Australia: What is the government’s multicultural policies review seeking to …

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Fifty years after the Whitlam government released its landmark report on multiculturalism in Australia, the Albanese government has launched a major review of its policies to ensure they are serving multicultural communities in the best ways.

But will this review provide a multicultural policy “for all Australians”? Or is it just seeking to ensure, as the government put it, that “no one is left behind, and everyone feels that they truly belong”?

Multicultural policies in Australia initially aimed to benefit all Australians, not just multicultural communities. They were meant to express the broader principles of liberal democracy, such as equality, freedom and economic opportunity.

However, the past decade has been marked by “fear-mongering and division”, as Immigration Minister Andrew Giles recently reminded us.

Perhaps this is why the Albanese government review, promised during the 2022 federal election, has set a modest goal on multicultural policies. It may ultimately fall short of the broader goal of engaging with wider society.

So, what will the review actually be looking at? And what is it seeking to achieve?

How Australia has changed

The review’s terms of reference say the aim is quite simple: ensuring we have a government that works for a multicultural Australia.

It identifies discrimination, systemic barriers to services and social mobility as focal points for action.

Australia has changed significantly over the past decade. More than 50% of the population today was born overseas or has at least one parent overseas born. And nearly 30% identify with a non-Anglo culture.

Over the past decade, perhaps the biggest issue in relation to the social integration of immigrants has been the huge increase in temporary migration to Australia.

Public policy has equated “temporary” with “not requiring support”. That means these migrants have not received adequate services in housing, transport, education, employment protection and health.

They were the ones most abandoned during the pandemic, when they were told simply to “go home” or survive on the streets.

What the review will look at

There are three intertwining policy spheres that require a major rethink in the multicultural review:

  • multicultural policy (including language policy, recognition of people’s identities and support for their sense of belonging to Australian society, and employment protection policy)
  • settlement policy (focused on new arrivals of both migrants and refugees, including trauma recovery), and
  • community relations (covering discrimination, relations between different cultural groups, anti-racism efforts, social integration and the all-important relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians).

These policies were left to decay over the last generation, throughout both Labor and Coalition governments.

Another focus of the review will be on the power hierarchy in Australia and how open it is to non-European Australians.

This remains a major challenge for the country. There are few people of multicultural backgrounds in positions of power, such as

Importantly, the review will also consider the role of the government as an employer itself. Recent studies have pointed to the under-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse groups in the public sector at both the Commonwealth and state levels – especially at senior levels.

The review will consider how the Commonwealth government has been addressing all of these issues. It will make recommendations on legislation, policy settings, community relations and government services at the federal, state and local levels.

Where the review may fall short

Unfortunately, the review was not asked to examine the poor state of Australian government data collection on diversity and its appalling consequences.

We recently saw this most starkly in the lack of statistics on mortality from COVID, which hit older, multicultural Australians particularly hard.

Neither is it being asked to consider how to rebuild the depleted state of Australian research on diversity and multicultural issues. This was a central recommendation of the last Labor-led parliamentary committee review of multicultural policies in 2013.

The chair of the current panel is Dr Bulent Hass Dellal, executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation. He has considerable experience as a government advisor in the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. He also has the confidence of the new government.

However, there are no First Nations people on the panel, though they will be invited to contribute. The government has also not appointed any academic researchers to either the panel or reference group.

From the perspective of experts with an interest in cultural and linguistic diversity, this is disappointing.

Lastly, the review is being conducted within the Department of Home Affairs rather than the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Multicultural policy was once thought important enough to have the support and imprimatur of the prime minister and be monitored by his staff – be it Malcolm Fraser or Bob Hawke. This is seemingly no longer the case.

Andrew Jakubowicz, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Technology Sydney

Source: What is the government’s multicultural policies review seeking to …

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Black Canadians gave views on racism in the justice system and experiences with police. Results were ‘stunning’

2023/06/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

The rift between Black Canadians and the country’s criminal justice system runs particularly deep and wide, according to the results of Canada’s first Black Canadian National Survey.

A report released this week by York University’s Institute for Social Researchreveals that 90 per cent of Black Canadians believe that racism in the criminal justice system is a serious problem. They are closely followed in that belief by the country’s Indigenous people, at 82 per cent.

The survey also outlines the extent of Black Canadians’ deep mistrust of the nation’s police services as well.

In the 12 months prior to the survey, more than one in five Black Canadians (22 per cent) reported being unfairly stopped by police — an experience less than half as common in any other racial or ethnic group. Only five per cent of white Canadians, for example, reported unfair stops.

