Provincial immigration applicants in Canada see soaring processing times. They say the system is unfair

2025/04/08 Leave a comment

More fall-out from the needed policy reversals:

…Sangha is among many economic immigrants selected and nominated by individual provinces for permanent residence, who are caught up in processing delays; that’s largely because the federal government cut the number of new permanent residents for 2025 by 25 per cent to 395,000 and reduced it further in the next two years.

The provincial immigration nomination program was one of the biggest casualties, with its allocated spaces halved to 55,000 in 2025, 2026 and 2027. 

Apart from putting newcomers’ lives in limbo, it was a big blow for a program whose aim is to settle economic immigrants outside of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to places where their skills are needed.

The federal cuts are “one of the factors that’s suppressing the issuance of the actual PR (permanent residence) and the increase of the processing times,” said Calgary immigration lawyer Mark Holthe, on behalf of the Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the provinces reached deals with Ottawa and started their respective nomination programs to recruit immigrants for local workforce needs. (Quebec has had its own special agreement to select its own immigrants.)

Applicants are screened and then referred to the federal Immigration Department for permanent residence processing. Newcomers are to remain in the province that nominate them.

The current delay in processing provincial immigration applications is only affecting nominees who apply under the “non-express entry” streams, which are not prioritized by federal officials.

Sangha, who came here in 2022 and works in IT for a petroleum company, said it’s unfair that he has to wait 21 months for processing when it takes just seven months for those in the express entry streams….

Source: Provincial immigration applicants in Canada see soaring processing times. They say the system is unfair

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Provinces warn Ottawa slashing immigration program in half will hurt economy

2025/01/25 Leave a comment

As noted in many of my posts, the provinces were complicit with the federal government, business and colleges and universities in the excessive growth of permanent and temporary residents without considering the practicalities of housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

The federal government has told most provinces and territories they must cut their allotted spaces for economic immigration programs by half this year, triggering concerns about drastic impacts on labour and the economy.

The provincial nominee programs (PNPs) are used by all provinces and territories except Quebec and Nunavut. All 11 jurisdictions with PNP slots have been told they will receive a 50 per cent reduction for 2025.

“We are quite reliant on that program. Our employers are quite reliant on the program,” Drew Wilby, Saskatchewan’s deputy immigration minister, told CBC News. “Obviously it’s our key driver of economic immigration.”

Saskatchewan’s share of the program will be cut to 3,625 spots, its lowest number since 2009. Wilby says the province wasn’t consulted about the cuts before they were announced.

The move is part of an overall cut to immigration targets. Ottawa announced in October it would cut the projected number of new permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025, down from 485,000. It’s planning further cuts to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027.

The PNPs target workers who have the skills to contribute to the economy of a specific province or territory and want to become permanent residents in Canada. Each province and territory has its own streams and requirements.

In a statement sent to CBC News, a spokesperson for Ontario’s Immigration Department said the reductions undermine “the province’s ability to meet employer demands and support economic growth.”…

Source: Provinces warn Ottawa slashing immigration program in half will hurt economy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Ontario missing strategy to match immigration to labour market needs: auditor

2024/12/06 Leave a comment

Of note but not surprising as once in Canada, immigrants like all people will pursue what appears be be best for them, whether in terms of economics or social and family considerations. Auditor recommendations for better data on where they end up make sense, allowing for further analysis and understanding of their reasons:

Immigrants nominated for permanent residency under Ontario’s provincial program aren’t always going to the regions or sectors that need them the most, a new auditor general report found.

The observation was made by Auditor General Shelley Spence in the audit of the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program (OINP) included in her 2024 annual report, which was released on Tuesday.

According to the report, about 37 per cent of nominees with job offers intended to settle outside of the Greater Toronto Area between 2019 and 2023.

Of those, only about three per cent of job-offer nominees landed in Northern Ontario.

“The ministry does not have an overall strategy towards a needs-based distribution of nominees across the province and particularly to regions outside of the GTA,” the auditor wrote, adding that one of OINP’s objectives is to “spread the benefits of immigration to all parts of the province and help address Ontario’s labour market needs.”

