Now had he insisted on us learning Swahili or Sanskrit, I would have understood the media and other “experts” with their whiney, hand-wrangling comments that imply a grave injustice being done to immigrants! In the past few years, I have fought for immigrants’ rights, yet I am bewildered at this response!

Here is the fact. Yes, immigrants or anyone in this country MUST have English or French language skills. Those are our official languages, people! This is a logical requirement of residents to this country! First off, no one cares what language you speak at home, so this has nothing to do with infringing on immigrants’ culture or preserving their language.

When skilled immigrants with poor language skills come to Canada, we are not doing them any favours. We are, in fact, harming them and their home countries! They do not get jobs commensurate with their skills and end up in survival jobs. This is a direct result of poor language skills! And the source country has lost a skilled worker who was contributing economically. Lastly, Canada loses a potential economic contributor. It’s a lose-lose situation!

Before the pundits jump in, there is also a social issue. Successful settlement of immigrants cannot happen if immigrants do not have language skills. This leads to ethnic silos where immigrants speak their mother tongue only! They then are unable to work in multicultural Canada as they have no ability to communicate and converse with colleagues who may be from other parts of the world or locally born. The isolation is now complete.

Lastly, immigrants with poor or no language skills are unable to access emergency and social services that Canada offers. It becomes more ominous when domestic violence cases are not reported due to language barriers. Sure, us nice Canadians spend bushels of taxpayer dollars on providing these services in multiple languages, but every so often something starts in the media (mostly ethnic) and one shakes their head thinking, “What are they thinking?”

So who are the so-called experts opposing this? Number one are the immigration consultants as they are losing clients and revenue and then of course one has the ethnic media who want to protect their readership! Read the comments in most mainstream media and Canadians are all for it! The minister has got it right! Let’s do what’s best for Canada!

Canadians are the most engaged online users in the world. The average Canadian logs 43.5 hours on the web per month – almost twice the worldwide average of 23.1 hours, according to research firm comScore.

Moreover, 71 percent of Canadian internet users visit YouTube every month, more than any other country in the world. We’re also the top nation on Facebook with 83.1 percent of Canadians visiting the social network compared to only 71.5 percent of U.S. internet users.

But marketers, advertisers and retailers frequently overlook Canada’s most active internet users – immigrants and visible minorities.

In fact, a recent poll of marketers found that more than 37 percent of respondents aren’t creating any campaigns aimed at ethnic Canadians. Another 34 percent estimated that less than 10 percent of their work includes multicultural messaging.

The oversight is glaring given, for example, that Chinese Canadians averaged 2.4 hours a day on the internet even in 2006 – well above the market benchmark of 1.7 hours.

When you marry ethnic consumers’ avid use of the internet with the fact that, on average, one immigrant joins Canada every minute and 55 seconds, it’s crucial that we dedicate time and resources to effectively engaging these communities online.
The opportunity

When asked by Canadian consumer insight firm Solutions Research Group, more than half of ethnic consumers agreed with the statement, “I rarely see advertising messages intended for me.”

Consider the lack of targeted, multicultural messaging in light of the fact that 29 to 32 percent of our population may belong to a visible minority group by 2031. This unmet need represents a significant opportunity for Canadian brands that move quickly to reach this audience.

To successfully tailor a digital campaign to Canada’s ethnic groups, we have to study the unique ways in which newcomers use the internet compared with Canadian-born users. For example, according to Statistics Canada:

26.8% of immigrants who arrived in or after 1997 made telephone calls over the internet compared with 6.4% of Canadian-born users
34.1% of immigrants who arrived in or after 1997 downloaded or watched TV or movies on the internet compared with 19.1% of Canadian-born users
62% of immigrants who arrived in or after 1997 used instant messaging compared with 50.4% of Canadian-born users
75% of immigrants who arrived in or after 1997 viewed news or sports information online compared with 62.1% of Canadian-born users

We also need to be mindful that a significantly higher percentage of immigrants and visible minorities are creating social media content than the national average of 20 percent:

Source: Delvinia and Environics Analytics, Infographic by Sparksheet

In other words, one-size-fits-all digital campaigns fail to acknowledge the real differences in how immigrants and visible minorities use the internet and social media. To engage this key and growing market, we have to be willing to customize our approach to marketing.
Industry examples

The Canadian advertising industry’s Marketing Awards, which have existed for nearly 90 years, included a category for Multicultural Awards only in 2011.

This year’s inaugural Integrated Gold Award in Multicultural Marketing went to Air Canada for the “Go Far” campaign created by its agency, Hamazaki Wong.

Creative Director Sonny Wong told the Dx3 Digest that the agency works with Air Canada “to optimize their reach in Asian markets through print, TV, radio and internet. We’ve created messaging that both resonates with the market from a cultural point of view and communicates the benefits of travelling with Air Canada.”

A more recent seat sale that combined print and media buys on select newspaper and ethnic websites earned Air Canada six times the return on their investment online, according to Wong.

Directing traffic to aircanada.com, the campaign resulted in 3.6 million impressions and 16,000 click-throughs over six days.

Wong adds, “the future belongs to those cultural navigators who are able to speak authoritatively and authentically to the changing marketplace.”

Likewise, Kraft Canada launched Kraft Ka Khana last year, a microsite for new Canadians from South Asia, helping new arrivals incorporate shortcuts into their traditional cooking while also introducing them to national favourites like Kraft Dinner and Oreos. Well-known food writer Smita Chandra also developed South Asian-inspired recipes as part of the campaign.

Kraft recently expanded the campaign with the launch of kraftchinesecooking.com, which instructs Chinese families across Canada and those who prepare Chinese-influenced meals at home how to incorporate Kraft products into their cooking.

“Clearly, it’s a strategy that gave client satisfaction and consumer gratification, helping Kraft Canada demonstrate that it understands consumers’ challenges,” Gautam Nath, Partner at Monsoon Communications, Kraft Canada’s former multicultural and communications agency, told the Digest.

As our country changes and becomes more diverse, Canadian brands need to engage multicultural consumers. But to successfully reach this audience, we first need to better understand the needs of individual ethnic groups and what they’re looking for in the digital space.

Tracy Bains is a writer and marketing strategist. She currently serves as Manager, Communications at the University of British Columbia, and sits on the Executive Team for CoopCulture, a volunteer-run platform for enriching Canada’s dialogue on cultural diversity through storytelling and community engagement. Follow her on Twitter at @tbains or on her blog.

Cut to 2011 and the announcement from Service Canada in Quebec that decorations should not be displayed in places that the public would see or have access to. So I guess fireworks on Canada Day and Flags are next?

Read the online comments and it would seem like Canadians feel all immigrants object to having the holidays called Christmas or even celebrating it!

Here’s a correction: NOT TRUE! I know many immigrant families across Canada and I know that the shopping at Christmas and New Year is not the only thing we like about this time of year. It is how our cities are magically transformed into a spectacle of lights and good cheer. We love how Canadians invite us to share this holiday with them.

