Mason and MacKenzie: Now is not the time to lose faith in immigration because Canada cannot prosper without it

2024/05/28 Leave a comment

Platitudes rather than substance. And what do the authors mean by “throw off the institutional shackles that resist change?”

Countries worldwide have long envied Canada’s ability to attract and integrate immigrants. Yet just as our aging demography is beginning to bite, we risk losing the long-standing public consensus that immigration is good for Canada.

To boot, our GDP per capita is declining at a faster rate than that of many other advanced countries. Productivity is abysmal and Canadians are looking for solutions. 

Though Canadian support for continued growth in immigration numbers is dropping, the need for new immigrants to address our demography cannot be wished away. With more Canadians leaving the workforce than entering it each year and our total fertility rate dropping to a historic low of 1.33 in 2023, immigration is the only way to maintain the living standards and levels of services we have come to expect.

If we were to freeze Canada’s population, we would go from around 30 people over 65 per 100 working-age Canadians to over 60 per 100 in the year 2071 — an unfathomable increase in very much loved, but costly, dependants supported by each working Canadian. We must address our demography at the same time as we improve our living standards.

As Carolyn Rogers at the Bank of Canada has cried out, productivity growth is key, where our lagging measures predate current increased immigration levels by a few decades. 

Some lay blame on newcomers for decreasing businesses’ willingness to invest in equipment and technology. Why invest when you can just hire another person? This criticism is short-sighted because to overcome demography we need both more workers and more capital investment. It would be foolish to put the country into population decline. 

Immigrants can help solve the productivity problem over time. A recent Statistics Canada study showed that so-called “two-step” immigrants, who gain education or experience in Canada before becoming permanent residents, broadly earn more (reflecting higher productivity) than permanent residents without Canadian education or experience. Many of our most successful entrepreneurs are immigrants too, for example Tobias Lütke of Shopify.

Immigration is not on its own an economic silver bullet for every problem, but Canada cannot grow without newcomers’ skills and ambition. We should all welcome a renewed dialogue about our national economic, social, and humanitarian goals, since the case for improving our immigration system is strong.

The time is now to ensure the selection of immigrants selected for the economic impact are aligned with labour market needs. In its recent strategic review, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada committed to hiring a Chief Talent Officer. We are ready to support this work through our connections to employers from coast to coast.

Immigration is of course an interconnected issue, not just an economic one. Newcomers alleviate workforce and demographic pressures but also create their own demand for housing, health care, and transportation. Concentrated in major cities, this demand can expand on the other factors driving the housing crisis — the foundations of which we laid long ago.

The recent cap on international students shows that the government is taking the issue seriously and increasingly considering the multiple factors that lead to success, like housing availability and “wraparound” support for newcomers. This is good. Prospective immigrants must be able to see a complete future here, not just a job. If they do not, more will leave for better opportunities, as Parisa Mahboubi and William Robson from the C.D. Howe Institute recently argued, or forgo coming to Canada entirely. To let this happen would be to squander our global advantage.

Our system has been the envy of the world, but as other countries compete to attract the best, we should update our policy-making to incorporate data from across the economy, with tailored thinking that nimbly responds to labour market demand. It was encouraging to attend the Better Evidence Conference this February and see rooms full of people discussing new ideas for exactly that. Better data will help Canada avoid surprises, match social infrastructure to immigration levels, and respond to changes.

It is vital that Canadians see immigration as part of our future and keep supporting it. Approval is still high, but that will only continue with successful outcomes. To achieve these, it is time to adjust course, adopt more data-driven decision making, and throw off the institutional shackles that resist change within our system.

Gillian Mason is the CEO of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council. Patrick MacKenzie is CEO of the Immigrant Employment Council of British Columbia.

Source: Now is not the time to lose faith in immigration because Canada cannot prosper without it

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She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

2022/03/31 Leave a comment

Ongoing barriers of note:

With a PhD and eight years of project management experience, Hala El Ouarrak didn’t expect finding a job would be that hard in Canada.

Before the Moroccan woman arrived in Toronto in 2019, she took part in all the pre-arrival settlement services and employment counselling that were available to soon-to-be newcomers. She was assured her skills and experience were sought after in the Canadian job market.

“I did everything to the letter to make sure that I’m not missing anything when I get here. The feedback was I wouldn’t have any problem finding a job, and all I would need would be a Canadian phone number for employers to reach me,” said El Ouarrak, whose doctoral degree is in applied math and automatic control engineering.

Instead, the 31-year-old worked as a sales account manager at a shoe store and teaching statistics on a side as a private tutor, while “upgrading” her CV by acquiring four additional Canadian project-management credentials. (Some of El Ouarrak’s struggle came during the pandemic’s disruptions, but she says the number of job postings wasn’t affected.)