Spence noted that other provinces and the federal government have mechanisms to encourage immigration into less populated areas.

For instance, the federal government launched the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot “to boost economic immigration to smaller communities and provide a pathway for skilled foreign workers to gain permanent residency,” she wrote.

Five of the 11 participating communities are in Northern Ontario — North Bay, Sudbury, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay — and, as of Dec. 31, 2023, almost 4,600 permanent residents across Canada had come through this pilot, Spence found.

Spence did outline a number of programs launched by the Doug Ford government meant to encourage nominees to settle outside of the GTA, like higher scoring for those with offers elsewhere and a two-year regional pilot to bring 300 nominees to Chatham-Kent, Cornwall and Quinte West/Belleville communities.

The pilot resulted in 147 OINP nominations. However, the auditor said, “No follow-up was conducted to see how successful the individuals were in these communities, or if they continue to reside in these communities.”

The government should also look at specific labour demands in those regions, which are different from those in the GTA, the auditor suggested. Nominations have not helped address the increasing job vacancies for registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses in central Ontario, she noted.

The report said that within the five-year analysis period, there were 1,730 nursing vacancies in Central Ontario and 11 OINP nominations.

The auditor recommends collecting information on intended settlement locations for all nominee streams and monitoring progress toward regional targets. The government has accepted this recommendation and pledged to “work to integrate available and reliable regional labour market data into our targets where possible.”

Source: Ontario missing strategy to match immigration to labour market needs: auditor

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Canadian provinces in open competition for economic immigrants

2024/07/24 Leave a comment

Summary of interesting research:

At a time of widespread labor shortages, the competition to attract and retain skilled immigrants isn’t just between countries; Canada’s provinces are also competing against each other. Catherine Xhardez, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal who studies immigration policy, discussed the trend in a talk on June 6 at the Forum sur l’intégration 2024 in Montreal.

Based on her recent study titled “‘Stand by me’: competitive subnational regimes and the politics of retaining immigrants,” Xhardez examined the strategies used by the provinces to attract, select and above all retain economic immigrants.

The work is published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

More immigration powers

While Quebec was the first province to gain increased powers over immigration, the other provinces quickly followed suit. Under bilateral agreements with the federal government, they now have significant powers, particularly over economic immigration.

“Of all the federated entities in the world, Canada’s provinces have the greatest say in immigration matters,” Xhardez said. “They have used their autonomy to develop policies for attracting, recruiting, selecting and receiving immigrants, as well as distribution strategies to spread newcomers across their territory.”

The instrument most frequently used by provinces to attract economic immigrants is the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), which lets them directly select a significant portion of their skilled immigrants. In some cases, up to 90% of a province’s economic immigrants have been selected through the PNP.

After these targeted selection efforts, however, provinces face a major challenge in retaining the immigrants they have selected.

“Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, immigrants enjoy the same freedom of movement as Canadian citizens, with some qualifications, and can therefore change province at will,” Xhardez noted.

Varying retention rates

The data Xhardez gathered by reviewing provincial documents published between 2005 and 2022 and 63 economic immigration programs show significant interprovincial differences in retention five years after arrival.

British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta lead the way with retention rates of 86%, 85% and 83% respectively (5-year rates), all immigrant categories). At the other end of the scale, some Atlantic provinces struggle to hold onto immigrants: New Brunswick retains 50%, Newfoundland and Labrador 46%, and Prince Edward Island 31%.

Taking local ties into account

To maximize their chances of retaining economic immigrants, the provinces apply specific selection criteria, using PNPs not only as tools for attraction and selection but also as levers for retention.

Xhardez divides the provinces’ actions on this front into four categories:

  • Adaptability factors: Applicants are favored if they already have family, professional or educational ties to the province.
  • Demonstrated intent and ability to settle permanently: Some provinces, such as Manitoba, require proof of ties to the local community.
  • Detailed settlement plan: Applicants may be required to provide a concrete integration plan, including points such as place of residence and education for their children.
  • Exclusion criteria: Candidates may be rejected if, for example, they reside in another province or own property in another province.

These practices give rise to a new selection criterion: According to Xhardez, the “ideal migrant” is no longer just someone who has the required professional skills but also someone who shows a strong commitment to the host province.

