Ramos | Here’s what we get wrong when we talk about international students and immigration

2024/11/04 Leave a comment

Good commentary by my friend Howard Ramos on the important distinctions between immigration and migration, how Canada has shifted towards the latter and the need for separate but related analysis and discussion on each:

…The failure to deliver on the value-proposition of migration and immigration to Canada has led to a reputational hit. Many newcomers have given up on the country and are returning home or looking elsewhere to fulfill their dreams.

Canada needs to recognize it is not the only game in town for attracting scarce high skill talent in a world. Trudeau failed in his ambition to offer “deliverology” to Canada and to the newcomers seeking to start a new life here.

Recognizing that Canada has become a migrant country does not mean that it should turn away from international students and temporary workers. As provinces have cut funds to colleges and universities, international students play a vital role in making up the shortfall. They also create a vibrant academic atmosphere and learn the skills needed in Canada and their home countries. Temporary workers also fill acute labour shortages and make up for an aging workforce. And both are needed in Canada’s two-step immigration system that relies on “Canadian experience” as an important factor in obtaining permanent residence.

Canada needs some temporary migrants but also needs to seriously consider the economic, infrastructure, social and cultural repercussions of moving to a migration system from being only a permanent immigration system. To fully do that demands two conversations about immigration and not just one.

Source: Opinion | Here’s what we get wrong when we talk about international students and immigration

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This Canadian province [Saskatchewan] wants to pick immigrants based on their nation. Is that fair, or a ‘slippery slope’?

2023/09/01 Leave a comment

Slippery slope. Would be helpful to see more solid evidence behind the selection of the countries.

But more fundamentally, goes against more than 50 years since race-based criteria were abandoned (7 of the 8 countries are in Europe) and other country-based programs generally are for refugees or leaving for political reasons (e.g., Ukraine, Hong Kong).

No real issue with recruitment missions and events in specific countries as that has been a long-time practice in Canada. The issue is limiting access to draws:

In a first-of-its-kind pilot project, Saskatchewan is picking skilled immigrants based on their country of residence, raising eyebrows for deviating from Canada’s selection system that has otherwise been open to all regardless of race and nationality.

In August, the Saskatchewan Immigrant Nominee Program created six draws with the goal of inviting 542 skilled immigrants in dozens of occupational backgrounds to settle in the province as permanent residents.

The catch is only those who are living in one of these eight countries can qualify: Czechia, Germany, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine.

While officials say the draws are designed to target immigrants based on their likelihood to succeed and stay in the province, experts fear this might mark the beginning of a return to Canada’s ethnocentric immigration selection approach of the past.

“This is a slippery slope that undoes the progress we’ve had with bringing in a points system,” says University of Western Ontario political sociologist Howard Ramos, who studies social justice and equity.

“What is very unique here is they’re being as explicit as they are in terms of saying, ‘We want people from these countries.’”

Until the late 1960s, said Ramos, Canada had an immigration system that welcomed immigrants from countries that were “culturally similar” to Canada, to exclude Chinese, South Asian and non-European migrants.

Then the so-called points system was introduced in 1967, awarding points to immigration applicants based on objective and measurable attributes such as educational achievements, work experience, language proficiency and employment skills.

“Canada was a world leader at bringing in a points system, a merit-based, human-capital, skills-based system,” said Ramos. “And the slippery slope of these kinds of draws goes again to pricing specific countries over skills alone.”

The most populous provinces — Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta — all enjoy an immigrant retention rate of higher than 80 per cent. However, the rest of Canada struggles to keep their newcomers despite the provincial nominee program meant to let them pick their own.

The country-specific pilot is an attempt by Saskatchewan to devote its limited resources to target newcomers who are most likely to stay, provincial officials say.

According to Statistics Canada, only 64 per cent of newcomers who settled in Saskatchewan between 2016 and 2020 ended up staying. Among those who came under the skilled workers and skilled trades categories in 2019, only 43 per cent of them remained.

Inspired by the settlement success of the five flights of displaced Ukrainians who arrived in the province in the past year, officials came up with the pilot project with employers, professional regulators, industry associations and community-based partners.

In picking the select countries, they looked at labour-pool characteristics, language ability, history of successful recruitment and retention of newcomers from different countries, as well as the job opportunities available in the province.

One other key element they considered was the credential compatibility of migrants from those countries. For instance, long-haul truck drivers in Poland, Ukraine and Germany are quickly recognized by provincial officials to work in Saskatchewan.

“We want to ensure that they remain in Saskatchewan and that the program is being used for genuine intent to contribute to the community growth that we’re experiencing in this province,” said the province’s deputy immigration minister, Richelle Bourgoin.

“We want to ensure that the very precious nominations that we have under our provincial nominee program are allocated to individuals who want to live and work in Saskatchewan.”

The federal government sets quotas for the number of provincial nomination spots each year and Saskatchewan is eligible to submit up to 7,250 in 2023.

Normally, provincial immigration officials will create a draw and invite applicants from a pool of existing candidates — who have expressed interest in permanent residence in the province and meet the relevant points thresholds — to apply for permanent residence.

However, in this pilot, Saskatchewan officials have created the draws before they have the talent pool. They expect to find their applicants in recruitment missions in Europe in late September and in India in October, where employers will meet candidates and invite them to enter the pool.

Bourgoin said employers have expressed the value of face-to-face recruitment opportunities, where provincial immigration officials, industry leaders and community partners can also be on hand to address questions and make personalized support for prospects.

Twenty employers have signed up for the mission in Poland, with more than 200 jobs to fill in 40-plus occupations including agriculture, construction, transportation, industrial manufacturing, engineering, project management and hospitality.

The intent to create the draws in advance, said Bourgoin, is to let potential applicants start preparing for an application and compiling all the necessary documents, and perhaps initiating the credential-assessment process from abroad.