“It actually took me two years to get back to my field,” said El Ouarrak, now an IT consultant and part-time lecturer in project management and data analysis at Northeastern University’s Toronto campus.

A new study suggests this sort of problem has been an issue for years — that many highly skilled and educated female immigrants in Canada are facing immense disparities in employment outcomes due to employer biases, gender-based barriers and other factors.

“Immigrant women face distinct challenges in entering and advancing in the Canadian labour market. They encounter downward career mobility and underemployment relative to their education and professional backgrounds,” says the study by Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC).

“Data also shows that the earnings of immigrant women, especially those who are racialized, lag behind those of immigrant men and Canadian-born women, and their unemployment rate is higher.”

Based on an online survey of 365 immigrant women in Greater Toronto — two-thirds with at least a master’s degree — and subsequent interviews, researchers found that 83.8 per cent of respondents had taken at least one of the following measures to “fit” the culture or expectations of Canadian employers:

  • 57.5 per cent had downgraded their stated educational achievements and/or experience to not appear overqualified for a position;
  • 43 per cent had accepted unpaid work or internships in a role related to their field of expertise to gain “Canadian experience”;
  • 21.9 per cent said they had changed or shortened their name to sound “more Canadian”;
  • 15.3 per cent sought training to help change their accents;
  • 13.7 per cent of respondents changed their appearances to make their looks more acceptable to “Canadian culture.”

“The compromises some immigrant women have to make to start their careers in Canada is in contrast to the high value Canada’s points-based immigration system places on their skills,” said report author Sugi Vasavithasan, TRIEC’s research and evaluation manager.

“Having to downplay their qualifications or change aspects of themselves to enter the Canadian labour market can be demoralizing for immigrant women. It hurts their dignity and self-esteem.”

Immigrant women’s jobless rate, at 12.2 per cent, is much higher than their Canadian-born peers (4.9 per cent) and immigrant men (6.4 per cent), said the report. Among principal applicants admitted in 2009 under various skilled immigration programs, women made $17,400 less than their male counterparts after 10 years.

Maysam Fadel settled in Toronto in 2019 after working for the United Nations Refugee Agency as a community service co-ordinator and for UNICEF as emergency officer in Syria for a decade.

The 36-year-old applied to more than 500 jobs posted in the not-for-profit sector but didn’t receive one single reply. She finally found a survival job working as a sales associate in retail while volunteering at different organizations, including the Canadian Red Cross.

“Employers all ask for Canadian experience and don’t consider any of the experience you had back home,” said Fadel, who has an undergraduate degree in English literature from Damascus University.

“I was very depressed and I lost my hope of ever finding an appropriate job in alignment with my experience.”

The husband of a friend’s friend helped her polish her resumé and she dropped her last name, Allah, on her CV, to avoid any potential biases she might face from prospective employers. Then response started trickling in and she finally was hired as a volunteer co-ordinator at a community service agency.

While she needed to learn about the operations and work culture at the organization, she said she’s simply applying the same skills she acquired from back home to her new job in Canada. 

“I didn’t get a new skill I didn’t have before. It’s just transferring my skills from one context to another. You need to learn and adapt whenever you change jobs even in Canada. That’s normal,” said Fadel, who last year got a promotion to be a manager at the same agency. 

El Ouarrak, who speaks fluent Arabic, English and French, said immigrant women shouldn’t have to downplay their credentials just to get their foot into the door.

Rather, she said, Canadian employers should adopt blind hiring practices to focus on seeking out candidates with the right skills and block out personal information that could bias a hiring decision. 

“Hiring managers are looking for unique profiles of candidates who qualify but to get to the hiring managers, you have to go through recruiters, the gatekeepers who are checking the boxes. If you don’t check 80 per cent of the boxes, they don’t even look at your profile,” said El Ouarrak. “I think that’s where the disconnect is.”

The study calls for improvement to generic employment support programs to reflect the unique needs of highly skilled immigrant women, as well as further education of hiring managers and recruiters in looking past stereotypes and recognizing the value of foreign credentials brought by female immigrants.

Source: She’s trilingual, has a PhD and loads of work experience. So why was getting a job in Canada an ordeal?

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Toronto immigrants face ‘thick glass ceiling’ when it comes to executive jobs, study finds

2019/11/23 Leave a comment

Would be interesting to see whether the numbers are different for those with Canadian under-graduate degrees, which the article suggests given that those with UK or US undergraduates were excluded:

Immigrants may have made progress reaching the first rung on their career ladder in Canada, but they are getting nowhere near the C-suites, a new report says.

Among the leading Greater Toronto Area employers across the public, private and non-profit sectors, only 6 per cent of executives — those at the level of vice-president or above — are immigrants, according to the study, “Building a Corporate Ladder for All,” to be released Thursday by the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council.

