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

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No avoiding it now: Immigration issues threaten Biden’s climate program

2023/03/09 Leave a comment

Interesting linkage and take:

President Joe Biden’s plan for greening the economy relies on a simple pitch: It will create good-paying jobs for Americans.

The problem is there might not be enough Americans to fill them. That reality is pressuring the Biden administration to wrestle with the nation’s immigration system to avoid squandering its biggest legislative achievements.

“There’s no question that addressing our broken immigration system in America would address many workforce shortages,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), a vocal proponent of immigration overhaul, told POLITICO. “There’s employment needed right now. Jobs are available.”

Congress has put a record amount of money behind boosting jobs the U.S. workforce presently does not appear equipped to fulfill. That includes $369 billion in climate incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, $550 billion in new money through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act’s $52 billion to boost semiconductor manufacturing.

Lawmakers, former administration officials, clean energy and labor advocates said immigration fixes are needed if the administration wants to ensure its biggest victories don’t go to waste — and that the nation can fight climate change, add jobs and beat geopolitical rivals like China in the global marketplace. Those changes include raising annual visa caps for highly skilled workers needed to grow the next wave of U.S. industry and securing ironclad work protections for people in the country on a temporary basis, they said. It’s the key to building a workforce needed to design, manufacture and install millions of new appliances, solar panels and electric vehicles.

The high stakes for Biden’s jobs agenda, which will be a pillar of his likely reelection message next year, may force the White House to finally grapple with an issue it’s mostly kept on the back burner.

President Donald Trump cut legal immigration in half over his four years in office through a mix of executive orders that halted immigration from Muslim countries and limited the ability of people seeking to join their spouses and other family members in the U.S. As Republicans have attacked Biden over the migrant crisis at the southern border, his administration has kept some of his predecessor’s immigration policies in place. And the White House is wary about enabling additional GOP attacks that would likely ignore the economic rationale for any easing of legal migration and simply hammer Biden as “soft” on immigration.

In addition, calling for foreign-born workers would appear at odds with Biden’s blue-collar, American-made green revolution.

Last decade saw the U.S. population grow at its slowest rate since the Great Depression, yet the White House remains somewhat hesitant to take further executive action or use its bully pulpit on immigration, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking. But they said the administration recognizes immigration tweaks could break a labor shortage raising the price of goods through supply chain constraints, slowing clean energy projects and preventing highly skilled people from helping American businesses lead in emerging global industries.

One former administration official warned that policymakers must soon address the reality of global competition for high-skilled talent.

“If in the long term we neglect the human capital equation here, to some extent these efforts to change the face of industrial policy in the United States are not going to be as successful as they should be,” said Amy Nice, distinguished immigration fellow and visiting scholar at Cornell Law, who until January led STEM immigration policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “And some measures will be in vain.”

The White House has been hearing from senior officials, including at least one Cabinet secretary, about the need for administrative actions on immigration — raising caps on certain visa categories, filling country quotas — to help alleviate the pressure on the workforce and increase the country’s labor supply, according to a senior administration official not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Biden, some officials and lawmakers have asserted, could also increase staff and other resources to help speed up visa processing and cut through a massive backlog that has left potential workers in limbo for months, years, and in some cases, decades.

But for now, the administration seems more inclined to allow Congress to work on the issue.

“I don’t think politics is the main concern. It’s just inertia and the hope that something more substantial could be done through legislation,” said one senior administration official who did not want to be named in order to speak freely.

A White House official defended the administration’s record on immigration, noting Biden sent a framework for comprehensive immigration reform to Congress as one of his first presidential actions. The measure has yet to gain traction.

The White House official noted the administration is moving to address immediate clean energy workforce needs in the construction, electrification and manufacturing fields, where a shortage of qualified people threatens to slow deployment of climate-fighting innovations Biden needs to meet his climate goals.

The official said the administration has worked with organizations to pair skilled refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine with trade union apprenticeship programs. The official said the administration’s focus remains on retraining people through creating training pipelines for electricians, broadband installers and construction workers. The official added that expanding union participation would ensure stronger labor supply by reducing turnover through improved job quality, safety and wages.