I lived in Mumbai, India, Muscat, Oman, Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and now in Vancouver, Canada. I cannot remember a time growing up without a Christmas celebration. In fact in the last two residencies, both of which were Islamic countries, there were no restrictions on celebrating religious holidays, be they Holi and Diwali from India, Christmas or Easter or Eid. Yes, the official holidays were Eid and were celebrated with great gusto by all faiths.

The person at Service Canada responsible for this decision made the entire non-Christian population of Canada responsible for this act. And unfortunately fingers are being pointed at immigrants! We immigrants bring in traditions to this country and encourage our newly found friends to celebrate these religions along with us. In one fell swoop, we have now been made the “grinches” who stole Christmas cheer!

In its march towards embracing diversity, Canadians takes pleasure in joining immigrants in celebrating Chinese New Year, Baisakhi, Caribbean days and many more such festivals. So why can’t we join in on the Christmas celebrations that are so intrinsic to Canada’s history and culture?

Canada it seems struggles at times with its political correctness, sometimes it does trip and fall. And then it seems we take four steps back for every two steps forward.

My next step is to pull that tree out of the shed and inspect lights – yes, it is time for family and celebrations!

IN THE flat world of maps, sharp lines show where one country ends and another begins. The real world is more fluid. Peoples do not have borders the way that parcels of land do. They seep from place to place; they wander; they migrate.

Consider the difference between China and the Chinese people. One is an enormous country in Asia. The other is a nation that spans the planet. More Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Then there are some 22m ethnic Indians scattered across every continent (the third Indian base in Antarctica will open next year). Hundreds of smaller diasporas knit together far-flung lands: the Lebanese in west Africa and Latin America, the Japanese in Brazil and Peru, the smiling Mormons who knock on your door wherever you live.

Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia. Today two changes are making them matter much more. First, they are far bigger than they were. The world has some 215m first-generation migrants, 40% more than in 1990. If migrants were a nation, they would be the world’s fifth-largest, a bit more numerous than Brazilians, a little less so than Indonesians.

Second, thanks to cheap flights and communications, people can now stay in touch with the places they came from. A century ago, a migrant might board a ship, sail to America and never see his friends or family again. Today, he texts his mother while still waiting to clear customs. He can wire her money in minutes. He can follow news from his hometown on his laptop. He can fly home regularly to visit relatives or invest his earnings in a new business.

Such migrants do not merely benefit from all the new channels for communication that technology provides; they allow this technology to come into its own, fulfilling its potential to link the world together in a way that it never could if everyone stayed put behind the lines on maps. No other social networks offer the same global reach—or commercial opportunity.

The immigrant song

This is because the diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the flow of information across borders: a Chinese businessman in South Africa who sees a demand for plastic vuvuzelas will quickly inform his cousin who runs a factory in China.

Second, they foster trust. That Chinese factory-owner will believe what his cousin tells him, and act on it fast, perhaps sealing a deal worth millions with a single conversation on Skype.

Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities.

In countries where the rule of law is uncertain—which includes most emerging markets—it is hard to do business with strangers. When courts cannot be trusted to enforce contracts, people prefer to deal with those they have confidence in. Personal ties make this easier.

Chike Obidigbo, for example, runs a factory in Enugu, Nigeria, making soap and other household goods. He needs machines to churn palm oil and chemicals into soap, stamp it into bars and package it in plastic. He buys Chinese equipment, he says, because although it is not as good as European stuff, it is much cheaper. But it is difficult for a Nigerian firm to do business in China. Mr Obidigbo does not speak Chinese, and he cannot fly halfway around the world every time he wants to buy a new soap machine. Worse, if something goes wrong neither the Chinese government nor the Nigerian one is likely to be much help.

Yet Mr Obidigbo’s firm, Hardis and Dromedas, manages quite well with the help of middlemen in the African diaspora. When he wants to inspect a machine he has seen on the internet, he asks an agent from his tribe, the Igbo, who lives in China to go and look at it. He has met several such people at trade fairs. “When you hear people speaking Igbo outside Nigeria, you must go and greet them,” he laughs.

He trusts them partly because they are his ethnic kin, but mostly because an Igbo middleman in Guangdong needs to maintain a good reputation. If a middleman cheats one Igbo, all the others who buy machinery in Guangdong will soon know about it. News travels fast on the diaspora grapevine.

Thanks in part to Mr Obidigbo’s diaspora connections, Hardis and Dromedas is thriving. It employs 300 workers and sells about 300m naira-worth ($2m) of products each year. And it is just one of many African firms that use migrants as their eyes and ears in distant lands. The number of Africans living in China has exploded from hardly any two decades ago to tens of thousands today. One area of Guangzhou is now home to so many African traders that the locals call it Qiao-ke-li Cheng (Chocolate City).

The ability to use informal networks built on trust and a sense of belonging is not restricted to honest businesses such as soap making. Those with dirty hands can build criminal networks on a very similar basis. Many past diasporas have housed a “thing of our own”, or Cosa Nostra, as the Sicilians put it, and some still do. But new technology may tip the scales in favour of those abiding by the law, at least a little. National police forces still do not co-operate seamlessly, but they are much easier to connect than once they were. And the ability of migrants to communicate with home directly leaves less room for sometimes criminal middlemen.

In through the out door

The Chinese and Indian diasporas have long been commercially important. In previous generations, however, China and India themselves were closed economies, so overseas Chinese and Indian traders had to content themselves with linking foreign ports to each other (the Chinese in South-East Asia, for example, and the Indians in parts of Africa). That has completely changed. The overseas Chinese now connect the world to China and China to the world. The Indians do the same for India.

Consider the Riadys, an ethnic Chinese family who have lived in Indonesia for nearly a century. Mochtar Riady established the family fortune after the second world war, first as a bicycle trader, then by buying a bank, then by founding the Lippo Group, a conglomerate.

Throughout his career he relied on his relationships with other Chinese exiles. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) who has written a study of the Riady family, argues that for the Lippo Group, “networking is not just supportive of the business strategy; networking is the business strategy,” and that ethnic ties serve as an “entrepreneurial springboard.” Mr Riady would probably agree. “Without a network, we can do nothing,” he once said.

The Riadys spread from Indonesia into Hong Kong and Singapore. In the 1980s they moved into America, hooking up with Chinese-American firms engaged in trans-Pacific trade. After Indonesia restored normal diplomatic ties with China in 1990, Mr Riady spent eight months touring the Middle Kingdom by car, sniffing out opportunities and forging new friendships. The Lippo Group—which has interests that range from property to supermarkets and newspapers—is investing in a variety of businesses in second-tier Chinese cities, where Western multinationals have been slow to penetrate. John Riady, Mochtar Riady’s grandson, says Chinese contacts “really make us feel at home.” The government in Beijing has set up a ministry to deal with the overseas Chinese.

Small wonder. Most of the foreign direct investment that flows into China is handled by the Chinese diaspora, loosely defined. Of the $105 billion of FDI in 2010, some two-thirds came from places where the population is more or less entirely ethnic Chinese (see chart). That includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are officially part of China. But these two places operate as if they are part of the diaspora. Citizens of Taiwan are entirely outside Beijing’s control. Hong Kongers are not, but they enjoy secure property rights and the rule of law in much the same way that Chinese Americans and Chinese Singaporeans do.

