Nick Noorani Website

Immigration tricksters in Punjab region prey on Indians who hope for new lives in Canada.
Kapurthala, India-One morning in February 2007, Harvinder Singh read an ad in a local newspaper that promised to change his life.
The ad offered a visa to Canada and a $450-a-week job as a kitchen helper at a Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto. Singh answered the ad, and agreed to pay an immigration consultant a $12,500 advance and an equal amount when his immigration documents were prepared.
Today, however, Singh, 31, is still working for his father in this blue-collar city in the northern Punjab region, manning the family photo shop and tending 1.2 hectares of wheat fields on the outskirts of town.
Police say the rise of unregulated immigration consultants is the most troubling crime trend in the state, ahead of a burgeoning drug problem and sectarian violence.

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Reaching out to immigrants and visible minorities brings companies new perspectives and access to more clients.
It wasn’t what you’d expect a staff member to be doing at the corporate offices of Bayer Canada.
Wearing a traditional Chinese costume from her native Hong Kong, Suzanne Wan was performing a fan dance. The audience consisted of colleagues, mostly newcomers to Canada like herself, watching as Ms. Wan unfurled the brightly coloured fans, making them look like birds in flight.
This was more than a show.
As a participant in Diversity Day, a company initiative meant to showcase the various cultures at play within Bayer, Ms. Wan used the occasion to underscore her value as an employee within the global organization — her ethnicity.

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Assembling a work force that looks like the greater community has become a business imperative. Equally important is doing it the right way
As Jason Colley explains it, in 2004 senior management at American Express Canada looked out the windows of the company’s new headquarters in Markham and realized the world had changed. Geography helped sparked social change.
Markham, one of Toronto’s northern suburbs, had become a city with an extraordinarily diverse population. No longer a farming town dominated by white Anglo Saxons, Markham was now home to expanding Chinese and South Asian communities. In most families, women worked as well as the men.
If the company was going to recruit staff locally, its hiring and retention policies would have to change. Diversity would have to become a fundamental pillar of corporate culture, says Mr. Colley, manager of talent acquisition, the man responsible since 2007 for finding ways to dip into existing pools of qualified women, ethnic minorities and those with physical disabilities.

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A group of con artists who have been scamming new Canadians appear to be targeting seniors from the Mediterranean.
The scammers claiming to be distant relatives who need money when they approach recent immigrants.
“This scam has re-emerged of late and we have recognized a very small pattern in victims of a Mediterranean background – most notably Italian,” Cst. Adam Minnion of Peel Regional Police said this morning (Jan 9). “The trend is minor, but it does exist. We would like to alert the Italian residents within our community, and all others, that this scam exists.”
A month ago, Peel Regional Police appealed to the media in a bid to warn the public of a fraud scheme targeting seniors who are relatively new to Canada.

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Canada prides itself on being one of the most multicultural countries in the world. There is also a lot self-congratulation about having a less restrictive immigration system than, say, that of the United States. But at the same time, we have been hearing all those stories about foreign-trained doctors, university professors and other professionals driving taxis, cleaning toilets and selling pizzas or burgers, because their credentials from the “old country” are not recognized by Canadian employers, which prevents those skilled workers and professionals from overseas from working in the fields they have been trained for.
Now with the recession hitting Canada, it was only a matter of time before someone would call for a reduction in the number of immigrants admitted every year. In a recent article for the National Post, Rudyard Griffiths, of the Dominion Institute, argues that immigrants are a drain on the public purse and that, therefore, fewer immigrants should be allowed to enter Canada for the duration of the economic crisis.

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Chinese Canadians have a higher rate of investment income than the general population, and more immigrants have investment income than have non-immigrants, new census figures reveal.
The findings, released quietly by Statistics Canada last month, underscore that most immigrants do well over time in Canada, and that Chinese Canadians do exceptionally well.
Canada’s South Asian and Chinese populations are similar in size and have similar total earnings, but Chinese have 2.5 times more in investment income.
“The nature of Canada’s mosaic has shifted, and now the Chinese community is moving to the top of the triangle, by virtue of their investment income and mobility amongst the second generation,” said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies. “As well, disproportionately more Chinese came to Canada with funds during the past couple of decades.”

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