While the approach may help build a stronger attachment between the newcomers and the local community, and meet the need for immigrant retention, Saskatoon immigration lawyer Chris Veeman said that’s a departure from the objective of the points system.

“It appears that there’s a preference for certain countries and there’s the question of an appearance of bias in terms of European countries,” he said.

“When you’re looking at, ‘Oh, who is going to stay in Saskatchewan? Who’s more likely to fit in here?’ Maybe that makes sense. But I don’t know that was the way the program was originally set up.”

Veeman assumed the province has already had the federal immigration department’s blessing in adopting country of residence as a criterion.

“They’re OK with provinces doing recruiting missions to meet their specific needs,” he said. “The fact that there’s these missions to certain countries is already a preference on the part of the province. They’re not going everywhere to look for people. They’re only going to certain places.”

Ramos suggested that giving this extra opportunity to European immigrants whose countries have bigger and deeper-rooted communities in Saskatchewan might help sustain those communities, while denying less-established and smaller African and Asian communities the same support.

In an email to the Star, the federal immigration department said provinces and territories are responsible for the design, management and evaluation of their respective provincial nominee programs, though Ottawa does review new streams to ensure they align with national policy and the law.

Bourgoin said the country-specific draws are by no means exclusionary because there are other draws that are open to all candidates. This year alone, the province has nominated applicants from 116 countries.

“This is one tool in a very large tool box. And we are in a position with a growing economy, a very low unemployment rate (so we use) all of the tools we have available to us,” she explained.

“In this case, we are looking to test a theory that we think might yield positive results for not only our communities but our labour market.”

The province will evaluate the pilot upon its completion in December. Successful recruits will be issued a work permit to come here while their permanent residence applications are in process.

Source: This Canadian province wants to pick immigrants based on their nation. Is that fair, or a ‘slippery slope’?

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Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Good overview of some of the issues:

Debbie Douglas was 10 when she came from Grenada to join her parents in Canada.

On her first day of school in 1973, her family had to fight with the principal, who wanted to put her back a year and have her take ESL because she spoke English with a Grenadian accent. In the end, she was allowed to attend Grade 5.

“But by the end of the first week on the playground, I got called the N-word, and it shook me to my core,” Douglas recalls. “And I looked around to see if anybody had heard and nobody said anything … In a school of 500, there were three Black kids and I don’t recall any other kids of colour.”

Despite a degree in economics from York University, her stepfather could only find a job as a financial planner. Her mother, a teacher back home, ended up working in a nursing home. 

But if you were to ask Douglas’s mother what her migration experience has been, Douglas says, she would say Canada has been very good to her family.

“My parents worked hard. We went to school. We now have a middle-class life. It’s a great migration story,” Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, told a forum about Canada’s immigration narrative this past May.

“Great” has never meant “easy” for newcomers arriving in this country. Douglas says the stories of immigrants’ struggles and sacrifice were just often not heard.

Yet Canada has long maintained its status as a destination to which newcomers aspire. The immigration story that’s told has, for decades, been one of perceived success — both from the perspective of those forging new lives here, and from the viewpoint of a country eager to grow.

Today, that national narrative appears to be under new strains that are threatening the social contract between Canada and its newcomers.

Canada’s population has just passed the 40-million mark, and it’s growing thanks to immigration. 

Immigration accounts for almost 100 per cent of the country’s labour-force growth and is projected to account for our entire population growth by 2032.

Governments and employers from coast to coast have been clamouring for more immigrants to fill jobs, expand the economy and revitalize an aging population. The more, the merrier, it seemed, even during economic recession of recent years.

Post-pandemic, Ottawa is set to bring in 465,000 new permanent residents this year, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 to boost Canada’s economic recovery after COVID.

Amid this push, there have been critiques that immigrants are too often being reduced to numbers — to units meant to balance the equations of our economy. While it is clear our economy needs immigration, what is it that newcomers need of Canada to ensure they can settle and thrive here? Are those needs being met?

Meanwhile, the federal government’s plan to bring in a historic level of immigrants has been met with some reservations domestically, as Canadians struggle with stubbornly high inflation amid global economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and volatile geopolitics.

There is a sense of scarcity emerging in Canada, despite the country’s seemingly great wealth — whether it manifests in the housing crisis, a strained health-care system, or in the lack of salary increases that keep up to inflation. 

While a national dialogue about Canada’s immigration strategy is overdue, some fear anti-immigrant or xenophobic backlash amid news, op-eds and social-media conversation that ties immigration to the strains already being felt.

One poll by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies last November found almost half of the 1,537 respondents said they believe the current immigration plan would let in too many immigrants. Three out of four were concerned the levels would strain housing, health and social services.

“Canada is at a crossroads in terms of being able to continue to be a leader in immigration. It’s at a crossroads in its ability to provide the Canadian dream to those who move to the country,” says University of Western Ontario political sociologist Howard Ramos. 

“It’s at a crossroads in terms of the infrastructure that’s needed to support this population, and it’s at a crossroads potentially at having widespread support for immigration.”

How Canada got to 40 million

Canada’s immigration strategy has long been about nation-building to meet both the demographic and economic aspirations of the country.

In 1967, Canada introduced the “points system,” based on criteria such as education achievements and work experience, to select economic immigrants. It was one of a series of measures that have gradually moved the immigration system away from a past draped in racism and discrimination.

The point system shifted a system that favoured European immigrants and instead helped open the door to those from the Global South for permanent residence in this country. The 2021 Census found the share of recent immigrants from Europe continued to decline, falling from 61.6 per cent to just 10 per cent over the past five decades. 