These data may be misleading. Mainland Chinese businesses sometimes launder money through Hong Kong to exploit Chinese government incentives for foreign investment. Nevertheless, it is clear that ethnic Chinese are far more confident about investing in China than anyone else. They understand the local business culture. They know whom to trust.

Which is why they also serve as a bridge for foreigners who wish to do business in China. A study by William Kerr and Fritz Foley of HBS showed that American firms that employ lots of Chinese Americans find it much easier to set up operations in China without the need for a joint venture with a local firm.

While some migrants settle down, others study or work abroad for a while and then return home, and others go first to one place, then another. “People don’t have to choose between countries,” says Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC. “They can keep a foot in two or more.” Their ceaseless circulation spreads ideas and expertise as the body’s blood spreads oxygen and glucose.

Bringing it all back home

The benefits can be seen at places such as Fortis, a chain of 50 private hospitals in India. Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, the brothers who built the company up, both studied business in the United States. That imparted what Shivinder calls “a certain discipline”. “If you live only in India, you naturally measure yourself against Indian standards,” he says. “If you have lived abroad, you measure yourself against the best in the world.”

During their father’s terminal cancer the brothers had a sad opportunity to see the American health-care system up close. Shivinder observed that the best American hospitals did not just have good doctors. They were also superbly organised. Doctors follow carefully documented procedures instead of relying solely on their instincts, as Indian doctors tended to. This might cramp the style of one or two medical geniuses, but it also raised ordinary physicians to a consistently high standard.

Fortis hospitals reimagined that American excellence to fit a frugal Indian setting. A leading surgeon in America might perform 250-350 operations a year. A surgeon at a Fortis hospital will perform 1,200. An army of helpers takes care of all the mundane tasks, leaving surgeons free to concentrate on the surgery. So even though the Singhs pay their doctors well, a kidney operation that might cost $100,000 in America costs less than $10,000.

To keep up with cutting-edge medicine, Fortis “very aggressively” recruits Indian doctors who have studied or worked abroad, says Shivinder. They bring back specialised skills, some of which were not previously available in India, such as transapical procedures for heart patients and ballooning techniques in spinal surgery. They also bring contacts: when a tough problem arises, they know whom to e-mail for advice.

Because migrants see the world through more than one cultural lens, they often spot opportunities invisible to their monocultural neighbours. For example, Cheung Yan, a Chinese woman living in America, noticed that Americans threw out mountains of waste paper and that ships carrying Chinese goods to America often steamed back half-empty. So she gathered up waste paper and shipped it to China for recycling into cardboard boxes, many of which were then returned to America with televisions inside. Her insight made Mrs Cheung a billionaire.

Going to California

The world is full of budding Cheung Yans. Immigrants are only an eighth of America’s population, but a quarter of the engineering and technology firms started there between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder, according to Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University.

The exceptional creativity of immigrants doubtless reflects the sort of people who up sticks and get visas. But work by William Maddux of INSEAD (a business school) and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University suggests that exile itself makes people creative.

They compared MBA students who had lived abroad with otherwise similar students who had not, using an experiment in which each was given a candle, a box of matches and a box of drawing pins. The students’ task was to attach the candle to a wall so that it burned properly and did not drip wax on the table or the floor. This Duncker candle problem, as it is known, is considered a good test of creativity because it requires you to imagine something being used for a purpose quite different from its usual one. Some 60% of the migrants saw the solution—pinning the drawing-pin box to the wall as a makeshift sconce—against 42% of non-migrants.

The creativity of migrants is enhanced by their ability to enroll collaborators both far-off and nearby. In Silicon Valley, more than half of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers share tips about technology or business opportunities with people in their home countries, according to AnnaLee Saxenian of the University of California, Berkeley. A study by the Kauffman Foundation, a think-tank, found that 84% of returning Indian entrepreneurs maintain at least monthly contact with family and friends in America, and 66% are in contact at least that often with former colleagues. For entrepreneurs who return to China, the figures are 81% and 55%. The subjects they talk about most are customers (61% of Indians and 74% of Chinese mention this), markets (62% of Indians, 71% of Chinese), technical information (58% of Indians, 68% of Chinese) and business funding (31% of Indians, 54% of Chinese).

Mr Kerr has devised an ingenious study which uses patent information to measure how knowledge moves through diaspora networks. Looking at the names on American patent records, and guessing that an inventor called Zhang was probably ethnic Chinese, whereas someone called Rubio was probably Hispanic, he calculated that foreign researchers cite researchers of their own ethnicity based in America 30-50% more often than you would expect if ethnic ties made no difference.

It is not just that Brazilian scientists in São Paulo read papers written by Brazilian scientists in America. There’s also gossip. Brazilian scientists in America will often alert their old classmates in São Paulo to intriguing research being done at the lab down the hall. And the information flows both ways.

A study in 2011 by the Royal Society found that cross-border scientific collaboration is growing more common, that it disproportionately involves scientists with diaspora ties and that it appears to lead to better science (using the frequency with which research is cited as a rough measure). A Chinese paper co-written with a scientist in America is cited three times as often as one produced solely in China.

Ramble on

Diaspora ties help businesses as well as scientists to collaborate. What may be the world’s cheapest fridge was conceived from a marriage of ideas generated by Indians in India and Indians overseas. Uttam Ghoshal, Himanshu Pokharna and Ayan Guha, three Indian-American engineers, had an idea for a cooling engine, based on technology used to cool laptop computers, that they thought might work in a fridge. In India visiting relatives they decided to show their idea to Godrej & Boyce, an Indian manufacturing firm.

Mr Pokharna wheedled an introduction from a young member of the Godrej family, exploiting the fact that both had been at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. They discovered that Godrej was already working on a cheap fridge for rural Indians too poor to fork out the $200 normally required, let alone the subsequent electric bills.

Jamshyd Godrej, the firm’s chairman, was determined to make a cheap battery-powered fridge. With the help of Mr Ghoshal’s cooling chip, his team produced the Chotu Kool (“little cool”): light, portable, small and cheap. Mr Ghoshal’s firm in Texas, Sheetak Inc, is working with Godrej to make it more efficient.

The “new type of hyperconnectivity” that enables such projects is fundamental to today’s networked diasporas, according to Carlo Dade, of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, a think-tank. “Migrants are now connected instantaneously, continuously, dynamically and intimately to their communities of origin…This is a fundamental and profound break from the past eras of migration.” That break explains why diasporas, always marginalised in the flat-map world of national territories, find themselves in the thick of things as the world becomes networked.

Shrewd firms are taking notice. China’s high-tech industry is dominated by returnees from abroad, such as Robin Li and Eric Xu, the founders of Baidu, China’s leading search engine. Asked how many of his top people had worked or studied abroad, N. Chandrasekaran, the boss of Tata Consulting Services, a big Indian IT firm, replies: “All of them.”

But despite that large percentage, newcomers settling into their lives still encounter discrimination and social exclusion and don’t always feel welcome. There are common beliefs and assumptions about newcomers that make their integration more difficult.

