Our failing immigration policy

Strange bedfellows:

1) Licia Corbella in the Calgary Sun:

That Canada's federal immigration system is broken is really not debatable.

The current point system put into place by the federal government that places so much emphasis on high levels of education seems, on the surface, to make sense, but in reality is nonsensical.

[...]

Canada -- and Alberta in particular -- needs workers, and lots of them. But what Canada and Alberta do not need is more foreign-trained doctors or PhDs whose credentials we do not recognize and likely never will.

What Alberta needs in droves are skilled labourers, not dubiously trained foreign professionals.

Bricklayers, carpenters, pipe-fitters, welders, butchers and bakers have the kinds of skills that could be tested easily and therefore could be put to work in their chosen fields almost immediately upon arriving in this country...

2) Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail:

Last week, Statistics Canada provided yet another report -- the sixth in the past four years by different institutions -- showing what's going wrong. Why things are going wrong is a bit of a puzzle. In 1993, the immigration criteria were changed to give more importance to the educational qualification of immigrants. The results were dramatic. According to Statscan, among immigrants 15 years and older, the share of those with university degrees jumped to 45 per cent in 2004 from 17 per cent in 1992. Those in the skilled class [I don't think this means pipefitters - MC] rose to 51 per cent from 29 per cent.

The reasoning for the change was simple: more skilled people would do better for themselves and the country. Alas, low-income rates for immigrants during their first year in Canada were 3.2 times higher in 2004 than for Canadian-born people -- higher than at any time during the 1990s.

[...]

So we have the law of unintended consequences. Although stabs have been made at figuring out what happened, governments are still groping for definitive answers. Yet, governments keep driving up the number of immigrants: 262,000 in 2005, 235,000 in 2004, 221,000 in 2003 -- with all political parties committed to admitting more

Mr Simpson, in rather coded fashion, then daringly suggests a possible reason for new immigrants' problems:

Could it be that the source countries of immigrants are making integration and economic success harder? A few researchers have posed the question; no one has given a serious answer. Perhaps none can be given, since talented people come from everywhere...

Mark C.

Posted by markc at February 7, 2007 07:25 AM