Ottawa had turned the immigration tap on and off depending on the economic conditions, reducing intake during recession, until the late 1980s, when then prime minister Brian Mulroney decided to not only maintain but to increase Canada’s immigration level amid high inflation, high interest rates and high unemployment. 

“There are real people behind those numbers — people with real stories, real hopes and dreams, people who have chosen Canada as their new home,” Mulroney’s immigration minister, Barbara McDougall, said back in 1990 of a five-year plan to welcome more than 1.2 million immigrants.

The plan, too, was met with what today sound like familiar criticisms of the country’s ability to absorb the influx of people.

“We don’t think the federal government is taking its own financial responsibility seriously. The federal government is cutting back. They’re capping programs,” Bob Rae, then Ontario’s NDP premier, commented.

“They’re not transferring dollars to match the real cost, whether it’s training, whether it’s (teaching) English as a second language, whether it’s social services.”

Another big shift under Mulroney’s government was the focus on drafting well-heeled economic and skilled immigrants to Canada, which saw the ratio of permanent residents in family and refugee classes drop significantly from about 65 per cent in the mid-1980s to about 43 per cent in 1990s, and about 40 per cent now.

Mulroney’s measures severed Canada’s immigration intake from the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy. Successive governments have stuck to the same high-immigrant intake, regardless of how good or bad the economy was performing.

It has set Canada apart from other western countries, where immigration issues are often politicized. Coupled with the official multiculturalism policy introduced by the government of Pierre Trudeau in 1971 in response to Quebec’s growing nationalist movement, it has contributed to Canada’s image as a welcoming country to immigrants.

Public support for immigration has remained fairly high and Canada seemed to have fared well despite such economic challenges as the burst of the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s to mid-2000s, the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, and the economic downturn driven by the oil-price slump in the mid-2010s.

Observers, however, note the challenges and circumstances of those economic fluctuations were different than what we see today: there was enough housing stock in the 1990s and the impacts of the crashes in the financial, tech and oil markets since were sectoral, regional and temporary.

Canada’s infrastructure problem

Except in Quebec, which has full control over its newcomer targets and selection, immigration is a federal jurisdiction in Canada, planned in silo from other levels of governments that actually deliver health, education, transportation and other services. Yet the impacts of immigration are felt locally in schools, transits and hospitals. 

A lack of infrastructure investments and the rapid immigration growth have finally caught up with the country’s growth. “We spent decades not s upporting our communities,” says Douglas.

“We were not paying attention to building infrastructure. We were all under-resourcing things like community development and community amenities. We haven’t built adequate affordable housing.

“It’s now become a perfect storm. We have all these people and not enough of what is needed for everybody.”

While the majority of newcomers have historically settled in the big cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, a growing number are moving to smaller cities and towns that in some cases are not ready for the influx. The share of recent immigrants settling in the Big Three dropped from 62.5 per cent in 2011 to 53.4 per cent in 2021, with second-tier cities such as Ottawa-Gatineau, Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, London and Halifax seeing significant growth.

“I don’t think it occurred to them that they need to build infrastructure to be able to welcome people in. It’s a lack of planning. It is a lack of funding,” Douglas says.

“We’ve raised these immigration numbers without paying attention to what it means, what it is that we didn’t have. We are already facing a crisis and we are bringing in more people without addressing the crisis.”

Canadian employers are champions for more economic immigrants. Half of employers surveyed told the Business Council of Canada they were in favour of raising the annual immigration targets — provided there are greater investments in the domestic workforce, as well as in child care, housing and public transportation.

Goldy Hyder, the council’s president and CEO, says many of the day-to-day challenges Canadians and immigrants face are in fact driven largely by labour shortages, whether it’s in health care, housing, or restaurants and retail.

Around the world, he says, countries build infrastructure to spur population — and economic — growth, but in Canada, he contends, it’s been vice-versa.

Hyder sees this moment as a crucial one for raising immigration targets and maintaining public support. “We are at a seminal moment in the life of this country, because we’re at a seminal moment in the life of the world right now,” he says.

Hyder says the country’s immigration policy shouldn’t be just about bringing in people, it should be part of a bigger workforce and industrial strategy to ensure skills of all Canadians and immigrants are fully utilized in the economy in order to maintain the public support for immigration.

“We need to plan better. We need to be more strategic in that plan. And we need to work together to do that: federal, provincial, municipal governments, regulatory bodies, professional bodies, business groups,” he says.

“Let’s address the anxieties that Canadians are facing. You don’t sweep them aside or under a rug. We must have honest discourse with Canadians, fact-based about what we’re trying to do to make their lives better.”

The tradeoffs that come with population growth

The case made for increased immigration is often an economic one. That said, research has generally found the economic benefits of immigration are close to neutral. That’s because when it comes to population growth, there are always tradeoffs.

While bringing in a large number of immigrants can spur population growth and drive demand for goods and services, it will also push up prices even as the government is trying to rein in out-of-control costs of living, warn some economists. 

When more workers are available, employers don’t have to compete and can offer lower wages. Further, just adding more people without investing into social and physical infrastructure such as housing and health care is going to strain the society’s resources and be counterproductive, economists say.

“For housing and health care, it takes a long time to catch up with the increased demand,” says Casey Warman, a professor in economics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, whose own family doctor is retiring. (He is now on a wait list seeking a new one, with 130,000 ahead of him.)

One of the main metrics of economic success has traditionally been a country’s overall GDP. Immigration and population growth can fuel the pool of labour and consumers and boost the overall GDP.

But there’s an emerging chorus of economists arguing that there is a better reflection of the standard of living and economic health in a country. That’s GDP per capita — productivity per person. The growth of Canada’s GDP per capita has been quite flat over the recent years, growing marginally from $50,750.48 in 2015 to $52,127.87 last year. Despite the recovery and high inflation amid the pandemic, it’s still below the $52,262.70 recorded in 2018.