The Spectator asked local settlement workers, city staff and ethnic community leaders to highlight the top myths about immigrants they come across. We arrived at 10 common misconceptions and attitudes and looked to address them with recent research.

The City of Hamilton recognizes both the necessity of attracting immigrants and the challenges they face when they arrive here. The Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council (HIPC) was created in 2009 to “strengthen, broaden and enlarge” the presence of immigrants in the city. The process involves identifying and addressing problems that newcomers face as well as showcasing immigrants’ contributions to the community.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada recently held a series of cross-country consultations with stakeholders and the public to determine appropriate immigration levels and a suitable mix of economic class, family class and protected persons.

Rather than being just a big-city phenomenon, more than a quarter of the Canadian population in total is expected to be foreign-born in 30 years. A federal government backgrounder says Canada needs to increase immigration to almost 4 per cent of our population from the current 0.8 per cent to support our “old-age dependency ratio.”

“There are lots of myths and misconceptions around immigrants and immigration,” HIPC program manager Tim Rees said, adding these perceptions exist because immigration changes “the nature of our community” and affects our personal identity.

“There’s always a fear of the unknown,” he said.

Dr. Bruce Newbold, a professor of geography at McMaster University who has studied the subject of immigrants and homelessness, cites another reason.

“You hear the worst cases. They are the cases that get brought to our attention. But you never hear the good pieces associated with (immigrants). The arguments that run counter to those myths — we hear those less.”

Success stories are important for demonstrating that newcomers are valuable to the city, Rees said. “They contribute to the economy and they contribute in all sorts of other ways as well — to the social and cultural lives and vibrancy of the city.”

Here are 10 typical assumptions about newcomers and stories of immigrants who have defied them.

Myths

1. Immigrants steal jobs from residents born in Canada

The disavowal of foreign credentials or work experience often makes it difficult for newcomers to compete with others who have lived in the area longer.

The unemployment rate among recent immigrants in Hamilton in 2006 was 11.5 per cent. That’s twice as high as the rate for nonimmigrants. The gap in employment becomes smaller the longer the newcomer lives in Canada.

Almost half of recent immigrant families to Hamilton have an income below $40,000 and have a child poverty rate of more than 50 per cent, the highest of any subpopulation in the city.

Immigrant women, in particular, have a difficult experience finding work, as the unemployment rates for women in this group between ages 15 and 24 was about 19.9 per cent in 2006. This figure was twice the rate for women in this age range born in Canada.

Christine Wong, a settlement support worker with the St. Joseph’s Immigrant Women’s Centre, knows many immigrants who have lowered their standards when it comes to finding jobs and have taken positions that pay about 30 per cent less than the mainstream wages.

“We are at a disadvantage when we compete for jobs with the locals … We don’t have the local experience,” she said, adding many workplaces do not recognize foreign credentials. In fact, more than half of newcomers to Hamilton end up working entry-level jobs such as food-counter attendants, truck drivers and cashiers.

2. Newcomers are a drain on society, are lazy and tend to live off social assistance

Recent immigrants living in poverty depend less on social assistance and more on family support than other impoverished Canadians.

Only 16 per cent of immigrant families living in poverty were receiving social assistance benefits in 2004, compared to 33 per cent of Canadian-born low-income families who received benefits from social assistance programs.

That year, a third of low-income working-age recent immigrants were considered working poor, just a bit higher than the 27 per cent of other low-income persons who reported enough hours to be considered part of the working poor group.

Statistics suggest that immigrants bring skills and education and want to use them as quickly and “effectively” as they can, said Tim Rees, the city’s program manager of immigration. “And it’s difficult. There are barriers,” he said. “They want to work. They want to feel part of our community.”

A report released in 2007 revealed that the percentage of low-income, recent immigrant adults who had work-limiting disabilities was 11 per cent, significantly lower than the 26 per cent of other low-income Canadians who could not work because of their disabilities.

The definition of “immigrant” comes into play again in this discussion, Wong said.

Refugee claimants tend to rely on social assistance more because of the language and education barriers to finding employment, but many people do not differentiate between them and other categories of newcomers, she said.

But 60 per cent of newcomers recruited by Citizenship and Immigration Canada fall within economic class, while 26 per cent are family class and 14 per cent are refugees.

3. Newcomers to Canada are unskilled or uneducated

Actually, immigrants tend to come into the country with more education than their Canadian-born counterparts.

In 2006, more than half of the recent immigrants reported having university degrees, while only 19 per cent of the Canadian population had obtained one. Fewer immigrants were also without a high school diploma (9 per cent) compared to the Canadian average of 23 per cent.

In Hamilton, almost 40 per cent of working-age newcomers arriving in the city from 2003 to 2008 had a university degree or higher. More than 10 per cent had a master’s degree and 2.5 per cent had a doctorate.

This means that these recent immigrants were twice as likely to have a university degree, compared to other Hamiltonians ages 15 to 64.

Furthermore, reports show that low-income recent immigrants have usually completed higher levels of education compared to most other low-income adults.

In 2007, more than a third of immigrants considered to be in the low-income category had a university degree, while most other low-income adults had not graduated from high school and only 12 per cent had completed university.

Studies have shown that recent immigrants are also much more likely to be overqualified for their jobs and to stay overqualified in their employment positions for longer than Canadian-born residents.

A Statistics Canada report released in 2006 found more than 50 per cent of immigrants who had been in Canada 10 years or less with a university degree had worked in a job requiring only a high school education.

In comparison, 28 per cent of the Canadian-born population was found in the same situation.

However, an estimated 40 per cent of immigrants to Canada are working in the field for which they received training. For example, in 2008, more than 21 per cent of all physicians practicing in Canada were trained outside of the country.

In 2007, more than 6,000 entrepreneurs and investors became permanent residents in the country.

4. There are too many

Canada’s population is expected to increase to 35 million by 2015, but this is actually a decrease in annual growth rate.

While the rate between 1996 and 2005 was 1.1 per cent, the figure for the span between 2006 and 2015 is expected to be 0.9 per cent. This is attributed to the decline in the natural increase in population, which is births minus deaths, caused by low fertility rates and the slower increase in life expectancy.

International migration made up two-thirds of the country’s population growth in 2006. And immigration is expected to contribute to the country’s population growth, accounting for about 67.5 per cent of the population increase by 2015, cumulatively.

As the population grows, so will the country’s labour force. By 2031, it is expected to grow to a number between 20.5 million and 22.5 million people, up from 18.5 million in 2010.

In that same time frame, about a third of the labour force is expected to be foreign-born. In Ontario, this figure is projected to be 41 per cent.

But if Canada closed its doors to immigrants over the next two decades, the labour force would be reduced to less than 18 million by 2031 and start shrinking in 2017.

Locally, Hamilton does not have enough locally-raised people to fill the 29,000 jobs expected to be created by economic expansion and 21,000 positions made available because of retirement between 2006 and 2016.

5. Immigrants do not know how to speak English or do not want to learn to speak it

Almost all recent newcomers to Hamilton have a knowledge of one of Canada’s two official languages. About 92 per cent of immigrants arriving between 2001 and 2006 knew English or French.