“It remains to be seen whether these policies work in the long term and we need a better understanding of immigrants’ trajectories,” she said. There are, she noted, other factors that can influence the decision to stay in a province or leave.

Major financial and societal challenges

The importance that Canadian provinces attach to retaining economic immigrants “is due to the provinces’ investments and efforts in both attracting and integrating newcomers,” Xhardez observed. “The departure of an immigrant to another province is therefore a net loss for the original host province.”

Beyond the financial considerations, these retention strategies raise questions about the balance between the provinces’ economic needs and immigrants’ right to mobility. They also highlight the challenges of long-term integration of newcomers and building a sense of belonging.

“As the competition for talent intensifies, Canadian provinces continue to refine their approaches,” said Xhardez. “The effectiveness of these policies and their impact on the country’s demographic and economic distribution will remain subjects of study and debate in the years to come.”

Source: Canadian provinces in open competition for economic immigrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Yukonomist: The future of the Yukon’s low-wage immigration program

2024/07/09 Leave a comment

Good analysis of how one jurisdiction is focussing its Provincial Nominee Program on the lower skilled and paid:

Last month’s pause in the Yukon Nominee Program highlights a classic trade-off.

On one hand, the Yukon government wants to help Yukon businesses import workers to fill labour shortages. Without fresh workers, businesses would have to jack up wages — digging sharply into profits — to lure workers away from government or other employers. Some businesses would have to shrink or close.

On the other hand, the government also wants to help Yukon workers get higher wages as housing and food prices spiral.

The Yukon Nominee Program brings fresh labour to the Yukon as follows. The feds tell the Yukon they will give us so many spots for foreign workers to come to the Yukon under certain conditions. The Yukon government then takes applications from local employers.

This year we get 430 spots. Remarkably, that’s about seven times more than Ontario on a per-resident basis.

There are four streams: critical impact workers, skilled workers, Express Entry and Yukon Community Program. There are complicated rules categorizing workers and eligibility. For example, “skilled workers” requires the job to be in National Occupation Classification category TEER 0-3; bakers are an example. “Critical impact workers” are in categories TEER 4-5, such as landscapers and retail sales people.

There are also wage restrictions, but they are limited. Employers must pay at least the Yukon minimum wage, and the job’s annual income must exceed Statistics Canada’s Low Income Cut Off. For a single person in 2022, this was $20,333 per year.

The program hit the news recently when the premier put a pause on accepting new applications from employers in Whitehorse, since the territory has already received 590 applications for this year’s 430 spots.

The Yukon government will prioritize existing applications in four waves: work permit holders with approaching expirations, visitor visa holders already in Canada, work permit holders with expirations within a year and workers outside Canada.

An economist would note that these criteria have nothing to do with economic value. A skilled mining engineer in India who would make big bucks and pay lots of taxes would be at the bottom of the list.

Where you stand on all this depends, as the cliché says, on where you sit.

Suppose you own a labour-intensive small business. In this case, the nominee program is critical to keeping wage costs down and finding staff to keep the operation humming. Otherwise, with our labour shortage, wages might have to rise dramatically to attract Canadians already working to leave other jobs and come work for you.

This would eat into profits, and probably require closing some unprofitable locations.

At the other end of the spectrum, workers do not want to be competing with imported labour in the job market.

If you are neither an owner nor a low-wage worker, you probably enjoy the lower prices that low-wage workers enable at shops and restaurants.

In the old days, before left-versus-right economic issues were overshadowed in our politics by culture war conflicts, you might have expected all of this to be a big political issue pitting unions and social justice groups against chambers of commerce.

However, we have a centre-left government in the Yukon, backed by the NDP, running the nominee program. It seems strange to write this, but if a Martian political economist beamed down they would say there appears to be a broad political consensus in the Yukon behind importing hundreds of low-wage workers each year to keep wages at the bottom end of the wage spectrum lower than they would be otherwise, even during a housing shortage.