Uncertainty about rapidly changing economic conditions, as well as the fast pace of technological adjustments, have also created uncertainty about what skills and labour will be in demand as the country moves forward.

“One big unknown now is how automation and especially AI is going to change the landscape for labour demand in the next five, 10 years … Is it going to decrease demand for labour?” Warman asks. 

How to adapt in the face of this uncertainty, and how immigration should be approached in light of it, is a conversation Canada needs to have, experts say.

Ivey Business School economics Prof. Mike Moffatt says that who Canada is bringing in matters as much as immigration levels, and what’s happening with the economy is nuanced.

Economic, family and humanitarian classes are the three main streams of permanent residents coming to Canada, and each group has different impacts on the economy, generally with those who come as skilled immigrants having the highest earnings and weathering economic downturns best.

The profiles of the incoming immigrants and their ability to integrate into the economy matter, says Moffatt. Bringing in foreign-trained doctors and nurses who can’t get licensed from stringent regulators, for example, won’t help address the health-care crisis.

Still, Moffatt says his critique of Canada’s immigration plan is less about the ambitious targeted numbers than the pace of the increases, as well as the short notice for provinces and cities in planning for the influx.

“Whether it be on education, immigration support programs, labour market programs, all of these things, there’s no time to adjust,” says Moffatt, senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank with a stated goal of advancing solutions for a stronger, cleaner economy.

“I do think we can have robust increases in the targets. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, but let the provinces and cities know what you’re doing.

“There’s no collaboration. There’s no co-ordination. They are not working with the provinces and municipalities and the higher-education sector in order to come up with any kind of long-term thinking. It’s very short-term in nature.”

Should Canada cap international students and migrant workers?

Aside from questions about the immigration plan Canada has, there are also questions about the plan it doesn’t have.

The national immigration plan sets targets for the number of permanent residents accepted yearly, but leaves the door wide open for temporary residents. 

That has become a bigger issue over the years as Canada has increasingly shifted to a two-step system to select skilled immigrants who have studied and worked in Canada, bringing in more international students and temporary foreign workers than permanent residents.

According to Statistics Canada, there were close to a million (924,850) temporary residents in Canada in 2021, making up 2.5 per cent of the population.

The majority of them, including asylum-seekers, can legally work here; the remaining 8.7 per cent who don’t have work permits includes visitors such as parents and grandparents with the so-called super visa, who can stay for up to five years.

Temporary residents, who don’t have credit history for loans and mortgages in Canada, are more likely to be renters and public transit users (but eligible for some provincial health care), says Anne Michèle Meggs, who was the Quebec Immigration Ministry’s director of planning and accountability before her 2019 retirement.

“In the past, it wasn’t an issue, because we had a relatively small temporary migrant population, so we managed, even though we took the approach that we just bring them in and we don’t look after what happened to them afterwards,” says Meggs, whose book “Immigration to Quebec: How Can We Do Better” was recently published.

“That’s fine. That population wasn’t out of control. So that’s why we still successfully managed and it didn’t become a crisis.”

However, under tremendous pressure from post-secondary institutions to recruit international students, and from employers to quickly bring in foreign workers, she said the balance has tipped. To not set targets for temporary immigration is to get into trouble, Meggs warns.

“We want people to come and we want people to stay. You want things to be good for everybody, including immigrants and including children. And I think the objective has to be to make sure that everyone gets treated with dignity,” she says.

“Immigrants are not just sources of labour or sources of financing of institutions or spending money to increase our national GDP. These are people. We have to get back to talking about the immigrants and not just immigration.”

Canada ‘cannot afford to allow for polarization’

Canada immigration overall has been a success in terms of forging positive public attitudes toward immigration and the political participation by immigrants, says Andrew Griffith, a retired director general of the federal immigration department.

He feels Canada now has the maturity to have an honest and informed conversation about immigration without the fear of being labelled as racist and xenophobic. The focus of the discussion, he says, should be on Canada’s capacity to ensure a good quality of life for those who are already here and those who will be coming.

“It’s not about keeping the immigrants out. It’s more that if we’re going to do this, we have to do it right,” says Griffith. “We have to make sure we have the right infrastructure, the right housing policies and everything like that.”

Any immigration plan, Griffith says, should go beyond the intake levels but study the potential socio-economic impacts and include inputs from provincial and municipal governments.

Canada has grown to become a country of 40 million, and it has not always been smooth sailing.

But Canadians have worked hard to make immigration work for everyone and the success has come down to how the growth has been managed and how the public support for immigration has been maintained.

“We cannot afford to allow for polarization, populism and xenophobia to kick in here because it’s a very slippery slope,” says Hyder, whose family arrived in Calgary from India in 1974 when he was seven. “Other countries have seen it. It can go downhill very fast.

“Immigration is part of the arteries of our soul. It is who we are as a people.”

Source: Canada is getting bigger. Are we setting the country and its newest citizens up for success?

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Canada kept doors open to temporary foreign workers during 2020’s pandemic lockdown, new numbers reveal

2021/03/05 Leave a comment

The project that Dan Hiebert, Howard Ramos and I have been working on:

Despite its pandemic lockdown, Canada managed to keep its doors open to temporary foreign workers last year, new numbers reveal.

Amid travel restrictions and vastly reduced immigration, 322,815 people were issued a work permit under various temporary foreign worker programs, according to a joint project that tracks the pandemic’s impacts on Canadian immigration. 