About 30 per cent of immigrants say they speak English or French at home, while 62 per cent speak another language. The remaining newcomers speak a combination of official and other languages in their homes.

A Statistics Canada study released in 2005 found 58 per cent of recent immigrants surveyed said they were able to speak English well or very well after being in the country for six months. After four years, 69 per cent reported this level of English proficiency.

The more proficient an immigrant’s English is, the better the chances are of being employed. Those who reported speaking English well or very well were more likely to be hired in an “appropriate” job than those who indicated speaking the language at a lower level.

Italian is the most-spoken unofficial language in Hamilton.

Eighty per cent of the over a million newcomers to arrive between 2001 and 2006 spoke something other than English or French as their first language. The largest linguistic increases were the Chinese dialects — which were Canada’s third-most common mother tongue group — Punjabi, Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog and Tamil.

However, many times the myth that immigrants cannot speak English is based on an assumption about the newcomer’s accent, says Arsim Aliu, the YMCA’s immigrant settlement services program manager. “In fact, that person speaks very well in English, (but) you create that perception based on that person’s look or where they come from.”

Proficiency in one of the two languages is one of the six selection factors for skilled workers, who are assessed on their ability to listen, speak, read and write in English or French.

Skilled workers and professionals have to do an approved language test.

6. Immigrants increase the crime rates in the neighbourhoods in which they live

Research indicates that immigrants to Canada have lower overall crime rates than those who are nonimmigrants.

Furthermore, as the number of newcomers to Canada surges, overall crime in the country has continued to drop.

A study in the 1990s by the Correctional Service of Canada found that immigrants in all regions and age groups were under-represented among those serving two or more years in federal penitentiaries.

Stereotypes linking ethnic minorities and crime are formed because the issue of racial visibility, Wong said. “Because immigrants are visible — by their names, their look or their skin colour, people just jump to conclusions: ‘Oh, they are immigrants. They are criminals.’”

In fact, the immigrant is often used as the scapegoat for dominant society’s anxieties over identity, Rees said. “We don’t have the comfort level, the confidence necessarily, to live in a diverse and multicultural, multireligious community,” he said.

“And, partly, it’s our own insecurities and so the immigrant is an easy target.”

7. Immigrants do not want to integrate into “Canadian society”

Immigrants are more likely to become Canadian citizens than eligible newcomers in other similar countries.

A study published in 2005 found that 84 per cent of immigrants who had lived in Canada for at least three years were Canadian citizens in 2001. Meanwhile, in the U.K., only half of the immigrants who had lived in the country for five years were British citizens, and only 40 per cent of foreign-born residents had become citizens in the States.

Eligible African and Asian immigrants in Canada are more likely to obtain citizenship than those coming from the U.S. or Europe.

According to the 2006 census, 73 per cent of people born in another country have become Canadian citizens. In Hamilton, 80 per cent of immigrants have obtained citizenship.

“Compared to other countries, immigrants become Canadian citizens at a much higher rate than other places and as soon as they possibly can, as soon as they’re eligible,” Rees said.

“In terms of level of enthusiasm and level of commitment on the part of newcomers, they absolutely want to be part of Canadian society and identify strongly with Canadian society. And the symbolic importance of becoming a Canadian citizen is a good measure of that commitment.”

Rees also pointed to the increasing trend of mixed marriages in the country as an interesting phenomenon.

According to Statistics Canada, the number of mixed-race married and common-law couples had increased by a third in 2006 compared to 2001. The large majority of these couples were of a white person and a visible minority. Japanese people were the most likely to be part of a mixed union.

8. Newcomers are all the same; they all come with similar experiences

There are various definitions of immigrants and refugees.

An economic immigrant is selected based on his or her skills and ability to contribute to the country’s economy. This category includes skilled workers, business people and provincial nominees. About 41 per cent of the immigrants who came to Hamilton from 2003 to 2008 were in the economic class.

Family class immigrants consist of close relatives of a sponsor in Canada, including spouses, common-law partners or conjugal partners, dependent children, parents and grandparents. About 27 per cent of the immigrants to Hamilton from 2003 to 2008 were in this class.

Business immigrants include there groups: entrepreneurs, self-employed people and investors. Business immigrants’ permanent residency status is assessed on their ability to establish themselves economically in Canada.

A convention refugee is a person who is outside of the country they originally lived in because they are unable or, by reason of fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group of political opinion, unwilling to return.

Government-assisted refugees are selected for resettlement in the country as members of the Humanitarian-protected Persons Abroad classes and receive assistance from Ottawa.

A refugee protection claimant is someone seeking the protection of Canada upon arrival. He or she can apply for permanent residence when a final ruling is made that he or she is a “protected person.”

Privately-sponsored refugees are not sponsored by the government but are selected from abroad and receive resettlement assistance from other sources.

Foreign workers are in the country on a temporary basis and must have employment authorization.

9. Newcomers seclude themselves in geographical clusters or ghettos in cities

A 2004 Statistics Canada study that examined the three largest metropolitan areas in the country noted a large increase in the tendency of visible minorities to live in the same neighbourhood. But this trend is not about a desire to be separated from mainstream society.

Within these cities, minority neighbourhoods — which are areas in which a single visible minority group makes up more than 30 per cent of the population — exploded in a decade, rising to 254 in 2001, up from the six that existed in 1981.

The report found that the development of these neighbourhoods was largely due to the population growth through immigration over the past 20 years. The residential concentration of South Asians in Montreal and Vancouver and Chinese people in Toronto made up more than 40 per cent of the increased tendency to live within “own group” neighbourhoods.

But research shows the expansion of ethnic neighbourhoods is more a product of the increasing percentage of the group’s share in the city’s population than a rise in its overall residential concentration. Co-residence of members from different groups is a common feature in these neighbourhoods.

The concentration of newcomers in a particular geographical area does not mean they do not want to be included in mainstream society, Rees said.

“Partly it’s the housing market,” he said. “Newcomers (are) struggling with finding jobs and don’t have much money so they’re looking for the cheapest places to live. So there’s a tendency to congregate as a consequence of the housing market rather than an inclination to want to live within their own community.”

In Hamilton, there are various districts in which immigrants have established communities and ethnic-based businesses over the years. For example, one out of five people in Stoney Creek have an Italian background. In the section bordered by Green Road, Barton Street, Millen Road and Highway 8, 38 per cent of the population is of Italian descent.

In city’s North End, the neighbourhood bounded by Cannon Street and York Boulevard to the water from and from Wentworth Street to the high-level bridge, is 19 per cent Portuguese heritage.

Immigrants also live together because it provides them with more support from others who speak their language, Wong said. “For other lookers … they might assume they like to live together (because) they are not sociable with Canadian society. But it’s not true. It’s because of the social supports they get from their own community, mainly that’s the reason,” she said.

10. Newcomers receive special treatment (i.e. the social assistance they receive is higher than some Canadians’ wages, they don’t have to pay taxes)

“It’s very easy to use newcomers and immigrants as an easy population to blame, to ignore, to dismiss, to think that they’re getting unfair advantage over the rest of us. And they don’t,” Rees said.