One reason for this is that the nominee program was overshadowed for many years by Canada’s traditional immigration program. This “points-based” system has broad support and has served the country well. In this system, foreign applicants earn points based on their youth, education, job experience and language skills. It serves to admit immigrants who can contribute quickly and substantially to the economy, even though there are ongoing issues with immigrants getting their skills recognized here.

The use of the nominee program for workers at or just above the minimum-wage level contradicts this logic. People used to talk about it as a temporary fix for episodic labour shortages, but now it is an ongoing feature of our labour market.

Some economists debating Canada’s poor productivity performance have hypothesized that such programs — by boosting the supply of low-wage workers — have disincentivized business investment in labour-saving technology.

I have seen this framed best by Harald Eia, the Norwegian equivalent of comedian-pundit John Oliver. In his segment “Rich and Equal,” Eia compares car washes in Norway and the United States. In Florida, he says, your car is washed by a team of people who are not paid very much. In Norway, you don’t see a human as you tap your card and drive through an automated car wash.

Union agreements cover much more of the economy in Norway than in Canada. Eia says these tend to have high minimum-wage floors, and have for years been pushing Norwegian employers to invest in automation.

Despite this, Norway currently has a lower unemployment rate than the Yukon.

Meanwhile, Germany has made a major revamp of its immigration policy to attract more skilled workers. If your job pays at least $60,300 (Canadian), then a wide range of occupations such as nurses, tech workers, teachers and engineers can be fast tracked. This also applies to recent university graduates who have a job offer above that amount.

If the Yukon Nominee Program switched to this system, the impact would be dramatic. Tax revenues would go up as higher-paid immigrants paid more income tax. Wages would rise at the lower end of the scale, forcing business owners to raise their prices and close some locations.

That kind of change would be too shocking to do all at once. But the Yukon government could raise the floor wages for the program and prioritize applications by economic contribution rather than freezing out nurses and engineers stuck in the government’s low-priority bucket for the rest of the year.

Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.

Souùrce: Yukonomist: The future of the Yukon’s low-wage immigration program

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

An Ottawa-Ontario turf war hobbled efforts to bring in skilled workers. Here’s what ended it

2023/03/23 Leave a comment

Of interest:

Around the world, ideology drives the politics of immigration by pushing people apart.

Across Canada, geography drives a deeper wedge between rival governments in Ottawa and at Queen’s Park.

Over the past decade, an undeclared turf war has hobbled Ontario’s attempt to recruit skilled workers. The federal government refused to give Canada’s biggest province a significant say in who came here.

Now, Ontario is finally getting a bigger role in selecting skilled immigrants. And Ottawa has belatedly declared peace in our time.

Just in time.

This month, a federal Liberal cabinet minister and his Progressive Conservative counterpart in Ontario agreed to double the skilled immigrants selected by the province for rapid resettlement, matching workers with work. By 2025, Ontario will get to select 18,000 skilled workers, primarily in the health-care, construction and hi-tech fields ― up from 9,000 in 2021 and just 1,000 a decade ago.

How did it happen?

The rise of inflation, the risk of recession, and the recurrence of labour shortages forced Canada’s two biggest governments, at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill, to work together after years of talking past each other.

But it’s not just the economic environment. The political climate has also brought the rival governments together to collaborate.

Two erstwhile enemies, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford, now meet almost monthly to cut cheques and cut ribbons for new factory investments. Against that backdrop of bonhomie, Monte McNaughton, one of Ontario’s most politically astute cabinet ministers, went one step further to bridge the partisan divide with his federal counterpart.

As the province’s minister of labour, McNaughton has long been a linchpin of Ford’s outreach strategy with union leaders. But he also has special responsibility for immigration and training, so when Sean Fraser was sworn in as the federal minister two years ago, McNaughton quickly texted an old pal to get his phone number.

That pal was Katie Telford, the PM’s chief of staff, with whom McNaughton has kept in touch since they served together as teenage pages in the legislature. Armed with Fraser’s number, McNaughton disarmed the new Liberal minister by dropping Telford’s name ― proof that he could work across ideological and geographical lines.

“I got his number from Katie and got ahold of him,” McNaughton told me this week. “I said to him, ‘This is not about politics whatsoever. We have a serious challenge in terms of the labour shortage … so let’s grow the numbers and actually do something that is going to make a meaningful difference on the ground.’”