Although that represents a drop of 10 per cent from the year before, temporary foreign workers appear to have been substantially less interrupted by COVID-19 than those in other streams of immigration to this country.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • The number of permanent residents admitted to Canada last year nosedived by 45.7 per cent, to just 185,130, from 2019;
  • The number of study permit holders also dropped by 33 per cent to 277,720, with the enrolment in primary and secondary schools down 32.3 per cent and in post-secondary education down almost 32 per cent. Those in language programs fell by 54 per cent; and
  • A total of 23,845 people sought asylum in Canada, compared to 64,045 in 2019. Claims made at airports and land borders dropped by 77 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively, due primarily to border closures. 

“Canada has been pretty dedicated to bringing in the people that it needs on a temporary work side,” said University of British Columbia professor Daniel Hiebert, a co-founder of the COVID research project. “There’s a Canadian interest story to be told.”

According to the immigration data, 215,080 work permit holders were admitted under “Canadian interests,” which include athletes, scholars, those in culture and entertainment, youth in international exchange programs and international students who graduated from a designated Canadian college or university. The group fell by just eight per cent from 233,430.

Migrant farm workers made up the second largest group, accounting for 54,145 of the work permit holders, representing a 6.1 per cent decline from 2019.

Those temporary foreign workers who required a labour market assessment to prove they’re not taking a job from a Canadian dropped by almost 13 per cent to 30,890 from 35,365 in 2019.

The biggest losers were foreign caregivers and foreign workers under trades agreements such as intra-company transferees, down by 49 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.

Andrew Griffith, another co-founder of the COVID and Immigration research project, said it makes sense for Ottawa to prioritize processing temporary residents such as migrant workers and international students, who are of Canada’s short-term economic interest and a crucial group in the country’s permanent resident pipeline.

Just in February, with the border still closed to prospective immigrants overseas, Ottawa invited a record 27,332 people to apply for permanent residence, and 90 per cent of the invitees are already living in Canada, with at least one year of Canadian work experience. 

With the immigration shortfall in 2020, Ottawa plans to welcome more than 1.2 million permanent residents over the next three years.

“I’m worried about the impact of COVID on those already in Canada,” said Griffith, a former director general at the immigration department. “Is it fair and ethical to encourage a large number of immigrants at a time when their economic prospects are not that great?” 

The immigration data also showed the number of permanent resident applications plummeted in 2020 by a whopping 54.6 per cent to 186,000 from 409,500 in 2019.

Applications from the Americas fell by 64 per cent, followed by those from Europe (57 per cent), Asia (56 per cent), Africa and Oceania (both at 46 per cent).

“Everywhere around the world people are hunkering down a little bit more, just thinking, ‘Why do I want to move thousands of kilometres away during a crisis?’ What’s on people’s minds is, ‘Who’s going to let me in as an immigrant now anyway?’” said Hiebert.

“There’s a sense that this isn’t the right time to try to get into another country. People are just being realistic.”

While it’s hard to predict how global migration will transform as the world digs itself out of the pandemic, Western University professor Howard Ramos said the notion of emigration out of the traditional source countries such as China, India and the Philippines in 2021 and going forward is different than before COVID-19.

“In any of those countries, they are now wrestling for the first time an aging population and potentially shrinking populations as a result of lower child births. The level of development is higher and people are more urban and have more education and affluence at home. The appeal to going abroad is not as it once was,” said Ramos, who works with Hiebert and Griffith on the COVID immigration tracking project.

“North America and Europe look very different than what they once did before the pandemic, as you see some of the chaos experienced with the rollout of the vaccines or when you look at public attitudes. We’ve seen an ugly turn in Canada with anti-Asian hate crime that certainly gives a different lens of Canada as a welcoming country.”

Permanent residents eager to become Canadian citizens were another group that suffered during the pandemic. Only 108,159 immigrants were granted citizenship in 2020, down by 56.8 per cent from 250,083 the year before as officials struggled to transition to offer virtual citizenship tests and oath-taking ceremonies.

While the research project has so far been operating more in a record-keeping mode, Griffith said the data will provide a better sense of the Canadian government’s immigration policy responses to the pandemic and their impact down the road.

“In the end, the interesting question is not just what happened, but why it happened. Did the policy responses have an impact? Was it good impact, bad impact? Was there something that needs to be done differently with hindsight?” Griffith asked.

“Those are the deeper questions, but it’s too early to answer them. This has been the year that the world has gone to hell. Hopefully, starting sometime in late summer we’re getting out of that hole.”

Source: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/03/03/canada-kept-doors-open-to-temporary-foreign-workers-during-2020s-pandemic-lockdown-new-numbers-reveal.html

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The impact of COVID may make it difficult to attract immigrants compared to other G7 countries, making it difficult to meet the targets set for 2024.

2021/02/04 Leave a comment

Howard Ramos, Dan Hiebert and I have been looking at COVID-19 impact on immigration (my last monthly update can be found here: https://multiculturalmeanderings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/covid-19-immigration-effects-key-slides-november-2020-draft-1.pdf).

One of the research questions we have is whether or not a country’s ability to manage or control COVID-19 will impact on its relative impact to potential immigrants. Out initial analysis is below, published in Policy Options (the updated slides can be found in the previous post):

Statistics tracking infections and deaths during the COVID pandemic show that Canada is faring better than all its G7 allies, save for Japan. Yet, it is doing far worse than the top five immigration source countries that it draws newcomers from. Canada cannot assume that it looks as attractive as it once did to newcomers, suggesting that it may be time to act proactively to meet ambitious immigration targets.

In October, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marco Mendicino made an ambitious announcement to bring 1.2 million newcomers to the Canada over the next three years. If it the country has a shot at meeting those targets, it cannot not sit back and simply expect those numbers to happen.

Immigration is driven by a complex set of push and pull factors that incentivises migration. Put simply, source countries have attributes that make life look more attractive abroad and host countries have features that attract newcomers. For instance, a weak economy or poorer quality of life at home compared to good jobs and good health abroad.