Immigrants are required to pay the same taxes as all Canadian citizens and must also declare their income from all sources both from within the country and outside. They are also entitled to the same tax credits as other Canadians, including the Child Tax Benefit and the HST credit. They do not receive additional tax credits.

While low-income recent immigrants in 2004 seemed to be better off than other Canadians in terms of their income situation — they would have needed 32.5 per cent more family income to escape poverty while other low-income Canadians would have needed a 36.7 per cent raise — immigrant families were less reliant on social assistance than others in the category.

The federal government provides several programs to help refugees settle into their new country. The assistance available is often not long-term and not given to those who can sustain themselves or their families.

The resettlement assistance program, for example, helps refugees pay for temporary accommodation, basic household items and general orientation for up to one year or until they become self-sufficient.

The immigration loans program lends out funds to refugees for travel documents, transportation to Canada and costs of medical examinations abroad. Loans are awarded based on the applicants’ situation and their ability to pay it back with interest.

In addition, the interim federal health program is for refugee claimants, resettled refugees and victims of human trafficking who are unable to pay for health care. Parties receive benefits under this program until they are eligible for provincial coverage or a private health plan.

Sources: Statistics Canada, Hamilton Immigration Partnership Council, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Hamilton’s Vital Signs

Josephine Eric – Cathie Coward

Josephine Eric
Josephine Eric is the oldest of nine children born and raised in the Philippines. As is the case for many first-borns in her homeland, the financial responsibility of providing for her siblings was thrust upon her. When her parents faced the danger of losing their home, an employment opportunity as a nanny in Belgium opened up through her uncle, a diplomat.

At the time, Eric was 18. She gave up her university scholarship in the Philippines to babysit in Europe while taking French courses. After two years, she came to Hamilton under the live-in caregiver program. She fell in love with the many beautiful trails, the diversity of people and food, and peaches and maple syrup, but had a tumultuous time with her employer who forced her to work 14-hour days without overtime pay. When Eric asked for the money she was owed, they threatened to deport her.

It was a frightening time for Eric, who was using almost all the money she earned to help her parents make payments on their home and put her siblings through school, but neighbours and friends rallied around her, providing emotional support and helping her find a new employer.

Two years later, Eric attained landed immigrant status and worked three minimum wage jobs to support her family in the Philippines. At some point, she saw the futility of her efforts and decided to finally pursue the education she had always dreamt of and had to give up.

She studied Anthropology and Political Science at the University of Calgary. She got a Master’s degree in Labour Studies from McMaster University and another in Anthropology from the University of Toronto. She continued working three jobs while going to school full-time to support her family — at a restaurant in the evenings, at a day care in the mornings, and a convenience store on the weekends. This superwoman also found the time to get married and raise five children of her own. Now 40, she has just wrapped up her thesis at the University of Toronto and works full-time at the Good Shepherd Centre.

“I guess I am kind of overdoing it now because I am still in school and compensating for my desire that never happened right away,” she said with a laugh.

Eric’s thesis projects on Philippine women in Canada and the religious experiences of Filipinos in Canada led to the creation of the Migrant Workers’ Family Resource Centre. The volunteer-run centre provides support to immigrants, especially caregivers, in difficult and abusive circumstances similar to Eric’s own situation when she first came to Canada.

Also, by being involved in a York University project to study why success rates of second generation Filipinos is lower compared to people of other ethnic backgrounds, Eric hopes to help later generations of immigrants make their own contributions to their new country. She very much wants to lend support to new immigrants the same way an entire community in Hamilton helped her when she needed it the most.

“I have good friends in Canada. I don’t think I could have ever made it this far if I didn’t have friends, from church and also outside.”

Yar Taraky – Kaz Novak

Yar Taraky

After 13 years in Canada, Yar Taraky is becoming somewhat of an icon in Hamilton.

Originally from Afghanistan, he has appeared as an expert guest speaker on South Asian politics on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. He has contributed to Hamilton’s art community through the Immigrant Culture and Art Association by being a mentor to other artists and by teaching art to youth. He says that he and his family — a wife and three grown kids — are all infected with a “spirit” to do as much as they can for their community. They have served on numerous advisory committees and volunteered with many local groups.

“We all left (Afghanistan) with that spirit and we are giving back what we received from the city and from the community. Everybody in the family has that spirit and we really thrive from that that we have to contribute to the community,” said Taraky.

When Taraky, 47, came to Hamilton in 1998 to escape the civil war ravaging his homeland, he had an infection in his foot that might have required amputation. He said Canada’s health care system saved his foot, and that it was the first time he received something without having to give first.

As a newcomer, he also received help from settlement agencies and other organizations

He went to college for CAD courses.

He also took law and management courses at the University of Toronto. He obtained his Canadian licence as an architect (he got his original training in Russia) and began designing health care facilities such as dialysis and emergency centres.

In 2009 he became a director in an agency that promotes private sector development and reforms in Afghanistan. His urban development project involves the creation of a new city — Kabul New City — for 1.5 million people on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital.

The project is supported by the Asian Development Bank and other international organizations.

Taraky said that he is using all the skills and knowledge he obtained in Hamilton to build a city just as livable in Afghanistan.

“Keep in mind that Afghani cities don’t have any bylaws, they don’t have any regulations, so you have to create something from scratch. So, it requires lots of ground work,” he said.

Hamilton, and Canada in general, have clearly made a strong impression on Taraky. He said that although many Canadians take it for granted, it is unusual to have a place where people are well-educated about their rights and responsibilities. He says Hamilton’s “inclusivity is very attractive,” and remains steadfast in his belief that immigrants create jobs — he himself has hired many people — and are the “backbone of growth in Canada,” especially through the “chain of providing good will.”

“You will never lose by providing proper services to immigrants, particularly in Hamilton which is a very diverse community.”

Virbala Kumar – Kaz Novak

Virbala Kumar

Virbala Kumar was born and raised in Kenya, the child of Indian parents who had emigrated there. Adverse political conditions in the early 1960s forced her parents and siblings to resettle. Kumar trained as a nurse in England and came to Toronto in 1969 at 27.

“I was very lucky because nurses were very much in demand. I walked into Ontario House in London, applied, they had a job for me and even held the job for me for six months.” When she arrived, she began working at the Toronto East General Hospital while completing exams to meet Ontario’s nursing standards. Her marriage to a Hamiltonian four years later brought her here.

Now 68 and retired, Kumar is as busy, perhaps even more so, as while she was working, taking courses to upgrade her skills and raising two sons. She leads recycling efforts at the Hindu Samaj temple and educates new immigrants who are not used to recycling. She helps organize walks for cancer and blood donations. Her deep opposition to “abuse of any sort” led her to join the board of Interval House, participate in the city’s Seniors’ Advisory Committee, and act in a play to raise awareness about seniors’ abuse.

One of her most important contributions to Hamilton is her joint role in the Seniors Seva Mandal. Seva means “service” and mandal means “group.” The mandal, funded by the Local Health Integration Network, organizes gatherings for seniors who may otherwise face isolation as they age.