They’ve been talking and texting ever since ― without political aides, without bureaucratic advisers, just the two of them. They started far apart, because the inherited challenge wasn’t just about bipartisanship but bilateralism.

Historically, the federal government was accustomed to unilateral action while Ontario contented itself with inaction. By contrast, Quebec had led the way decades ago, winning shared jurisdiction on immigration on the strength of its special French-language needs; meanwhile, Western provinces had quietly persuaded Ottawa to let them select thousands of immigrants to meet local labour market needs amid growing economies.

Ontario had never bothered to ask in the past. As the jobs went West, so did the talent.

A decade ago, seven out of 10 immigrants to Western provinces were in the “economic” class, compared to barely half of those coming to Ontario. By the time Queen’s Park woke up to that reality, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in Ottawa were unwilling to help.

“We’re not interested in devolving services to the junior level of government,” then-immigration minister Jason Kenney told me at the time.

Now, with the roles reversed ― there’s a federal Liberal minister in Ottawa, while his Ontario counterpart is a PC ― the roadblocks have been removed and a back channel reopened.

“I give full credit to Fraser,” McNaughton said in our interview. “We were more desperate than other provinces from a labour shortage perspective. We were receiving, as a percentage, less (skilled nominees) than any other province in the country.”

For his part, Fraser says he never saw it as a turf battle. The economic stakes are too high for political grudges or bureaucratic games.

A mismatched labour market “is one of the challenges that keeps me up at night,” Fraser told me at a recent Democracy Forum at Toronto Metropolitan University (where he also talked about crossing party lines to get advice from ex-PM Brian Mulroney).

If workers end up in the wrong regions for the wrong jobs, while skilled jobs are going begging in businesses elsewhere, all Canadians will pay the price of a delayed recovery and missed opportunity, he argued.

“I think this was a unique opportunity for us to increase (Ontario’s) provincial nominee program levels,” Fraser said at the TMU event I co-hosted last week, adding coyly: “Before too long we’re going to show up in Ontario.”

Days later, both ministers did indeed show up in Toronto to announce their landmark agreement. Ontario’s biggest employers promptly hailed the deal as an economic breakthrough that ruptures previous roadblocks.

Despite the doubling of the program, the new numbers are still small and the progress largely symbolic. But it is a strategic first step.

Immigration always has the potential to drive people apart. Consider the continuing tumult in the U.S. and U.K.

Yet two Canadian cabinet ministers quietly came together, in a bipartisan and bilateral way. They tried to work it out, so that the economics would turn out better for workers and workplaces alike.

Small numbers, yes. But no small feat.

Source: An Ottawa-Ontario turf war hobbled efforts to bring in skilled workers. Here’s what ended it

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

Diane Francis: Provinces need more say over immigration

2022/08/31 Leave a comment

Immigration is shared federal-provincial jurisdiction. So legitimate to support provincial calls for increases in the Provincial Nominee Program, less legitimate to request a Quebec deal (which, in any case, only applies to the economic class).
But Francis can’t resist the cheap shot on the current government, despite the government having dramatically increased immigration levels and largely maintained the proportion of economic immigrants at close to 60 percent of the total and thus her assertion that immigration “has been skewed toward family reunification and other politically motivated goals, not toward helping this country meet its economic goals” is false.
That being said, her praise of Ontario Minister McNaughton’s measures to improve credential recognition is well warranted:
In Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Canada, politics outweigh good policies, especially when it comes to immigration. For instance, Trudeau has ratcheted immigration goals up to 400,000 a year, but hasn’t made a dent in terms of overcoming Canada’s skilled labour shortages.
Nearly 37 per cent of all businesses say they’re facing a shortage of skilled workers. This is because our immigration system has been skewed toward family reunification and other politically motivated goals, not toward helping this country meet its economic goals.

Source: Diane Francis: Provinces need more say over immigration

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Canadian immigration ministers agree on multi-year PNP levels plan

2022/07/30 Leave a comment

Good initiative. Now the haggling over multi-year levels can begin :).