The survey numbers suggested this seems to happen more in the country’s coastal provinces than anywhere else. In Atlantic Canada, 40 per cent of Black males reported being stopped unfairly by police in the previous 12 months. In B.C. that figure was 41 per cent. By comparison, the rates in Ontario and Quebec were 30 and 31 per cent respectively.

Lorne Foster, York University’s Research Chair in Black Canadian Studies and Human Rights and one of the co-authors of the survey report, calls those numbers “stunning.”

“It kind of makes me gasp, in a sense, to think that 22 per cent of randomly collected Black respondents across the country suggest that they’ve had unfair encounters with police,” he says.

He says although many people think of the racial profiling and racial discrimination of Blacks by police as a big-city problem, that the data from the Atlantic Provinces and B.C. — where the percentage of Blacks reporting unfair stops by police was almost 20 points higher than the national average — calls that idea into question.

“There is, in policing, the usual theory that all our police services are good. (And) if there’s something wrong, it’s only a few bad apples and there’s a few bad apples in every good barrel,” he says. “That argument has existed for a long time — that the police services are basically and fundamentally fair and unbiased.

“This data sort of belies that.”

The RCMP did not respond to requests for comment on the results of the survey.

Under former commissioner Brenda Lucki, the Mounties eventually acknowledged ongoing problems with systemic racism and discrimination. Lucki’s Vision 150 program was designed, over the course of five to seven years, to transform the RCMP, in part by addressing those discrimination problems — problems that have, since 2018 lead to the national police force paying out or potentially facing some $2.4 billion worth of damages in multiple class action lawsuits.

Part of that program was a three-hour, online course, United Against Racism launched in November 2021. It was stipulated by the RCMP as mandatory for all employees to complete by September 2022.

As of Jan. 1, 2023, only 51.6 per cent had completed the course. When that data is filtered to include only RCMP members — regular officers and special constables — the figure drops sightly to 51 per cent.

The data is the result of a hybrid survey (using three different ways of collecting responses) of almost 7,000 Canadians, the majority — 5,697 — chosen randomly from across the country.

Foster is quick to point out, though, that the data this survey does not actually allow researchers to make determinations of racial profiling.

“But it does suggest, because the numbers are so disparate for Black communities, that there could be issues there. And they should be looked into.”

He likens it to a patient getting an X-ray and doctors seeing a shadow in the lungs. There’s definitely something abnormal there, but it will take more tests to find out what exactly it is.

The survey results also reveal that Black Canadians see their workplaces as an epicentre of racial discrimination, says Foster.

Seventy-five per cent of Black Canadians said they have experienced workplace racism and think it’s a problem. Another 47 per cent believe they have been treated unfairly by an employer regarding hiring, pay or promotion in the 12 months prior to the survey.

Seventy per cent of other non-whites also see workplace racism as a serious problem. By contrast, 56 per cent of white Canadians don’t see racism in the workplace as a problem or believe it to be a minor issue.

The survey results — which also include Black Canadians’ opinions on racism in health care, child care and social services — go a long way to establishing the importance of collecting specific race-based data.

“Race data has not been collected in this country in any kind of consistent and proper way. Not by Stats Canada, not by anybody,” says Foster.

That’s just beginning to change, though, beginning with Ontario, with Nova Scotia closely following suit. Foster has been involved with both provincial governments in helping them learn to collect that data.

In Ontario, he says, all police services are required to collect race data on use of force incidents and some police departments — Toronto among them — are collecting race data on strip searches as well. In Nova Scotia both the Health and Justice ministries have committed to collecting race-based data.

Beyond the startling numbers in the survey, says Foster, it’s a model for the rest of the country’s police services and public sector services to examine and improve their operations through the lens of collected race-based data.

“The point of this kind of research is that it really maps out these kinds of structural vulnerabilities in these public sector institutions, and it kind of points to the quality of life gaps,” he says.

“We’re a mixed race society that’s never been studied along racial lines. And this is the first salvo into that. And I’d hope that it would be followed up with many, many more.”

Source: Black Canadians gave views on racism in the justice system and experiences with police. Results were ‘stunning’

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Windmill: Canada wastes the skills of its immigrants, and the economy suffers as a result 

2023/06/16 Leave a comment

Skirts the broader questions around Canada’s immigration and productivity, and focusses on an area where there is broad agreement and signs of change at both the governmental and industry levels:

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts Canada’s economic growth will be dead last among 40 advanced economies over the next half decade. This shocking statistic is based on per capita growth in growth domestic product, which is the country’s productivity divided by the total population. How can we fix that?

Immigration is often touted as a panacea for economic growth, yet that notion is increasingly being challenged.