Affected by the loneliness her own parents struggled with in Canada before they passed away, Kumar was determined not to allow cultural and language barriers prevent other seniors from enjoying their golden years.

The mandal organizes gatherings and catered lunches three times a week at three different locations — Hindu Samaj temple on Twenty Road, Chedoke Twin Pad Arena and Stoney Creek United Church. People do yoga, exercise, listen to Indian music, dance and play cards and other games.

“It’s a very energetic group of seniors. They love it,” said Kumar.

She adds that newcomers to the gatherings are often “quiet and meek.” After a while, “suddenly, they are volunteering for singing and in the gharba dancing … That transformation is very endearing. I get goosebumps and I just want to run and hug them.”

The gatherings have proved to be very popular among Hamilton seniors from many different cultural backgrounds with anywhere from 35 to 50 people attending each day. By providing them with an avenue to have an active and enriching social life, Kumar has effectively destroyed the myth that immigrants only interact within their own communities.

This article is for personal use only courtesy of TheSpec.com – a division of Metroland Media Group Ltd.

These traditions are ancient and hark back to an era where agriculture was a predominant occupation. How does it therefore have relevance to us as immigrants in Canada who are, like most North Americans, much removed from any form of farming as our occupation?

To me it is a time to say thank you to Canada and it’s people for what we have received and what we are about to receive. In the past thirteen years that I have been in Canada I have, like many immigrants, had my share of struggles and I know that the challenges of life are lifelong, but I have been so fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve my adopted country. I have had the pleasure of meeting so many interesting people and have learned from so many of them that I am truly thankful. And as I go across this wonderful country speaking to immigrants and helping them understand how to succeed, I always encourage them to embrace this country and to fall in love with its natural beauty and understand its history. And every time I talk about this to immigrants I am always asked “so what is the best thing about Canada?” and my reply is always the same – its people. As someone who has lived in four countries and seven cities I have met many people from different walks of life but none as embracing of a newcomer as a Canadian.

So on this day I say thanks to this nation, acknowledge its history and thank Canadians from coast to coast. Thank you for being who you are!

So what’s the solution? In the past year I have travelled across Canada speaking to almost a thousand immigrants one on one in the GTA, Southwest Ontario and Metro Vancouver and I have heard from them firsthand their stories and challenges. The system needs correction and Minister Kenney has undertaken a democratic consultation process of meeting stakeholders to find out what is needed. I was at a roundtable meeting with him on July 20 in Toronto, where I shared some ideas.

As someone who has been closely watching this situation for over a decade as an immigration activist, here are five suggestions. None of them are easy. This is the bitter pill we must swallow in order to make Canada a country of choice for immigrants as well as allow us to select the cream of international talent.

1. Throw out all applications prior to one year ago and start afresh. Yes, refund the application fees to those on the waiting list. Immigrants have been waiting for their visas and are now coming in their late 50s. It is hard enough for a Canadian-born person to compete for a job in that age bracket, let alone a newcomer with additional language and credential recognition challenges. They are being set up to fail. New applications should be allowed under new specific rules, as follows.

2. Increase points for language and drop moderate, basic or no proficiency. Research reports coming in year after year show one thing. Immigrants with low level language skills are not making the cut. They are doomed to a lower than qualified subsistence level. Australia’s experiment with raising the language bar resulted in a 70% positive outcome for immigrants. This is NOT a popular move and will have several special interest groups protesting, but it is good for Canada. As things stand today, if you have a PhD and the requisite work experience with “moderate“ language skills in just one official language, you can still get in. In my experience, that will NOT translate into employment! We are creating a nation of literate illiterates — literate by virtue of their degrees, but illiterate on language skills. Fact is, we are not helping these immigrants by letting them into Canada when they are not going to be part of our economic growth. This will also reduce the flood of applications to only those with the right language tools to succeed.

3. Change the age range. At present, the age range for maximum points to enter Canada is 21-49. That range is too wide. Given the average five years it takes to come in, I see far too many immigrants who are in their mid-50s struggling to find suitable employment. Points for age should instead be broken into blocks of 10 years: applicants aged 21-31 receive 10 points. 32-42 get eight points, and so on. Younger immigrants learn the soft skills that they need in order to succeed faster.

4. Enhance the entrepreneurship category. What do Intel, Google, Sun Microsystems and eBay have in common? All were started by immigrants! The U.S. is finally getting it. Immigrant entrepreneurs have fuelled their economy for decades. At one time, 60% of patents registered in Silicon Valley came from immigrants! Even now, one-third of tech start-ups in Michigan are owned by immigrants. They have realized that post-911, with lower numbers of immigrants due to security reasons, their innovations dropped. They now have a think tank that reports to President Obama on building this back up.

A University of British Columbia professor gave Canada a failing grade when it came to encouraging immigrant entrepreneurs. As things stand today, entrepreneurship for immigrants is a default position when they are unable to find suitable employment commensurate with their education and experience. Open this up by allowing these entrepreneurs to access capital and loans from organizations like BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) and EDC (Export Development Canada).

Also, let’s create a specific program that allows Canadian small business owners set to retire to specifically bring in immigrant entrepreneurs as part of a succession plan.

5. Improve provincial nominee programs to meet language requirements. This program has worked well in Manitoba and other Western provinces, but in a report from the Toronto Immigrant Employment Data Initiative (TIEDI) almost 16% of principal applicants spoke neither French nor English! Again, as mentioned, high language proficiency should be emphasized. Minister Kenney has said himself that immigrants aren’t making enough use of ESL instruction once in Canada. Having a country without a strong common language bond can have substantial social repercussions leading to proliferation of ethnic silos. Bringing in people through PNPs who can speak the language and hit the ground running is what provinces need.

As I said before, these are hard decisions, but we need to do what is best for the future of Canada. We also need to treat applicants with fairness and not waste their time as they wait years to come to Canada, only to face many challenges they are not prepared to deal with once they finally land. Most importantly, we need skilled immigrants in Canada who can speak the language, hit the ground running, bring innovation, create jobs and pay taxes! Period!
Nick Noorani is Canada’s best-known immigrant advocate, the founder of Canadian Immigrant magazine and is currently Managing Partner Destination Canada Info Inc., a company that helps immigrants and international students get information before they land in Canada. Contact Nick at nick@nicknoorani.com.

The Canadian Immigrant magazine was not just any entrepreneurial venture; for me, it was a way to reduce the time it takes for an immigrant to succeed in Canada, and make them productive tax payers! There was never a situation of two sides. Canada needs immigrants and their success has a direct impact upon Canada’s economy.

So while the UK, Germany, France and Australia questioned and denounced multiculturalism, we Canadians didn’t think we would have that problem – after all, poll after poll kept showing Canadians supported immigration. Alas, it was only a matter of time before the virus came to our idyllic shores.

Enter Rob Ford – now Mayor of Toronto – Canada’s largest city. A city where 50% of the population is born outside of Canada. Also a city where 50% of all immigrants to Canada land. During the municipal election campaign, Ford questioned the need to have more immigrants come to Toronto. Maybe his remarks were aimed at the Tamil boat refugees, but the monster was peeking out of the closet. Ironically, immigrants voted Ford in!

