abroad, but there are more than 58,000 foreign workers here.
Cape Breton Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner told the Commons this week that, under the program, there were 753 Polish workers in this country and four Canadians in Poland. There are more than 300 Croatian workers here, but there are two Canadians working in Croatia.

For Conservatives, cheap foreign labour trumps Canadian youth: Tim Harper

Doug Saunders similarly argues for more immigrants, less temporary workers:

But, as an important new study of temporary-worker caregivers by the Institute for Research on Public Policy shows, its temporary nature has also created a huge social and economic problem. Between this and the other temporary programs, there are now hundreds of thousands of people who live full-time in Canada and have deepening ties here, but are unable to form any legal connection to our country’s economy or society.

In at least one respect, the caregivers are better off than the 65,000 skilled, unskilled and agricultural workers who come in “temporarily” each year (and now number more than 300,000): Since 2010, the nannies have been allowed to apply for permanent residence after completing 24 months of work over a period of up to four years.

That, at a minimum, needs to be done for all temporary workers. If there is one lesson from the world’s half-century experience with “guest” immigration, it is that nothing is worse for a country than having a large number of unaccompanied individuals living in its borders with no ability to form family, educational or economic ties – and thus to invest in their communities and help build their new country. Whereas permanent immigrants are a net gain, temporary ones do nothing for our development and often harm their lives.

Foreign workers won’t be temporary if we make them permanent

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Temporary Foreign Workers Commentary

2014/04/25 Leave a comment

Terry Glavin’s well-placed rant in the Citizen on the temporary workers program. The government in its efforts to please its small business and franchisee base is surprised that the program has encouraged hiring foreign workers, as it would appear, at the expense of Canadians:

But harder still is the work of believing all those things we are told in order to dissuade us from the reasonable conclusion that the entire edifice of the Temporary Foreign Workers program has been subverted to the purpose of a racket, and the whole point of it is to defraud the Canadian public, suppress the wages of the people and distort the national labour markets to the unearned advantage of some employers.

You will be expected to believe that the stagnation of real median wages since the 2008-09 recession is by some voodoo mechanism wholly unrelated to the roaring trade in easily-exploitable foreign temps that has been underway, simultaneously, as documented by the Labour Market Assessment 2014 report the Parliamentary Budget Office released last month.

You will be asked to take it as normal that there are nearly a half million foreign workers in Canada, and that a quarter of all the new jobs filled across Canada last year were taken by these vulnerable migrants, and similarly there is somehow nothing especially worrisome about the rate of temporary foreign workers in Canada exceeding the number of permanent residents being admitted into this country as prospective citizens.

You will be further obliged to agree that the routine eruption of all those scandals is merely a matter of an otherwise proper system being gamed and foully abused, spoiled by a few grifters and bad apples, and that in actuality the program is unfair to employers owing to its burdensome encumbrances by way of inordinate fee-paying and form-filling and application-submitting, and Employment Minister Jason Kenney is just being mean.

You need not be more than a run-of-the-mill moron to believe such propositions, but you would have to be uniquely possessed of a special type of gall to actually traffic in them, and whatever name you want to give that rare quality it is in no short supply around the offices of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

How to fix the foreign-workers program.

Campbell Clark has a more reasoned approach in the Globe, but essentially comes to the same conclusion:

The number of people in Canada under those labour-market opinions grew from 82,210 people in 2005, before the Conservatives took power, to 202,510 in 2012, according to statistics from Mr. Kenney’s department, Employment and Social Development Canada.

The number one occupation group isn’t engineers, it’s” food counter attendants, kitchen helpers, and related occupations,” with 17,755 people. Waiters, cooks, and cashiers are all in the top 20.

Immigration policy does play a role in the labour markets, by determining the number who come and the qualifications they need to come. But the government should have a good public-policy reason before it intervenes to tinker with supply and demand at employers’ request.

There could be a gap in a highly-specialized or highly-skilled profession that Canadians just can’t fill for the time being. There’s always been a separate stream for agricultural workers, and that’s perhaps justified because it’s back-breaking seasonal work and the farm sector can’t risk a labour-shortage at harvest….

But there’s no compelling public-policy reason to help a fast-food franchise find workers at the wage they want to pay. Can a McDonald’s in Victoria really claim no Canadian will take a job there, no matter what the wage?

Yes, some employers like this program. Dan Kelly, of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said a lot of employers say it’s increasingly difficult to “find people who are available to work and will show up with a smile on their face, and not be on their phone for half the shift.” But the government can’t justify guest-worker programs because some employers think these kids today have the wrong attitude.

Politically, it’s not going to be easy to justify the expansion of temporary foreign workers. Most Canadians thought it was a program to fill temporary skills shortages, not to have the government micro-manage the labour pool in jobs Canadians can do. Each case of alleged abuse underlines not simply that the program is open to abuse, but that it’s gone off the rails.

