This from a LA Times piece in praise of Canada:

…
“U.S. businesses are certainly looking at lessons learned from Canada,” said Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board in New York. “In a nutshell, Canada has been very pragmatic in dealing with the economy.”

Its approach to immigration is one example. With one of the highest immigration rates in the world, Canada has been receiving about 250,000 permanent residents annually. About one-fourth of the new arrivals gain entry through family relations, but more than 60% are admitted as “economic immigrants” — that is, skilled workers, entrepreneurs and investors.

In the U.S., it’s basically the reverse…

But that 60% figure for economic-class immigrants is very misleading. It also includes the dependents the primary immigrant brings with him–and usually it is a “him”. Thus these figures from 2002 (I doubt the ratio has changed much–see Update):

Skilled Workers: 53,437
Spouses and dependents: 69,920
Total entering under skilled worker class: 123,357

In that year some 229,000 people came to Canada legally as residents, immigrants plus refugees. So 54% were skilled worker class–but only some 23% of those immigrants were individuals actually admitted on the basis of their qualifications under our points system [see here for its big problems].  And a great number of the female spouses from quite a few of our source countries were pretty unlikely to work.

So when you read that 60% figure for economic immigrants in the LA Times you can effectively cut it way down. Then it doesn’t look so impressive.  I’ll bet you haven’t seen the real facts about those figures in our major media; takes a quick bit of research.

The story does note this:

…
“The big issue is how immigrants, though highly skilled, aren’t getting jobs as easily,” Reitz said…

No shoot. Here are some pretty bleak realities:

Recent Immigrants are the Most Educated and Yet Underemployed in the Canadian Labour Force
March 12, 2009
…
Canada’s recent immigrants are better educated, on average, than native-born Canadians but they fare worse in the job market. While 15.8% of native-born Canadians had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2006, 25.4% of Canadian immigrants were degreed. Despite this difference, native-born Canadians earn an average total income of $64,239 compared to $48,488 for immigrants. And unemployment for Canadian immigrants was 6.6% -nearly twice of what it was for native-born Canadians (3.5%).

The gap between immigrants and native-born Canadians is most pronounced among immigrant receiving provinces and metropolitans. Degreed immigrants earn 70% of the incomes that native-born Canadians do in Ontario, but 90% in Prince Edward Island [but some degrees are, er, more equal than others.].

The same pattern can be observed among metros as well. In Toronto the average income of immigrants was 58.8% of native-born Canadians [scary "Since the turn of the twenty-first century almost fifty percent of immigrants and refugees coming to Canada have settled in the Toronto Census metropolitan area...]“…

And note this:

Immigrants new to Canada have a difficult time finding work, and face unemployment rates twice as high as those among Canadian-born citizens, according to a Statistics Canada study released Monday.

The study found 2006 unemployment levels among immigrants who arrived in Canada between 2001 and 2006 was 11.5 per cent, as compared with 4.9 per cent among the Canadian-born population.

The federal agency suggested that a lack of Canadian work experience, language barriers and unrecognized foreign credentials posed the largest barriers to integrating new immigrants into the workforce.

The study notes that unemployment rates in 2006 fell to 7.3 per cent among immigrants who had been in the country between five and 10 years [still 2.4 per cent higher than Canadian-born]…

Not pretty, eh? Ottawa, we have a problem. If you want more numbers, lots more numbers, have a look here:

Facts and figures 2008 – Immigration overview:
Permanent and temporary residents

Update: The OECD’s reading of 2008 figures:

…
One in four permanent migrants came to Canada through the employment channel, and 1 in 8 on the basis of humanitarian residence permits. Family migration accounted for 62% of total permanent migration [emphasis added] in 2008…

The OECD is clearly doing what I did above and including dependents of primary economic-class immigrants in family migration. Which puts a whole different perspective on the numbers.

Upperdate: Post is in National Post’s “Full Comment“:

Mark Collins: Immigration Canada = skilled workers, unskilled spouses, no jobs anyway

Mark
Ottawa