Seriously, same planning logic that led feds to multi-year planning to assist settlement agencies and others also applies at the provincial level:

The Forum of Ministers Responsible (FMRI) for Immigration met in Saint John, New Brunswick on July 28 to discuss a host of major immigration policy issues.

Topics on the agenda included Canada’s Immigration Levels Plan, a more agile economic immigration system, regional economic immigration, settlement, and refugees resettlement.

The big takeaway is that Canada’s immigration ministers agreed to develop a multi-year Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) allocation plan. Currently, even though Canada sets its permanent residence targets over a three-year period, PNP allocations are determined on an annual basis. Moving forward, the ministers agreed that PNP allocation targets will also be set on a three-year basis. The ministers agreed to determine the multi-year PNP plan by March 31, 2023.

The FMRI is comprised of Canada’s federal, provincial, and territorial immigration ministers. They meet each year to discuss immigration issues of national importance. The FMRI is a decision-making body with the goal of supporting a flexible, timely, and effective immigration system for Canada.

Canada’s Immigration Minister Sean Fraser added in the post-meeting press conference that there is no certainty at the moment on the precise numbers on the increased PNP allocations for each province and territory. The reason, he said, is the federal government needs to have follow-up conversations with provinces and territories to ensure they have the settlement capacity necessary to welcome more newcomers.

The rationale for a multi-year PNP plan is similar to why Canada re-introduced a multi-year Immigration Levels Plan back in 2017. The rationale for the Immigration Levels Plan 2018-2020, and subsequent plans, has been to allow stakeholders including government, the settlement sector, and employers the ability to plan in advance for higher immigration levels. Canada is now guided by the Immigration Levels Plan 2022-2024 and Minister Fraser is set to table the 2023-2025 plan by November 1st of this year.

At present, Canada’s PNP targets over a three-year period are contained in the levels plan. However, each province and territory’s PNP allocation is set on an annual basis. The federal immigration minister sends a letter to their provincial and territorial counterparts each year with their respective allocation, typically in the first quarter of the calendar year.

However, the country’s immigration ministers have now agreed that by the end of March 2023, the federal minister will inform each province and territory of their PNP allocation over a three-year period. This will allow each province and territory to plan ahead, including identifying how to best use their allocation to achieve their economic development goals, as well as to identify what operational steps they need to take to be able to process PNP applications as efficiently as possible. As a province or territory’s PNP allocation increases, they need to ensure they have enough staff and the requisite technology in place to process higher PNP volumes within their service standards.

The PNP has grown in prominence since it was introduced in 1998 to promote a broader distribution of immigration across Canada. Prior to its introduction, most immigrants settled in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, which made it challenging for the Atlantic and Prairie provinces to support their economic development through immigration. The PNP only contributed to about 400 new immigrant arrivals in 1999, but it is now set to welcome over 80,000 new immigrants in 2022 and over 90,000 by 2024. The PNP, next to the federal Express Entry system, is among the two major pathways for economic class immigrants to land in Canada.

The post-meeting press release noted the immigration ministers also discussed assisting Afghan refugees, supporting Ukrainians, improving application processing times, taking steps to strengthen public support for immigration in Canada, among other topics.

Source: Canadian immigration ministers agree on multi-year PNP levels plan

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Congress Can’t Solve Immigration. Maybe the States Can.

2021/09/03 Leave a comment

Seeing more arguments in US media regarding providing a role for states in selecting immigrants, citing Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program as a model. Given the political dynamics, hard to see this getting much traction as presume there would need to be legislative authority for such a change:

“A moral failing and a national shame.” During his 2020 campaign, that was how Joe Biden characterized America’s immigration policies in the Trump era. On his first day in office, the new president announced an ambitious reform. The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 would include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It would raise caps on legal immigration. It would increase aid for Central America. It touched all the progressive erogenous zones.

And it was dead on arrival. “It’s such a progressive wish list that it’s almost counterproductive,” a pro-immigration lobbyist told me. By summer, the reform effort had stalled, migrants were flooding the border, the Democrats were divided, and the Republicans were demagoguing. Just like always.