The lingering impact of the COVID-induced downturn is flipping traditional push and pull factors on their head. In past economic downturns and recessions, for example, recent immigrants suffer the most and this means we need to consider the inequalities that might get triggered by returning to recent levels (340,000 in 2019) too quickly, which the federal government’s plan largely ignores. This is not to mention how Canada’s health care system looks compared to other countries in addressing the pandemic.

The statistics may weaken the perceptions of potential immigrants of Western public health, social welfare programs and quality of life advantages. Take for instance COVID-19 infections-per-million from July to January 2021 as an example. If you look at the top-five immigrant-source countries to Canada (India, China, Philippines, Nigeria and Pakistan) all have far lower rates of infection than the G7 which are among the countries that compete with Canada for newcomers.

Although there may be undercounting of COVID infections and deaths in non-Western countries, rates would have to be five or more times higher to change the trends we report here. We do not believe such issues are significant enough to change the overall picture that rates in G7 countries are among the highest in the world.

Rates of infection can be taken as a proxy of a number of factors. They reflect the strength of a country’s social welfare system, its healthcare system and the quality of life it can offer newcomers. Polling of immigrants to Canada time and time again show that quality of life is a reason people move to the country and it is also seen in polling on specific regions, such as Nova Scotia. Rates of infection put this all into question.

The situation is even more stark when looking at deaths-per-million over the same period in 2020. Again Canada’s top immigrant source countries all have lower rates of death compared to the G7. On this front, again, Canada tends to look better than its G7 allies. But when regions of the country are examined in more depth, Quebec has worse outcomes than other immigrant destinations and has some of the highest death rates in the world.

https://e.infogram.com/3bb049d7-ee59-4cde-b209-ed8f1edbacce?parent_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpolicyoptions.irpp.org%2Fmagazines%2Ffebruary-2021%2Fwill-the-pandemic-make-canada-less-attractive-to-newcomers-2%2F&src=embed#async_embed

The degree to which Canada is to vaccinate may also become a factor, given its sluggish start compared to the UK and U.S. but higher than immigration source countries. Such statistics put into question whether traditional immigration destinations can offer the quality-of-life immigrants seek and this may change mix of the push and pull factors that drove migration before the pandemic.

https://e.infogram.com/7176996e-d1b1-406e-b337-d32fd0bf9c85?parent_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpolicyoptions.irpp.org%2Fmagazines%2Ffebruary-2021%2Fwill-the-pandemic-make-canada-less-attractive-to-newcomers-2%2F&src=embed#async_embed

The statistics put into question the ability of the West to offer strong public health and social welfare safety nets. Dampened perceptions of the West’s advantage will likely impact the speed at which countries recover from the pandemic, the pace at which they can get their economies back to speed and thus their relative attractiveness to immigrants.

In this context, the federal and provincial governments may well need to revise immigration targets downward, at least in 2021. The mix may also need to be revisited given that the economic immigration streams prioritize the higher skilled where one lesson from the pandemic is the essential nature of lower-skilled service jobs. At the same time, Canada’s attractiveness compared to the U.S. will likely decline under the Biden administration, which is of particular importance to the tech sector.

The government cannot take for granted that the push and pull factors that drove migration before COVID will remain the same in the new normal. Instead, Canada needs to act boldly and proactively if it has a chance to returning to being a key player in attracting newcomers.

Source: https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2021/will-the-pandemic-make-canada-less-attractive-to-newcomers-2/

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

COVID-19 Immigration Effects: Some early data

2020/06/30 Leave a comment

I have been working with Dan Hiebert of UBC and Howard Ramos of UWO on a project to understand the short and medium term effects of COVID-19 on immigration (permanent and temporary residents), settlement services and citizenship.

Pending the specialized operational data sets from IRCC, we have been looking at the publicly available numbers on open data.

This deck highlights the dramatic impact as noted by others but with more detail.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewlgriffith_covid-19-immigration-effects-key-slides-activity-6682724191990530049-ms5k

We plan to update and refine this each month, with greater analysis and depth once we have the specialized datasets.

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Howard Ramos: #Immigration to Canada May Not Return to Pre-Pandemic Levels

2020/06/20 Leave a comment

Good analysis and commentary by my friend, Howard Ramos, that asks some needed questions rather than assuming immigration will just bounce back, particularly the impact of Canada’s mixed handling of COVID-19 compared to immigration source countries:

After almost three months of lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada and other countries around the world are working to slowly re-open. As they do, immigration will be a key component to their economic recovery.

The question Canadian policymakers should be considering: will immigrants want to move and call Canada their new home? At the moment, it’s a theoretical question. However, a closer look at a number of trends suggests that a rebound in immigration to Canada is far from a guarantee.

A recent report by RBC underscores the extent to which the pandemic could derail Canada’s immigration-driven economy. With travel restricted and the pandemic still spreading in some parts of the world, quarantines and shutdowns are going to be a key part of the ‘new normal.’ The impact of closed borders and restricted movement on migration will not only interrupt movement but it will also create backlogs and other obstacles in immigration systems that most countries will have to wrestle with.

For Canada’s immigration levels to return to pre-COVID levels, Canadian governments will have to look beyond our borders to see how it has handled the pandemic relative to other countries.

Canada does not fare well compared to global counterparts

According to Worldometer, Canada ranks 17th worldwide in the most deaths per million, at 217, as of June 15, 2020. When this is broken down by region, as done by Andrew Griffith on the Multicultural Meanderings web site, death rates in Quebec are higher than the United States or Italy – and almost as high as the United Kingdom.

By this metric, Canada also does not fare well when it compares itself to the countries that are its most prominent sources of its immigrants. In 2019, the top 10 countries of citizenship of new permanent resident admissions to Canada were: India, China, Philippines, Pakistan, United States, Syria, Eritrea, South Korea, and Iran.