“I don’t think we’ve run out of people to do these kinds of jobs,” the official said.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in an interview that the White House is “certainly aware that the low unemployment rate can be an obstacle” to the economy and the laws it has passed, but that the administration “hasn’t come to the Hill with a real workforce focus” on immigration.

The stakes are clear for sectors pivotal to building and operating the infrastructure, manufacturing and clean energy projects Biden and Democrats have promised. The 57,000 foreign-born workers currently in the electrical and electronics engineering field comprise nearly 27 percent that sector’s workforce, while the 686,000 foreign-born construction laborers account for 38 percent of the nation’s total, according to a New American Economy analysis of Census data. Most foreign-born construction laborers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Center for American Progress, making up nearly one-quarter of the sector’s national workforce.

“My largest worry about the American economy right now is the workforce worry,” Kaine said.

The White House has seemed more comfortable taking executive steps, Kaine said, such as expanding a humanitarian parole program for migrants that also comes with a two-year work authorization. It also has pledged to step up enforcement against employers that exploit undocumented workers, which advocates contend will help keep those people in the workforce.

But conversations are also brewing again on Capitol Hill about more “discreet” immigration bills. Kaine said he and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have discussed legislation to help support people with Temporary Protected Status, a Department of Homeland Security designation for people who have fled natural disasters, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in their home country.

Immigration restrictions are even hindering oil and gas companies right now, Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), said in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last month.

“The permits that ranchers use, agriculture, the permits that hospitality use — those same immigration permits are not the ones that are needed for people to have temporary work visas in the oil and gas sector,” he said. “You ain’t unleashing a thing unless you do something about immigration reform.”

Others have suggested that in addition to its inability to reach a deal to update the nation’s outdated immigration system, Congress needs to do a better job at retaining the immigrants who specifically come to the U.S. to earn degrees.

The U.S. for years has struggled to develop advanced STEM degree holders, a key indicator of a country’s future competitiveness in these fields. It has fewer native-born advanced STEM degree recipients than countries like China, raising national security concerns from top officials. The Biden administration has tried to break that logjam, in part by allowing international STEM students to stay on student visas and work for up to three years in the U.S. post-graduation.

“Why educate some of these folks in American schools … and then lose some of our best and brightest talent just because our system is super outdated?” said Kerri Talbot, deputy director of the Immigration Hub.

And the demand for high-skilled workers far outweighs the nation’s immigration caps, said Shev Dalal-Dheini, head of government affairs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Congress limited employment-based green cards and H-1B visas offering temporary residency to skilled workers to 140,000 and 85,000 per year, respectively.

Foreign nationals dominate the exact fields the U.S. needs to grow its clean energy and manufacturing base. Nearly three-quarters of all full-time graduate students at U.S. universities pursuing electrical engineering, computer and information science, and industrial and manufacturing engineering degrees are foreign-born, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, an innovation, trade and immigration think tank. The same is true for more than half seeking mechanical engineering and agricultural economics, mathematics, chemical engineering, metallurgical and materials engineering and materials sciences degrees.

Subtle changes, like requiring more evidence and interviews, under the Trump administration worsened already-common backlogs. Processing at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is mainly paper based, not electronic, shuttered during the pandemic — it remains plagued by staff and funding shortages.

To the extent that the green energy transition is a race for a global market and influence, the U.S. immigration system is like a boulder in its shoe.

“Canada literally places billboards in Washington state saying, ‘Come here,’” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, senior advisor for immigration and border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Our ability to succeed in these big goals relies on people being able to do the work to meet those goals.”

Source: No avoiding it now: Immigration issues threaten Biden’s climate program

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Germany eases path to permanent residency for migrants

2022/07/08 Leave a comment

Of note, another nail in the coffin of the guest worker approach:

Tens of thousands of migrants, who have been living in Germany for years without long-lasting permission to remain in the country, will be eligible for permanent residency after the government approved a new migration bill Wednesday.

The new regulation, endorsed by the Cabinet, applies to about 136,000 people who have lived in Germany for at least five years by Jan. 1, 2022.