Analysts who favour higher levels of immigration cite Canada’s low birth rate, aging population and rapidly declining ratio of working age Canadians to seniors (7.7 to 1 in 1966, 3.4 to 1 in 2022). Others who want to reduce immigration targets argue that our supply of housing, health care and infrastructure are insufficient to handle a massive increase in newcomers. Still others contend that the solution is to focus on immigrants with the highest skills and earnings potential.

I believe immigration is a critical part of the solution – but only part of it. Necessary in the face of Canada’s low birth rates, high immigration levels alone will not address our punishingly low economic growth rate.

Canada’s issue is not a shortage of skilled immigrants, but the roadblocks that stand in the way of their economic integration.

A recent Scotiabank Economics report shows that two-thirds of immigrants arrive with university degrees, whereas only one-third of Canadians hold them. Yet two-thirds of native-born, university-educated Canadians are in jobs that require a degree, whereas only one-third of immigrants with degrees are in jobs that require one. In health care, the numbers are almost as bad: More than 60 per cent of internationally trained doctors and nurses are not working in their profession.

Canada’s labour needs are not what they were a decade ago, let alone a generation or a century ago. Many of our labour shortages are for highly skilled workers: nurses, doctors, pharmacists, engineers and cybersecurity experts. Low-income and affluent Canadians alike will suffer if these skills gaps are not addressed.

There is no point in admitting highly educated people if we are not going to allow them to put their skills to work.

There are many reasons why this skills waste is happening. Most of them stem from a bygone era when labour supply outstripped demand and xenophobic policies that protected Canadian educational institutions and graduates were popular. It’s clear now that those policies are damaging to our economic growth and to our reputation as a just, inclusive and welcoming society.

The costs, in time and money, of reaccreditation programs for internationally trained professionals are excessive – often measuring in years and tens of thousands of dollars. There are also too few residency spaces for internationally trained physicians, and too many requirements for Canadian experience that are hard for newcomers to attain.

My organization sees these challenges daily through our clients’ eyes. Too many engineers, pharmacists and doctors are working in fast-food service or driving for Uber because they can’t afford the cost of accreditation. Without a Canadian credit history, they spend years underemployed.

Governments are taking steps to address these challenges, but the progress is too slow.

Bringing skilled immigrants to Canada is critical to our future prosperity. But smoothing their path to professional integration and prosperity is even more important if we want to climb out of last place in the OECD ranking of GDP per capita and preserve our standard of living over the next generation.

Source: Canada wastes the skills of its immigrants, and the economy suffers as a result

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Influx of Russians prompts Argentina to set restrictions on immigration

2023/06/16 Leave a comment

Of note, applying to temporary residents, equivalent of extended visitor visa in my reading. Original story from Clarin: “Enojo ruso” en Argentina: qué condición cambió para que puedan residir en el país.

Will be interesting to see how effective is implementation and how effective this financial requirement is.

Having a child born in Argentina gives its parents the right to legal residence, and entitles them to a passport two years after the offspring’s birth. The Argentinian government has adopted a decree restricting the mass influx of Russian citizens into the country, especially pregnant women.

As the Argentine newspaper “Clarin” explained, the decree does not apply directly to Russians, but to all foreigners, but the amendment serves to stop the mass influx of Russian citizens to Argentina initiated in March 2022.

The main change to the legislation approved at the initiative of the National Migration Authority (DNM) is that temporary residents are required to have annual receipts of USD 24,000 per person in an account established in Argentina.

The new legislation also obliges the precise source of the sums deposited in the bank, which, as envisaged by the amendment, cannot come from the earnings of freelancers, as is commonly practised by Russians in Argentina.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, several thousand Russian children have been born in Argentina, which the authorities in Buenos Aires consider suspicious. According to them, there is an allegation of an attempt to extort an Argentine passport, which allows visa-free travel to 171 countries worldwide.

Source: Influx of Russians prompts Argentina to set restrictions on immigration

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Ottawa pausing deportations of international students affected by acceptance letter scam

2023/06/16 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023/06/15 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023/06/15 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Un actif pour la société

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

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

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

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

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Hardin: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

2023/06/14 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

The taboo is great.

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

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

What’s really behind high immigration numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Breaking the Immigration Taboo

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

2023/06/14 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023/06/13 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do immigrants get a fair opportunity in Canada?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigrants’ expectations have shifted

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

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

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

But their expectations seem to have shifted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citizenship rate declining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lack of ‘Canadian experience’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Skill sets in IT are easily transferable’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to retain immigrants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunity found — in the U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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