Foreign worker abuses expose Harper’s hollow commitment to free markets

Terrence Corcoran in the Financial Post notes the CD Howe study showing that the program led to an increase in unemployment:

And now comes a heavy-duty economic analysis from the C.D. Howe Institute claiming that the TFWP caused increased unemployment in Alberta and British Columbia. The paper could put a serious crimp in the federal government’s program that has proven wildly successful. As of December, an estimated 338,000 temporary foreign workers held jobs in Canada.

The increase in unemployment in Alberta and B.C. is said to have occurred between 2007 and 2010 when the program was relaxed and a pilot project introduced to allow “cheaper access to foreign workers because of purportedly deep shortages of labour in some occupations.” The program worked, but maybe too well.

The author of the C.D. Howe report does not condemn the TFWP as a whole. Dominique Gross, a professor at the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University, says in her study, Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada: Are They Really Filling Labour Shortages, the idea is economically sound but only if the program is well designed. In an interview, Ms. Gross said the unemployment rates in B.C. and Alberta were on average 1% higher per year over the 2007-10 period than they would have been had the government not relaxed the rules of the TFWP.

To fix the problem, Ms. Gross calls for a number of reforms, including collecting much better data on whether shortages actually exist, increasing the corporate cost-per-worker of a TFW permit (now $275 each compared with $2,500 in the United States) and imposing tougher rules that would force companies to prove the labour shortages are real.

Pending reforms, Ms. Gross says Ottawa should impose a “temporary quota” on the total number of temporary workers allowed into Canada.

Ms. Gross’s reforms may be hard to implement without gutting much of the initiative. Temporary worker programs are a relative success in Europe, she says, in part because labour supply and demand is vigorously monitored through detailed employment vacancy surveys. Europe also makes use of expensive government-run “local labour offices” that serve as matchmakers between workers and employers. Canada has never been hospitable to greater state involvement in day-to-day management of the labour market, whether provincial or federal.

Bit odd however that Corcoran should be citing temporary worker programs in Europe as a relative success given some of the longer-term integration challenges resulting from these programs.

Terence Corcoran: How Canada’s temporary foreign workers program became a victim of its own success

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Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post

2014/04/22 Leave a comment

One of the perverse consequences of Quebec continuing its business immigration program while the rest of Canada has suspended it. Never liked this “buy a visa” approach and government officials are basically poor at assessing entrepreneurial and business skills:

Whether or not the language exemption is abused matters to Vancouver, since 89 per cent of all investor immigrants supposedly bound for Quebec end up living elsewhere in Canada. Assuming the dispersal rate under the federal scheme holds true for these immigrants too, that means about 59 per cent of all Quebec investor immigrants actually end up living in Vancouver.

As with the axed federal scheme, Chinese millionaires dominate Quebec’s investor immigration scheme, making up 71 per cent of 2012’s applicants.

This habit of rich Chinese to quickly flee their new “home” of Quebec has not gone unnoticed.

In testimony to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Official Languages last June, then Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was scathing.

“I think there is some skimming going on in the programme, whereby Quebec is taking the money of immigrant investors and using it, but the British Columbia taxpayers must pay the price for the social services provided to immigrants selected by Quebec,” Kenney said.

Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada | South China Morning Post.

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Canada needs more immigrant future citizens, fewer guest workers

2014/04/16 Leave a comment

Globe editorial on temporary workers vs immigration. Not surprisingly that employers are taking advantage of the expansion of the temporary foreign worker program; surprising that the Government did not anticipate such abuse (would be interesting to know what officials advised). In the rush to meet requests from franchise owners and the like, some fall-out.

One of the ironies is that Minister Kenney now gets to see the temporary foreign worker issues from the Economic and Social Development perspective, whereas before it was from an immigration perspective.

Canada’s wise and long-standing policy has been to prefer immigrants over temporary workers. Most newcomers to this country come as immigrants, offered permanent-resident status and a path to citizenship. They come to Canada to become Canadians, and even before they attain full citizenship, they are able to enjoy most of the rights of Canadians in the labour market. Workers under the temporary program are a whole other story. There are cases where the program makes sense, but Canada should be wary of creating a large pool of low-wage, temporary guest workers with limited rights, some of whom run the risk of turning into illegal residents when their temporary status ends.

Employers having trouble finding workers to fill low-skill, low-wage jobs have two choices: attract new employees by raising wages, or find a new pool of people willing to work for less. The point of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program should not be to ensure that businesses never have to consider the first option. And if this country really has a shortage of low-skill workers, Canada should consider taking in more immigrants – future citizens – rather than more guest workers.

Canada needs more immigrant future citizens, fewer guest workers – The Globe and Mail.

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Douglas Todd: ‘Best and brightest’ slogan popular with leaders who don’t get its satirical edge

2014/04/07 Leave a comment

Good critique of the indiscriminate use of the term the “best and brightest” in relation to immigration and Canadian values. Obviously, we do not want the “worst and dumbest” but the definition of what is the “best and brightest” in real world terms is hard to measure :

Most Canadian are aware that students who score the highest marks are not necessarily the “best.” How many times have you heard about doctors, academics, MBAs or psychiatrists who have no people skills, vision, collegiality or insight?

