Photo: Tim Van Horn

…don’t try immigrating to Canada–even when your skills are more employable than those of many who get in (piece in the Crvena Zvezda no less) :

Points system fails immigrants and Canada

…Canada claims to need the services of immigrants with PhDs but, for some mysterious reason, it prevents them from working in their chosen field and pays them unemployment insurance instead. I’m sure that there has to be something more to it…

…the question is: Who fools these immigrants into leaving promising careers in their home country to make a jump into the unknown?

The answer is our immigration system. It puts a lot of emphasis on education and knowledge of one of the two official languages. If you have a job offer, it gives you 10 points and the so-called “suitability” requirement gives you another 10. But if you have a PhD, as was the case with Taiwo from Nigeria, and you speak proper English, you get 49 points. You get another 21 points if you have up to four years’ experience and another 10 if you are between 21 and 49 years old. Now, considering that the minimum number of points required to come to Canada is 67, it’s easy to understand why people like Taiwo are allowed into the country but remain unemployed. They can easily total 80 points without having a job offer.

This also explains why a bricklayer or labourer from any country in Central or South America or Europe is not allowed to immigrate to Canada.

The results of this immigration madness (implemented by former Liberal governments under pressure from their Quebec caucus asking them to put more emphasis on language than skills) is clearly visible on the streets of Toronto these days.

We have highly educated people like Taiwo, humiliated and frustrated and collecting unemployment insurance, while thousands of illegal immigrants, mainly from Central and South America or Eastern Europe, are illegally doing legal jobs…

I know that the future of our manufacturing sector lies mainly in highly specialized jobs requiring skilled and highly educated people. But these jobs are not here yet and we shouldn’t lure highly educated people to this country only to list them among the unemployed. We only have to look at the large number of young Canadians who have just graduated from our universities and are still unemployed to understand that our economic problems are not due to a lack of qualified people…

Posts with a similar theme at Daimnation!:

A sensible reform for Canadian immigration policy

Our failing immigration policy [Jeffrey Simpson on the ball on this one too, see 2)]

How come the Aussies can deal sensibly with immigration…

Canada’s odd approach to immigration, or, currying favour [a nod to Adrian]

What Marx wrote (at end before footnotes):

Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!

And this is truly nuts, if we wish to have a country with any, er, coherence, seeing as all that growth would necessarily come from immigration given the birth rate of residents:

Canada should aim for 100M in population, essay says

Just wondering also how the Québécois might reconcile themselves to the dwarf population status they would have in such a Canada, given their limited percentage of the immigrant inflow.

Mark
Ottawa