Regulatory pre-clearance would help immigrants integrate better.
by Mehdi Rizvi
Education and work experience are among the valuable assets new immigrants bring to Canada. Almost one in five newcomers is a skilled-worker principal applicant, selected because, in theory, their skills fit what Canada needs.
Often those skills are professional skills. According to Statistics Canada, in 2008, close to 45 percent of all newcomers held a university degree. Among those who were admitted as principal applicants in the skilled workers category, 72 percent held a university degree, as did 41 percent of newcomers in the "spouse and dependents, skilled worker" category, and 33 percent of family class immigrants.
Skilled-worker applicants qualify by earning points for attributes such as education level, language ability in English or French, employment experience, age, arranged employment in Canada prior to landing, and some form of adaptability or suitability. These characteristics are deemed to be likely to facilitate integration and ultimately, success.
While federal and provincial governments provide newcomers with a lot of help integrating into a new society, government policy makers still face a major challenge in finding ways to help immigrants apply their hard-won education and skills, and reward them accordingly.
Maia Korotkina, a researcher at the University of Montreal, addressed this very question in her presentation at the recent Canadian Association for Refugees and Forced Migration Studies conference, held at York University in Toronto.
Canada's objectives in encouraging immigration have always been (in broad strokes): to populate the country, ensure the economic returns from an active and vibrant workforce, and adhere to social and humanitarian commitments. Beyond that, immigration policies have evolved through a juggling of economic, political and social priorities.
Korotkina enumerated and described the layers of complexity involved in matching a skilled immigrant worker with a skilled job in Canada — particularly, where the government recognizes professional credentials but admission to practice in Canada depends on self-regulating professional agencies who may bar entry to the profession or require re-certification.
Korotkina's painstaking matching up of immigrants' skills with local needs found what she called "a damaging incoherence" in the way we go about admitting skilled workers whose professions are regulated. Because the pre- and post- migration phases of selection and integration remain sharply distinct, she argues, the system hinders new immigrants in their efforts to integrate into the job market at the level and in the field desired.
Speaking as a fairly recent immigrant, I came to Canada in 1999, with a masters degree in chemistry and twenty five years experience as a chemist. Yet my first job was at a gas station. I was stunned at difference between the position I'd achieved at home and the position available to me in Canada. The question of who is a "skilled worker" causes heartache for tens of thousands of immigrants like me. With that painful exposure, I would strongly suggest that we must draw a clear line of demarcation between blue-collar skills and white-collar skills.
The question of who is a “skilled worker” causes heartache for tens of thousands of immigrants like me.
An immigrant medical doctor or any other professional would never happily accept a dish washing or cab driving jobs, for those jobs we should bring in suitable candidates. Highly educated and skilled immigrants must not be pushed to accept survival jobs because of labor market needs, economic gains and poor immigration policies.
For more details and discussions of her research, Maia Korotkina invites readers to contact her at the link below.
About Mehdi Rizvi
Mehdi Rizvi is a former member of the Community Editorial Board, Toronto Star and an affiliate of the Center of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, which is a consortium of three Toronto universities. He is a chemist who has worked in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, cement and UV printing products for the last 35 years.
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