Among these, all but the United States had lower death rates, per million, from COVID-19 than Canada. And it wasn’t even close. China had a low of three deaths per million, while Iran had 107 deaths per million.

Policymakers would also be wise to consider that many of Canada’s hardest hit neighbourhoods by the pandemic were ones with a high concentration of recent immigrants. That reality undercuts many of the perceived advantages Canada presents to immigrants, such as its accessible and strong health care system or its quality of life.

When Canada is compared to other immigrant receiving countries such as Australia or New Zealand it does not fare well either. Australia ranks 129th in most deaths per million and New Zealand declared victory over the pandemic. Both managed the disease more efficiently and have a head start in reopening. As the world may experience a second or future waves of the pandemic, Canada does not look as attractive compared to competing immigrant receiving countries.

Multicultural ‘veneer’ tarnished by recent events

While Canada is recognized internationally for being open and multicultural, that veneer has been tarnished slightly by many reported incidents of anti-Asian discrimination. Polling shows that the majority of Canadians believe negative attitudes towards Asian-Canadians have increased since the pandemic and the Vancouver police report that anti-Asian hate crime has gone up in the city this year. Given that the top three source countries of newcomers last year were all Asian, this too makes the country less attractive.

The good news for Canada is that people have continued to apply for immigration and the country has continued processing applications during the pandemic. However, if the country aims to re-kindle its high level of immigration intake, it will need to reopen its borders. Canada cannot sit back and assume that people will want to come. Canadians will have to do the hard work of assuring newcomers that the country is indeed safe, healthy, and a welcoming place to build a future.

Source:  Immigration to Canada May Not Return to Pre-Pandemic Levels 

Filed under Immigration, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Being Counted in Canada’s Coronavirus Data, Ontario’s lack of diversity data for COVID-19 is an embarrassment

2020/04/17 Leave a comment

Two good commentaries on the lack of diversity data, starting with Howard Ramos of Dalhousie:

The lack of COVID-19 data on immigrants and racialized minorities collected and shared by Canada’s many layers of government could lead to health inequities.

Canada is not alone in having a data gap on immigrant and racialized groups. In the United States civil rights groups and doctors have called on its federal government to release demographic data on coronavirus infections.

Analysis that looks at the number of COVID-19 cases based on publicly available American data and census information shows that counties that are majority African-American have three times the rate of infection and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority. It is a trend that has raised alarm across American cities.

Understanding Canada-U.S. differences

Past research suggests, however, that Canadians should be cautious in reaching conclusions and not automatically assume that what takes place in the U.S. naturally holds true north of the border.

The ‘healthy immigrant effect’ debate, for instance, which shows that many newcomers to the country self-report better health than native-born Canadians may mean that immigrants, who are also largely racialized, may not follow the same patterns as seen in the U.S.

What is needed to answer that question, and many others, is access to quality data. And just like personal protective equipment – it is currently in short supply.

Part of the problem in capturing immigrants and racialized groups in health data rests with how they are captured. Health data is largely the domain of provinces and territories, leading to uneven data collection and reporting across them.

When asked if Ontario could offer insights on the pandemic’s impact on racialized communities, Dr. David Williams, the province’s chief medical officer of health, noted that “statistics based on race aren’t collected in Canada unless certain groups are found to have risk factors.”

Ironically, if data are not collected, one cannot tell if a group has risk factors to begin with. This could lead to health inequities for African-Canadian, Indigenous, racialized, and other new Canadians.

That scenario is a big reason why the African, Caribbean and Black Network of Waterloo Region recently launched a petition demanding that data on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status be collected and reported on.

Data gap flows all the way to Ottawa

The data-gap is also seen at the federal level too. For instance, the new and innovative crowd sourced survey on the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 run by Statistics Canada measures age and gender but not other demographic features. The same absence is also seen in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s ‘detailed confirmed cases of coronavirus disease’ data, which is hosted by Statistics Canada.

The detailed data does not provide geo-coding or additional information on the location of the cases which means that researchers cannot link it to census tracts or other geographic units to do the kinds of analysis that was done for American communities.

As a result, the maps offered through the interactive Canada’s COVID-19 Situational Awareness Dashboard are fairly coarse. In many cases, more detailed information can be found through non-governmental sites such as ViriHealth. But, once again, sociodemographic characteristics are not provided and the location data is where people are treated over where they live.

Lastly, once Canada begins to move towards recovery, Statistics Canada’s data on job loses and employment can report on immigrants and racialized groups. Much of this data is collected through the Labour Force survey, which is good news. It’s only logical that measures of health and wellbeing be captured with the same level of detail.

If there’s one thing silver lining to Canada’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s reinforcing the point that collecting data matters. It’s essential to insure that everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, is treated equally as citizens.

Source: newcanadianmedia.ca/being-counted-…

Secondly, the Ontario situation by Adam Kassam a Toronto-based physician:

The United States recently earned the unfortunate distinction of having the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, at more than 575,000. The true number of infected individuals, of course, is likely much higher given the lack of widespread and available testing.

But in that U.S. data, an alarming trend emerged: The coronavirus appeared to be disproportionately killing African-Americans. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a preliminary report suggesting that there were higher rates of hospital admissions and death among black Americans compared with other communities.

These revelations have intensified a nationwide conversation on the social determinants of health and the necessity to collect better data. The CDC report is far from comprehensive, which has led to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden calling on the organization to be more transparent by releasing more information. Even U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed concern, and instructed his African-American Surgeon-General, Dr. Jerome Adams, to formulate a federal response to address the problem.

This discourse about diversity data and its impact on racialized communities in the U.S. stands in sharp relief against the Canadian experience. Last week, Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, summarily dismissed calls for the collection of racial data. He asserts that statistics on race aren’t collected unless certain groups are found to have risk factors, and that “regardless of race, ethnic or other backgrounds, they’re all equally important to us.”

