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Canada’s immigration policies have changed substantially in order to attract and retain the most highly skilled immigrants who will adjust well to Canada and be best positioned for success. Increasingly, policies are being directed towards retaining temporary foreign workers and international students as permanent residents. This is a step in the right direction and is critical to Canada’s success and competition in the global arena.
Yet recent immigration shifts, and the criteria used to evaluate potential immigrants, may result in gaps in Canada’s ability to recruit and retain qualified immigrants and position them for success.

For both the labour market and the population to survive, Canada needs immigration to grow. However, recent immigrants in Canada have been faring poorly compared to previous cohorts of immigrants and Canadians. The barriers faced by immigrants include lack of Canadian work experience, foreign credential and experience recognition issues, language barriers and discrimination.
The educational quality of Canada’s skilled immigrants has also been called into question, suggesting that it is the immigrants who need to change, not Canadian policies and society.
In response to some of the problems plaguing skilled immigrants, Canada’s immigration program has changed significantly over the past six years. Two of the major drivers of the changes are the failure to recognize immigrants’ foreign credentials (and their resulting underemployment and unemployment) and the lengthy processing times and backlog for economic immigrant applications.
The Canadian Experience Class (CEC) is a recent major policy change that allows temporary migrants and international students employed in highly skilled jobs to apply directly for permanent residency. The CEC is a step in the right direction, expediting the retention of highly skilled and qualified migrants who are well adjusted to Canada and who have demonstrated their success in the labour market or the education system. However, the CEC, in conjunction with other policies and programs, needs to go further for immigrants and the nation to succeed.
Many of the issues immigrants and Canada’s immigration system already face may be compounded by such changes as the CEC as they sidestep important issues related to foreign credential recognition without resolving them. Further, many recent shifts in immigration policy have been developed without fully analyzing the results of previous policies–as statistics have not been able to keep pace with rapidly changing immigration policies. Many of the data sets being used to analyze the labour market success of immigrants are from the 2006 Census and do not necessarily reflect the impact of the policies in question. Most immigrants selected under the 2001 immigration act had not arrived in Canada by the 2006 Census. Without proper analysis, we will not know whether the most recent policy shifts will lead to better outcomes.
The CEC, coupled with other immigration policy shifts, may displace Canada’s skilled worker program and significantly alter the face of immigration. CEC applicants will come out of the selected skilled worker applicant targets and some resources will be shifted from the processing of applications abroad towards processing applications under the CEC. In 2008, almost 40 per cent of temporary foreign workers will meet the occupational skill level requirements for the CEC and many international students are likely to remain permanently given the changes. In a 2007 survey conducted by the Ryerson’s International Services for Students office, 87 per cent of international students were interested in pursuing permanent residence.
In 2008, roughly 192,500 temporary foreign workers and 79,500 international students entered Canada. At that time, about 43,300 skilled worker principal applicants gained permanent residence. If fewer than 16 per cent of the combined sum of international students and temporary foreign workers were to apply and be accepted through the CEC, the number of skilled worker principal applicants from abroad would be entirely replaced by these migration flows. This shift would not add more immigrants to Canada and may exacerbate the backlog for skilled immigrants abroad.
As a result of these new policies, the selection of skilled immigrants is moving into the hands of employers, colleges, universities and provinces–with a limited national framework to guide the process. These changes may also have a significant impact on how settlement services are designed and delivered across Canada, with these new players now holding a larger role in settlement support, without necessarily having the resources and expertise for the task. Under the current model, temporary migrants are not eligible for many settlement services available to immigrants until they are actually granted (or approved in principle for) permanent residence.
There is no systematic assessment of or data about the qualifications and skills of temporary foreign workers entering Canada and we do not know the academic qualifications and level of people coming under temporary foreign worker programs. They are initially selected based on the needs of employers, and their eligibility for permanent status is based on the skills required for the job, not on their individual qualifications. We have no way of knowing if they are over-qualified for the jobs they are selected for, or if they have the qualifications we seek in our permanent immigration program. This is especially of concern at the low-skill level where there is the potential for temporary foreign workers to be employed in low-skilled jobs despite their qualifications, making them over-qualified for their work and, at the same time, unable to qualify as potential economic immigrants through the CEC.
In order to fully consider the benefits of temporary foreign workers and the CEC, data should be collected about the skills and qualifications of temporary foreign workers entering Canada. Otherwise, developing a pathway to permanent residency based solely on the skills required for the job may not reflect the overall goals of a human capital model of immigration.
Canada has the tools necessary to assess the actual skill and qualification levels of migrants even before they enter Canada. Rather than evaluating migrants’ potential as permanent residents based on the skill level of the jobs they hold, why not gather appropriate data and use existing tools to ensure that migrants are indeed employed at their skill level? And further, shouldn’t skilled migrants, regardless of the job they possess, have access to permanent residency?
The CEC provides a good start to attracting and retaining skilled migrants, but it is not the golden ticket. Persistent problems in Canada’s immigration and integration systems need to be addressed. Proper data collection on current migration flows, in conjunction with a current analysis of the successes and failures of the immigration program, could help policy development. Canada needs immigrants on a permanent basis and we cannot afford to underutilize their skills and talents.
Sophia Lowe is the research and policy analyst at World Education Services.
slowe@wes.org
http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/immigration-6-24-2009