For the country, as well as for immigrants and their families and employers, the cost of our never-ending immigration crisis has been very high. Among its consequences was the presidency of Donald Trump, who could not have reached the White House without the disruptive energy that immigration unleashed. In fact, if you had to pick a date when America launched itself toward Trumpism, June 28, 2007, would be a good choice.

Immigration was on the floor of the Senate. A bipartisan coalition had revived what was then—and still is—the logical compromise: stricter controls at the borders and at job sites, more legal immigration (especially of skilled workers), and a path to citizenship. Had the compromise passed, “it would have changed the politics,” Jim Kolbe, who was then a House Republican representing an Arizona border district, recently told me. “It would have been seen as putting the immigration issue behind us.”

Instead, the bill failed, badly. A disappointed Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, said, “I had hoped for a bipartisan accomplishment, and what we got was a bipartisan defeat.”

Before 2007, immigration had been a controversial issue but also a normal one—susceptible to bargaining and compromise. Congress had passed major reform under President Ronald Reagan in 1986, and then a series of tune-ups in the ’90s. After 2007, paralysis set in. For conservatives, the stalemate became emblematic of the country’s inability to secure its borders and enforce its laws. For liberals, it was emblematic of the country’s inability to deal humanely with millions of immigrants. And for moderates, it was a symbol of congressional incompetence. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of the public wants a pathway to citizenship and better border control. “Everyone knows what has to be done,” Kolbe told me, “but no one has the will to do it.”

This dispute has now inflamed our whole body politic. “I think the immigration debate is a bigger problem for the country than any of the failures of the immigration system,” Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. In other words, the country needs a resolution to the political crisis around immigration at least as much as it needs a solution to the policy mess. As long as voters believe Washington is too incompetent and venal to handle immigration, they will not trust it to do anything else, and the door will stay open to demagogues and nihilists.

So now what? Plan A, comprehensive progressive reform, will not work. Plan B, comprehensive conservative reform, will not work. Plan C, compromise, should work but has failed time and again. That leaves Plans D, E, and F: piecemeal reforms for groups such as “Dreamers” and farmworkers, and the kinds of patchwork changes that congressional Democrats were seeking to include in their budget-reconciliation package this fall. They may be the best we can do.

But there is one piecemeal proposal that deserves special attention. I think of it as Plan Z, because it reframes the whole problem.

In 2019, representative John Curtis, a Republican from Utah, introduced what he called the State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act. It would have allowed a new avenue for immigration by authorizing states to sponsor people for three-year, renewable work visas. The bill found no co-sponsors and never came up for debate, but Curtis told me he intends to reintroduce it in the current Congress.

Delegating immigration authority to the states is not a new concept; Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a similar plan in 2017. According to Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, bills seeking authority to issue work visas have been introduced in 11 state legislatures since 2008, and three such bills have been voted into law. But the federal government has ignored them.

One problem is that people just can’t get their mind around letting someone other than the federal government decide who comes and stays. You can’t have individual states picking immigrants for the whole country! What about security? What about fairness? Could a conservative state discriminate on the grounds of, say, race or religion?

But the idea is not really that dramatic. This proposal wouldn’t encroach on the existing federal systems for visas, refugees, or family reunification. Any state-sponsored work permits would be in addition to the current number. The federal government would still vet the applications and control permanent residency and citizenship. Federal law and the Constitution would still forbid discrimination.

When I asked Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, in Indiana, and a former Republican governor of the state, whether policy makers there would participate in such a program, he replied with a prompt yes. “The one thing” keeping Indiana from economic competitiveness, he said, “is that we don’t have enough people with the right skills.” Besides, he added, universities and businesses can already sponsor immigrants for visas; why shouldn’t states have the same authority?

how would state-sponsored visas work? In Curtis’s 2019 version, every state would have the option of sponsoring 5,000 work visas a year, plus an additional allotment based on its population, up to a nationwide total of 500,000. No state would be obligated to sponsor anyone, so states could shut their doors if they chose to. They could favor tech workers, farmworkers, family members; they could even use their visas to temporarily legalize undocumented workers already living there. The only requirements would be that the visas couldn’t be employer-specific (so bosses couldn’t use them to blackmail workers with deportation threats) and that the immigrants holding them live and work in the state that sponsored them.