Those who qualify can first apply for a one-year residency status and subsequently apply for permanent residency in Germany. They must earn enough money to make an independent living in the country, speak German and prove that they are “well integrated” into society.

Those under the age of 27 can already apply for a path to permanent residency in Germany after having lived in the country for three years.

“We want people who are well integrated to have good opportunities in our country,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told reporters. “In this way, we also put an end to bureaucracy and uncertainty for people who have already become part of our society.”

The new migration regulation will also make it easier for asylum-seekers to learn German — so far only those with a realistic chance of receiving asylum in the country were eligible for language classes — with all asylum applicants getting the chance to enroll in classes.

For skilled laborers, such as information technology specialists and others that hold professions that are desperately needed in Germany, the new regulation will allow that they can move to Germany together with their families right away, which wasn’t possible before. Family members don’t need to have any language skills before moving to the country.

“We need to attract skilled workers more quickly. We urgently need them in many sectors,” Faeser said. “We want skilled workers to come to Germany very quickly and gain a foothold here.”

The bill will also make it easier to deport criminals, includes extending detention pending deportation for certain offenders from three months to a maximum of six months. The extension is intended to give authorities more time to prepare for deportation, such as clarifying identity, obtaining missing papers and organizing a seat on an airplane, German news agency dpa reported.

“In the future, it will be easier to revoke the right of residence of criminals,” Faeser said. “For offenders, we will make it easier to order detention pending deportation, thus preventing offenders who are obliged to leave the country from going into hiding before being deported.”

Source: Germany eases path to permanent residency for migrants

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Canada Admits 3 Times More Non-College Immigrants per Capita than the U.S.

2022/02/25 Leave a comment

Useful comparative data:

Many Americans want a more “merit‐​based” legal immigration system, and the country most commonly associated with this framework is Canada. Former‐​Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for example, characterized U.S. immigrants as largely “illiterate”, with “no skills”, and argued that America “should be like Canada” on immigration, evaluating them on their skills. But while Canada does favor economic‐​based paths to residence, it still admits far more non‐​college educated immigrant workers than the United States does as a proportion of its population—and it is planning to let in even more in the coming years.

According to Canada’s statistics, 244,800 non‐​college‐​educated immigrants over the age of 25 in the labor force entered Canada from 2015 to 2019, 0.65 percent of the Canadian population. During the same period, 729,797 immigrants with the same characteristics entered the United States, 0.22 percent of the U.S. population (Figure 1). In other words, Canada saw nearly three times more entries into its labor force from lower‐​skilled workers than the United States did in recent years on a per capita basis. This disparity would be greater if illegal immigrants were excluded from the calculation.

Despite admitting far more non‐​college‐​educated immigrant workers, Canada also admitted nearly 5 times as many immigrant workers with bachelor’s degrees and 4 times as many immigrant workers with advanced degrees as the United States did from 2015 to 2019 on a per capita basis. This means that overall, Canada admitted nearly 4 times more immigrant workers into its labor force than the United States did from 2015 to 2019. Note that the Canadian share of lesser‐​educated workers would be even higher if they were not also admitting so many higher skilled immigrants.

While it is true that Canada admits a much larger share of immigrants through economic channels than the United States does, it also makes it easier for them to qualify based on jobs where a college education is not required. It also admits as a share of its population more immigrants based on family ties and humanitarian grounds than the United States. Canada has just announced its largest ever legal immigration targets for the next several years, which will increase the rate of admission for both skilled and lesser‐​skilled workers.

While college‐​educated immigrants offer the United States the greatest productivity boost, the fact that a majority of job growth will come from jobs not requiring a bachelor’s degree provides a strong basis for the United States to increase both skilled and lesser‐​skilled immigration in tandem.

Source: Canada Admits 3 Times More Non-College Immigrants per Capita than the U.S.

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La balle est dans le camp de Québec, dit le ministre Mendicino

2021/05/19 Leave a comment

This “blame game” has been going on for some time:

Le gouvernement fédéral a beau être celui qui a le pouvoir d’octroyer la résidence permanente, Québec a sa part de responsabilité dans les dizaines de milliers de dossiers de travailleurs qualifiés en attente, croit le ministre de l’Immigration, Marco Mendicino. En entrevue au Devoir, il s’est dit « encouragé » par le fait que Québec a légèrement augmenté ses seuils pour 2021, mais estime que la balle est toujours dans son camp.

