|
The immigrant selection process used by the
Government of Canada is in dire need of fixing. Many highly
educated recent immigrants cannot find jobs in their professions.
Statistics Canada shows that average incomes of recent immigrant
cohorts are well below those of Canadians with similar
demographic characteristics, even 10 years after their date of
immigration. These facts are important because Canada has a
pervasive welfare system and it is no longer true that immigrants
do not affect the incomes of Canadians directly.
Canada's welfare system relies on a highly progressive personal
income structure and provides universally accessible free
government benefits. Because of the low incomes of immigrants,
this system has resulted in substantial net transfers of
taxpayers' money from Canadians to the recent immigrants. These
costs are estimated to be $1.4 billion in the year 2000 for the
cohort of immigrants that arrived in 1990. For all of the
immigrants who arrived during the 13 years before 2003, the cost
in 2002 alone is estimated to be $18.3 billion. Such costs have
also been noted in Europe's Nordic states, which are known for
the pervasiveness of their state welfare systems. Observers there
note that the welfare state is incompatible with mass immigration
and policies are enacted to curb the latter.
Government employees and academics have studied the reasons for
the low incomes of recent immigrants in Canada. The findings of
these studies are still tentative, but point to the large numbers
of immigrants who bypass the government screens that are designed
to allow entry only to foreigners likely to be economically
successful. Those bypassing the screen include large numbers of
family members and refugees, many of which have low earnings
capacity.
There are other causes of low average incomes of recent
immigrants. They include the wage-depressing effects their
numbers have on the incomes of all workers with low skills in the
country; the inability of many immigrants to find work for which
their high education qualifies them; and the insensitivity of
annual immigration rates to labour market conditions in Canada, a
policy of relatively recent origin.
This paper recommends a continuation of the efforts to achieve a
better use of the high skill levels of the recent wave of
educated immigrants. However, its main recommendation involves a
fundamental reform of Canada's immigration selection process to
prevent the need for such measures and to avoid large costs to
taxpayers in the future.
|