Their story inspired a flurry of alarmist news coverage south of the border on how America’s overly bureaucratic immigration system was putting the country’s economic future at risk.
“But it’s an easy gut reaction to have when you have 200 resumés to go through.” American employers are likely just as discriminatory as Canadian companies, but because workers need a job offer to immigrate, that discrimination tends to happen before prospective immigrants have been given a work permit and have made plans to move to a new country.
Critics have attacked America’s system of temporary employment-based immigration, since it leaves immigrants vulnerable to the whims of their employers or the economy.
In 1970, men who immigrated to Canada earned about 85 per cent of the wages of Canadian-born workers, rising to 92 per cent after a decade in the country.
By the late 1990s, they earned just 60 per cent, rising to 78 per cent after 15 years, according to Statistics Canada studies.
In the end, their story turned out to be less a picture of the Canadian dream than an image of the ugly reality facing so many Canadian immigrants. Calls to employers went unreturned or recruiters told her she would need Canadian work experience to qualify.
With extended family already living in Canada, the couple expected a slow start, but was shocked by how difficult life here turned out to be.
Nearly half of chronically poor immigrants living in Canada are those who have come as skilled workers. Australia overhauled its immigration system in the 1990s, giving preference to immigrants who would be most likely to land a job, and saw immigrant employment and earnings steadily improve.
The implications for the country are huge, given that Canada has one of the highest rates of immigration in the world and attracts far more skilled immigrants than most other Western countries. immigrants earned 93 per cent of native-born workers, while foreign-born college graduates now their American counterparts. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), nearly 23 per cent of Canadian immigrants live in poverty compared to an OECD average of 17 per cent.
Economic migrants—those chosen because they’re thought to have the kinds of skills that can boost a country’s economy—represent roughly half of all Canadian immigrants, compared to around 16 per cent in the U. The declining economic welfare of immigrants is “a huge problem,” says Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. immigrants earned about 80 per cent of American-born workers, a gap that was roughly the same in Canada. During the last recession the unemployment rate for foreign-born university grads in Canada topped out at 8.4 per cent in 2010. Even during the worst of the recession, the unemployment rate for Canadian-born university graduates hit a mere 3.5 per cent. Canada is also one of the worst at matching immigrants’ education to their jobs, ahead of only Estonia, Italy, Spain and Greece.