How would the plan prevent immigrants from moving out of state? Each state would be required to report where its visa holders live and work, and if it couldn’t account for them, it would lose visas the next year. States that administered their programs well would be rewarded with more visas.

In any case, immigrants who settle into jobs and communities are not all that inclined to move. In Canada, which has allowed its provinces to sponsor immigrants since 1996 and which does not restrict where visa holders reside, more than 80 percent of them stay put for more than 10 years. “The vast majority,” a government report on the program said in 2017, “have become established economically, with high employment rates and earnings that increase over time.”

Even if this system isn’t perfect, the politics would be healthier than at present, when the federal government is making decisions, or nondecisions, and the states have no voice. “We’ve been so wrapped around the axle on immigration law and policy for so long that it might be very constructive to look at it through a different lens,” Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona and secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration, told me. “Maybe it avoids some of the hard lines that both sides have drawn.”

State-sponsored immigration is not a cure-all. It would not remedy Congress’s deficiencies or resolve difficult questions about border control, asylum, or citizenship. What it would do is make American communities feel that they have some influence. It might dispel the rancid air that has suffocated reform. And it might begin to free our national politics from the curse of immigration gridlock.

Jonathan Rauch is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Source: Congress Can’t Solve Immigration. Maybe the States Can.

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Alberta government considering immigration changes during pandemic

2020/05/25 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see what changes he proposes with respect to Alberta’s Provincial Nominee Program as well as how he informs the overall debate around post-pandemic immigration policy:

Premier Jason Kenney says changes are coming to Alberta’s immigration practices as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Although the government won’t yet release details, the premier said the province can accommodate fewer newcomers as a result of global travel restrictions and Alberta’s economic crisis. He made the comments during a Facebook live video question and answer session on Wednesday night.

He said the government will push Alberta employers to “do everything they possibly can to look within Alberta to the huge and growing number of unemployed people” when hiring.

A formal policy announcement should come within weeks, a government spokesperson said Thursday.

However, immigration lawyers cautioned any rapid changes to immigration rules could have unintended consequences.

Although business prospects are rough right now, Calgary lawyer Evelyn Ackah said they will bounce back. When they do, they’re going to need immigrants to do the jobs Canadians just won’t do, she said.

Few Canadians apply for jobs in slaughterhouses or at fast-food restaurants, lawyers say.

Ackah said as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, prospective immigrants are contacting her from China and India. They’re interested in buying and running businesses in Canada. Those job creators are who the province should be attracting, she said.

“Quick changes, boom boom boom, they have long repercussions and it takes a long time to resolve, and so, I really want to not let this crisis change the direction and the trajectory of immigration’s process,” she said.

Limited provincial control

With immigration being federal jurisdiction, there are limited steps Alberta’s government could take to curtail newcomers, said Megan Dawson, a partner at McCuaig Durocher in Edmonton.

The Alberta Immigrant Nominee Program allows the provincial government to select immigrants who are already working temporarily in Alberta to apply for permanent resident status if their skills and education fill an economic need in the province.

It’s a joint program with the federal and provincial government. In 2019, the province sponsored 6,000 immigrants through the program. From January 2015 to March 2020, nearly 50,000 people came to Alberta through the program, said Adrienne South, press secretary to the minister of labour and immigration.

The nominated immigrants are a fraction of the more than 232,000 people who became Canadian permanent residents during the same time period and intended to live in Alberta.

The federal government controls the admission of temporary foreign workers, refugees and other express entry newcomers, Dawson said.

Employers must often recruit workers with specialized knowledge and skills when people with the right training can’t be found in the province, she said.

Those economic immigrants often train Albertans and help companies create new jobs for locals, she said.

Alberta has a list of workers it doesn’t need, including teachers, actors, athletes and real estate agents. Dawson said the province could potentially expand that list of categories.

“There already are safeguards in place to show, that we did our best to hire Canadians for this job first,” she said.

“I think the ramifications could be potentially unintended or unexpected in a negative sense for some Alberta businesses if they’re not able to staff their business with foreign workers.”

Source: Alberta government considering immigration changes during pandemic

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

← Older posts