And what about the central value of the world’s major religions? Christianity, Islam and Sikhism, to name three, do not teach that society should focus on privileging “the best and the brightest.” Instead, along with most secular philosophies, they stand for upholding the dignity and value of all.

Instead of Canadian officials in government and public education using the language of universal worth, they are reverting to buzzwords to tell us to bestow even more status on the “best and brightest.”

There will always be a need for talent spotting to keep the wheels of society churning, but the growing proclivity in Canada for “best and brightest” sloganeering runs the danger of careering into elitism.

Let’s not forget the Vietnam era, when the phrase was most often used to expose pretense, deception and a lack of common sense.

Douglas Todd: ‘Best and brightest’ slogan popular with leaders who don’t get its satirical edge.

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We’re cleaning up the Liberals’ immigration mess | An Immigration System strangling in red Tape

2014/04/04 Leave a comment

The duelling narratives on immigration and related policies, starting with Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to CIC Minister Alexander:

In doing so, the Liberals will prove again that they are the party of missed opportunities and the same old group of do-nothing hypocrites who repeatedly slashed immigration levels, settlement funding and resources to tackle long wait times for newcomers. Our Conservative government will take no lessons from them on matters of immigration.

We’re cleaning up the Liberals’ immigration mess | iPolitics.

Followed by John McCullum the Liberal critic for CIC:

At a time when Canada competes with other countries for immigrants and visitors, speed is of the essence. On this score, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his former longtime Immigration minister, Jason Kenney, have failed miserably.

From visitors and skilled immigrants to non-economic immigrants and citizenship candidates, processing times have mushroomed on their watch, typically rising by 50 per cent to 100 per cent or more.

An immigration system strangling in red tape | iPolitics

My sense was that CIC officials largely favoured some of the “supply management” restrictions decided by the government given the backlogs and lengthy processing times, largely unmanageable.

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Immigrant spouses may have to meet language and education requirements | Canadian Immigrant

2014/03/26 Leave a comment

The Government sometimes can’t help itself making partisan shots rather than a serious discussion of the issues. There are integration challenges for spouses coming to Canada, best addressed through settlement and related services, as not allowing immediate family reunification, should the Government decide to go there, will hamper not foster integration:

Alexander’s office would not confirm if language and education requirements are in the cards. It said the government is proud of its record of condemning intolerance, hatred, and barbaric cultural practices.

“We can’t say the same for Justin Trudeau, who has refused to call honour killings barbaric,” said Alexis Pavlich, the minister’s press secretary. “Everyone is expected to respect Canadian values and abide by Canadian laws.”

Lawyer Avvy Go, executive director of the Metro Toronto Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, who attended one of the consultations, said such a move would be “a direct attack on Canada’s family reunification program.”

“We will go back to a bachelor society, like when Canada had its Chinese head tax in place and people were prevented from bringing their wives and children here,” she said.

Alexander has been meeting with invited representatives of communities across Canada for input into a strategic plan to “strengthen the integrity of the immigration spousal sponsorship program.” In those meetings, he raised the idea of imposing the new requirements, some of those invited told the Star.

However, Pavlich, the minister’s press secretary, said it’s “irresponsible and unproductive” to characterize such discussions at the meetings as an indication of future policies.

Immigrant spouses may have to meet language and education requirements | Canadian Immigrant.

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Learning a Second Language

2014/03/15 Leave a comment

Nice piece by Victoria Ferauge on the challenges on becoming really fluent in a second language. Most of us who are bilingual (and not brought up that way) likely have a similar experience:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/mjljN/~3/G2YxpTwiZoo/the-trials-of-learning-and-maintaining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

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Understanding Intergenerational Social Mobility: Filipino Youth in Canada » Institute for Research on Public Policy

2014/02/20 1 Comment

Good study on some of the challenges facing the Filipino Canadian community, and the anomaly that subsequent generations have poorer educational outcomes than their parents.

Given that Filipinos are one of Canada’s largest source of immigrants, the Government’s assiduous courting of the Filipino community in Canada, and that some of the points are applicable to other communities, worth reading. Most of the recommendations are reasonable and may also apply to other groups of new Canadians that are struggling.

Unlikely and unfortunate, however, that the Conservative government will reinstate the long-form census, despite the need for better information for both current and longer-term issues:

Kelly makes a number of recommendations, some of which also apply to other immigrant–background communities: intensify efforts to improve immigrants’ access to professions and credential recognition; recognize the importance of extended families in the success of the next generation; lessen precarity for those in the Live-in Caregiver Program by considering giving workers permanent residence upon arrival; and support role-modelling and mentoring, particularly to improve educational achievement among males. Finally, the author underlines the need to collect large-scale data by, among other things, reinstating the compulsory long-form census to accurately track intergenerational outcomes.

Understanding Intergenerational Social Mobility: Filipino Youth in Canada » Institute for Research on Public Policy.

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