We have a problem in this country when Donald Trump sounds more progressive about racial disparities than our own public health officials. Imagine if our Chief Medical Officer of Health claimed that it wasn’t important to collect gender-based data? This would be a fireable offence. It is, therefore, inconceivable that this same official, in the country’s most diverse province, would willfully choose to effectively ignore the unique needs of the nearly four million visible minorities who call Ontario home.

This is the manifestation of structural and systemic biases that have been omnipresent within our medical community for generations. Canada’s poverty of diversity data has been an indefensible blind spot, both in terms of health care and in our educational institutions. It is the symptom of an insidious disease, whose current hallmark is a leadership that looks increasingly less like the communities which it serves.

How else could you explain the dearth of visible minorities in some of the top leadership roles in health care across Ontario? Public Health Ontario’s executive does not appear to include a single visible minority. A visible minority has never served as Ontario’s health minister. And because diversity data of this nature is not collected or made public, we don’t know how many deputy ministers of health, deans of medicine or chiefs of medical departments have represented diverse backgrounds.

In many ways, you only measure what you really care about. Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer has unfortunately made that very clear. Never mind that collecting race-based data wouldn’t be an onerous task; crucially, it is part of good science. Only by intentionally studying diverse populations have we learned that women experience certain health challenges, such as heart attacks, differently from men. In the same vein, disease has been shown to manifest differently for patients from different ethnic backgrounds. It is my belief that all people deserve to know the details of their lives and to know that their lives are worthy of study.

While we don’t know whether racial differences influence COVID-19′s effect on individuals, Canada should be invested in determining this definitively, instead of taking its cues from the World Health Organization.

Early reports from the U.S. have pointed to disadvantaged and marginalized groups – the poor, immigrant, black and brown communities – being more significantly affected, and this has prompted crucial scrutiny of the deep and enduring fault lines between the haves and have-nots. Yet we cannot have those conversations here, as we cannot know whether the U.S. data reflect Canada’s, even though just a border separates us.

In Canada, where we are quick to declare that diversity is our strength, we must now dispense with the empty platitudes and put our money where our mouth is. Our governments should openly commit to funding the collection and publication of diverse health data during and after this pandemic. Their explicit goal should be to create policy that improves the health care of all its citizens. What’s clear is that this ethos will only become a priority when our medical leadership more closely reflects the Canada of today.

Source: Ontario’s lack of diversity data for COVID-19 is an embarrassment: Adam Kassam

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Why the media loves the white racist story

2019/02/04 Leave a comment

Thoughtful discussion on how sometimes the focus on the individual provides a means to avoid some of the more uncomfortable discussions regarding systemic barriers:

Racism isn’t new and will not go away. What is new is the interest in pointing it out and calling out its perpetrators through both mainstream and social media. Especially white racists. What explains the need to do this? And why do incidents go viral so quickly?

Take for instance the case of Nick Sandmann, a white teenager from Kentucky whose picture and video many will have now seen. In a video, Sandmann is standing across from Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, who is holding a rawhide drum. Sandmann is smiling or smirking at Phillips. From the videos, we don’t know which it is.

What we do know is that Sandmann has been widely condemned for disrespecting Phillips. Sandmann was wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap. And many people believe wearing the MAGA cap proves that Sandmann is a racist.

Maybe, as everyone seems loathe to do, instead of asking whether Sandmann is a racist or not, we might ask another question: Why is there so much interest in this story?

Why are so many people interested in pointing out and shaming individual white racists? There have been dozens of these events highlighted on social and mainstream media this year. Here are a few of the incidents that went viral and sparked outrage: a video of Fort McMurray teens mocking Indigenous dance, another of a North Carolina woman’s racist rant and the racist tirade against a Muslim family at the Toronto Ferry Terminal.

Why are people less interested in calling out the systems that prime them to act in racist ways and foster lifelong inequities.

Easy targets

We think the reason lies in the fact that by pointing out other individual racists, people can feel good about themselves without actually doing very much. In this way, individuals do not need to question how they must change their lives to create the more just society they say they want.

White people can feel good about themselves because, unlike what is claimed about Sandmann, they probably aren’t overtly racist.

These days most people are not overtly or publicly racist. And being labelled a racist can lead to social stigma. The individual (who may or may not be white) racist and their story, however, provides easy answers and easy targets.

Structural racism and colonization are not seen as the problem. It also allows people to ignore broader trends, such as the recent rise of hate crimes. Instead the focus is often on the spectacle of the incident and the problem is pinned on just one individual or a group of individuals.

In the Sandmann case, many see the problem as the individual racist, not the context that created the MAGA movement.

Ignored in the process of labelling people racists and shaming them is that the shaming fails to condemn actions. Instead, it focuses on a single person. Condemning people gives them little room to change, grow or learn from their mistakes. Humility is needed on all sides.

The move to innocence

Pointing out and condemning individuals for their racism is popular because it exemplifies what scholars Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang would call a “move to innocence.” Moves to innocence are the rhetorical moves that people use to distance themselves from genocide and colonization.

Those who have privilege and power can just tell themselves that they are one of the “good ones” because they aren’t racist like the people in the videos.

In pointing out others as racist, people don’t then have to ask themselves difficult questions about their own privilege or do the work of fostering social humility. Those of the dominant society don’t have to think about the ways that they benefit from slavery, colonialism and land theft.

They don’t have to think about pipelines and stolen land. They don’t have to think. They can just point.

If we want to move forward, we need to stop taking an aggressive punitive approach to individual racism. This only divides the right and the left. No side is “innocent” when it comes to discrimination or colonization.

Source: Why the media loves the white racist story 

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,