While the public and non-profit sectors are faring slightly better with 6.6 per cent of their executives being immigrants, just 5 per cent of corporate executives overall in the GTA are newcomers, says the study, which did not survey executives directly, but examined third-party public sources, such as LinkedIn, to determine immigrant representation.

Being a visible minority immigrant woman is a triple whammy as they only make up one in 100 corporate executives in the region, the report found, though women overall accounted for 36 per cent of the executive positions.

“Immigrants often have to begin their Canadian careers at more junior, even entry levels. This mid- or late-career ‘restart’ makes it unlikely that they will be able to climb up to the top of the career ladder. Taking a lower level position has the potential to affect an immigrant’s entire career in Canada,” says the report, referring to the limited upward mobility faced by newcomers as the “sticky floor” phenomenon.

“Employer reluctance to hire immigrant talent for management-level positions in particular, plays a significant role in limiting advancement … Cultural differences in management and leadership styles can play a role in this. There are certain cultural expectations in Canada around how a leader should behave.”

Report author and researcher Yilmaz Ergun Dinc analyzed the profiles of 659 executives from 69 employers through sampling from the 2019 GTA Top Employers listing by Mediacorp Canada. Only those with headquarters and executive positions in Canada were counted. Data was culled through company websites, annual reports, investor reports, LinkedIn and Bloomberg profiles, as well as other publicly available sources.

Although the findings are not definitive, the report offers a snapshot of immigrant representation in executive roles in the region.

“Immigrant” executives are defined as those who obtained their bachelor’s degree abroad, given only 2.1 per cent of Canadians studied overseas, making this a good indicator of an individual being an immigrant.

Those executives with an undergraduate degree from the United States and the United Kingdom were excluded because professionals from the two countries don’t tend to face the same barriers as others from non-English speaking countries.

The unemployment gap between newcomers and their Canadian peers has been shrinking over the past two decades. However, in the GTA, where newcomers make up 50 per cent of the population, almost half of immigrant men and two-thirds of immigrant women with a university degree were in jobs that required lower levels of education in 2016, compared to one-third of their male and female Canadian-born counterparts.

“As immigrants age, and hypothetically reach more advanced stages in their careers, their incomes should align more closely with people born here,” says the report. “Yet, the salary income gap seems to be growing with age.”

In the GTA, economic immigrants between the ages of 35 to 44 on average earn about 25 per cent less than people born in Canada. However, by the time they are between the ages of 45 to 54, they earn almost 40 per cent less than their Canadian-born counterparts.

Dinc says community efforts have traditionally focused on helping immigrants get their feet in the door in the job market through job and language training, and not enough attention is paid to supporting them in career advancement. It doesn’t help that the economy is shifting toward precarious work and that some organizations lack inclusive promotion processes.

“As more and more jobs are becoming temporary and contract-based and therefore without advancement opportunities, organizations are not investing in grooming these workers for leadership,” he notes, adding that many immigrants do not have senior executive mentors who can act as their champions when it comes to promotion.

To break the “thick glass ceiling” for immigrant professionals, the report recommends that employers establish leadership development and mentoring programs, inclusion training for managers and inclusive professional development strategies.

“We need to be applying our minds to the systematic barriers, especially for women and racialized people, that limit immigrants’ advancement once they do find work, and collaboratively implement the recommendations identified,” the study concludes.

“If our goal is to set Canada apart as a desirable destination for the world’s best and brightest in their fields, we need immigrant leaders that will help Canadian businesses, non-profits and public institutions to innovate, grow and prosper.”

Source: Toronto immigrants face ‘thick glass ceiling’ when it comes to executive jobs, study finds

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A 10-year record of immigrant success: TRIEC

2014/05/17 Leave a comment

Good profile on Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) celebrating its 10 year anniversary:

Over the past decade TRIEC has become so admired that it is now copied in 12 cities across Canada and in countries around the world, including the U.S., Finland, Germany and New Zealand.

Indeed, it is a true Canadian success story.

“Ten years ago the landscape facing skilled immigrants was pretty dim,” Omidvar said at a recent event in Toronto celebrating the 10th anniversary of TRIEC. The event was attended by hundreds of newcomers and employers who have been helped by TRIEC.

“Today, we’ve made much progress, but we’ve a long way to go and in many cases have actually fallen back in terms of immigrant jobless rates and poverty levels,” she said.

In general, poverty rates have been rising among immigrant groups and falling among Canadian-born residents. More than 36 per cent of immigrants who have been in Canada less than five years live in poverty, according to a 2012 Canadian Labour Market Report. In the 1980s the rate was 25 per cent.

At the same time, researchers have found that while 70 per cent of immigrants find a job within six months of arriving here, only 40 per cent of those get work in their chosen occupation.

A 10-year record of immigrant success: Hepburn | Toronto Star.

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