« Il faut comprendre très clairement que Québec établit ses propres seuils d’immigration annuels, et nous recevons plus de demandes pour le PTQQ [Programme des travailleurs qualifiés du Québec] que les [places] permis [es] par Québec. C’est la raison pour laquelle il y a plus d’applications dans l’inventaire », a dit le ministre dans une entrevue accordée en français au Devoir.

Il rappelle que 50 000 travailleurs qualifiés sont en attente d’une résidence permanente, mais que les cibles du Québec ne permettent pas d’absorber toutes les demandes traitées. « Les seuils d’immigration de Québec en 2021, cette année, sont de maximum 26 000 personnes. Ça, c’est la réalité », a déclaré le ministre Mendicino, qui a succédé à Ahmed Hussen à ce poste à la fin 2019.

Il ne cache pas que cette « réalité », soit les seuils trop bas du Québec pour écouler les dossiers en attente, est à l’origine d’une demande de la ministre de l’Immigration, Nadine Girault, enjoignant au fédéral de traiter en priorité les dossiers de travailleurs qualifiés déjà ici. Or, cela n’est pas sans conséquence sur les autres catégories d’immigration, souligne M. Mendicino. « Quand nous faisons l’exercice de priorisation du PTQQ, la réalité est que les autres applications ne sont pas priorisées. […] Ça va rester comme ça tant et aussi longtemps que la demande sera plus grande que les niveaux d’immigration établis par le Québec. »

Regarder vers l’avenir

Il y a deux semaines, Le Devoir avait révélé qu’Ottawa avait reconnu avoir ralenti le traitement des dossiers de travailleurs qualifiés et que c’était attribuable « aux restrictions imposées par le gouvernement du Québec quant aux admissions en raison d’un nombre limité de places dans les niveaux annuels », pouvait-on lire dans des documents gouvernementaux. Ces déclarations avaient agacé Québec, qui a continué de rejeter la responsabilité des délais de traitement sur le gouvernement fédéral, le seul à pouvoir délivrer des résidences permanentes.

Mais le ministre canadien dit qu’il ne souhaite pas « débattre du passé », mais plutôt assainir le climat entre lui et le Québec. « Je vais me concentrer sur aujourd’hui et l’avenir, et je vais livrer tous les travailleurs dont le Québec a besoin pour appuyer sa relance économique. C’est la chose la plus importante pour moi et mon gouvernement », a-t-il dit, en ajoutant qu’Ottawa est un « partenaire de bonne foi » dans cette affaire.

Marco Mendicino rappelle que son ministère a déjà octroyé une résidence permanente à plus de 7000 travailleurs qualifiés du Québec, soit une augmentation de 54 % par rapport à l’an dernier. Il aurait également contribué à fournir au Québec plus de 7000 travailleurs temporaires.

Plus d’anges gardiens

Quant au programme des « anges gardiens », qui vise à régulariser le statut des demandeurs d’asile ayant travaillé en soins directs aux patients pendant la première vague, le ministre fédéral de l’Immigration a dit continuer de talonner son homologue québécoise pour qu’elle élargisse le programme. « J’ai répété que la porte restait ouverte de notre côté pour revisiter les paramètres de programme », a-t-il indiqué, en évoquant une rencontre avec Nadine Girault il y a exactement deux semaines. « Je pense que le Québec veut attendre un peu plus pour regarder le progrès. Mais s’[il] veut élargir le programme, nous sommes prêts. »

En date du 10 avril, seulement 3200 dossiers (représentant 7500 personnes au total) avaient été reçus dans le cadre de ce programme, dont 1400 au Québec. Soucieux d’atteindre sa cible historique de 401 000 immigrants en 2021, le gouvernement fédéral a également lancé le mois dernier un programme permettant à plus de 90 000 étudiants et travailleurs temporaires d’obtenir la résidence permanente.

Source: La balle est dans le camp de Québec, dit le ministre Mendicino

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