And now we have the biggest seat in Ontario being contested – the Premier’s office. The first announcement came from McGuinty: companies hiring immigrants get $10,000 towards training (whatever that means). Hudak responded by calling it ‘affirmative action,’ an American term really as in Canada we call it employment equity. Hudak then went on to talk about the fact that ‘foreigners’ would get preference over Canadians. The beast had been unleashed.

Coming out of a recession where hundreds of thousands were jobless, all they needed was a new target to aim their ire. It was an old one: ‘foreign people taking away our jobs’! In the melee that ensued, the division between immigrants and Canadians grew and McGuinty promised that the program would be for immigrants who had been in the country less than five years and were Canadian citizens. WOW! Where will you find them? Most immigrants have bigger priorities than forking out $200 per adult to apply for Citizenship.

In the noise that ensued with both sides the poor immigrant got sandwiched. I am confused myself. I thought under the Charter permanent residents or immigrants had the same rights as Canadians with the exception of the right to vote which only came with citizenship. So who are the ‘foreigners’?

In 2005 I spoke before the Parliamentary committee on Citizenship and Immigration and made a proposal that the Government give a tax incentive to corporations that give immigrants their first job in their field. The fact is that as a country we do have similar programs for First Nations and Aboriginals, for mothers, for the physically challenged and for youth entering the workforce. Why not something similar that would help the country socially and economically? Canada spends over $600 million helping immigrants with settlement services but the fact is that employers still are risk-averse to hiring a newcomer. My proposal was interestingly picked up in 2006 when Conservative MP Dianne Ablonczy proposed it.

Someday I will have a bumper sticker made – “Be nice to immigrants, they will pay your medical and CPP when you retire!”

Talk back to me on Prepare for Canada Facebook page!
Until next Monday.
Nick Noorani

Canadian immigration is, indeed, at the crossroads, and this nationwide consultation is a golden opportunity to further open the doors to those who would make Canada a leader of the 21st-century economy.

Enter the high-tech immigrant entrepreneur.

The notion of the “Startup Visa” is gathering steam in the United States. Foreign-born entrepreneurs are behind more than half the start-ups in Silicon Valley alone. Hence the concerted effort by American businesses and opinion makers to make the U.S. a haven for enterprising techies, to kick-start exciting new business ventures and create jobs for Americans.

In Canada, our government has adopted a blinkered, short-sighted strategy in which immigrants are simply hands for hire to fill labour shortages, rather than vital players in building a new knowledge-driven economy.

The new “streamlined” process involves a fast track for people in certain fields. It’s a motley of professions from cook to cardiologist, with an emphasis on health professionals, technicians and engineers.

To the prospective immigrant, this list is highly misleading as fields such as dentistry and family medicine are impossible for immigrants to break into, thanks to the professional and accrediting bodies that act as overzealous gatekeepers and multiply the hurdles for foreign-trained professionals. Hence the all too common doctor-turned-cabdriver phenomenon in our cities.

There’s an immigrant entrepreneur program at Immigration Canada that’s now indefinitely suspended. This is a real shame, because this is the very channel through which we would get the best “recruits.”

Indeed, immigrant selection in Canada in the 21st century should be carried out by headhunters, not paper-pushers. We should have our immigration agents in Bangalore, Seoul and Moscow scour campuses and companies for promising new technology entrepreneurs.

Then imagine a panel of angel investors, chief technology officers, academics and entrepreneurs back in Canada judging the entrepreneur, his technology and his business idea. Most important, they would evaluate the idea’s potential to create jobs in Canada.

A Dragon’s Den for immigrant entrepreneurs. Minus the cameras and the icy stares.

The results could be spectacular and could potentially create new clusters of excellence in clean energy, mobile communications, life sciences and so on.

Indeed, many countries such as China, Morocco, South Korea, India and Russia are teeming with entrepreneurial young engineers armed with patent applications and prototypes but who feel stifled by red tape or corruption, sometimes both.

In Canada, on the other hand, we have an ecosystem to nurture the entrepreneurial talent of engineers, through a vast network of angel investors, venture capitalists, technology incubators, a highly talented pool of scientists and engineers and arguably the most generous R&D tax credit program in the world.

What’s missing from the equation, however, is a critical mass of technological entrepreneurs and risk-takers ready to strike out on their own. And this is where immigrants would come in.

For this to happen requires nothing less than a paradigm shift: from labour-market needs to long-term economic growth, choosing job creators over job seekers.

As our government contemplates the future of immigration, it should brand Canada not simply as a nice, welcoming country but one that actively seeks and nurtures the best minds and ideas from all over the world. In fact, we ought to have our own version of the “Uncle Sam wants you” poster, with his finger squarely pointing not at future conscripts but at enterprising scientists and engineers who dare to think big.

Sumitra Rajagopalan is an adjunct professor of biomechanics at McGill University and the founder of Bioastra Technologies, an R&D company specializing in biomedical devices.

We want skilled workers, or so goes the mantra. But the set of skills most likely to create jobs – entrepreneurship, or that intangible mix of creativity, personal drive and business acumen – gets short shrift in our immigration system.

Immigrants on both sides of the border have been a driving force behind innovation, job creation and entrepreneurship, from Google’s Sergey Brin to Intel’s Andy Grove, Research In Motion’s Mike Lazaridis and Lee Lau, who started ATI Technologies which has since sold for $5.4-billion.

Canada, however, has done a generally poor job of recruiting the most promising entrepreneurs. The federal government recently suspended its entrepreneur-class immigrant program after waiting times ballooned and the number of successful applications dwindled. It says the program needs an overhaul and is studying how to attract and retain innovative entrepreneurs.

Under former rules, entrepreneurs needed $300,000 in net worth, a threshold that deterred many immigrants, young people in particular. The other challenge: waiting times of up to eight years in the entrepreneur class. Immigration lawyer Sergio Karas says that wait is driving away the best and the brightest.

The review comes amid a growing public debate over the level and mix of immigrants entering the country. The discussion isn’t just about immigration, though; it plays into the very notion of what kind of a country citizens want Canada to be.

Mr. Karas believes entrepreneurs with a proven track record in their home country should be vaulted to the very top of the priority list, ahead of every other type of newcomer, including skilled workers.

“We need someone who’s going to create the next RIM, or the next Magna. … We should make a commitment as a nation that this is what we want from our immigration system,” Mr. Karas says.

The first step is to attract aspiring entrepreneurs. In that respect, “Canada has lost a bit of its edge in the past few years,” says Andy Jasuja, founder of tech firm Sigma Group, who is based in Toronto but spoke from a business trip in New Delhi. “It still has a good brand, no doubt about it. But these days, countries are competing for talent, and entrepreneurs are in very, very short supply.”

Promising young people nowadays are drawn to Australia, which is aggressively promoting itself to them, says Mr. Jasuja, who started his business in 1990 and now employs 800 people in Canada and India. He believes Canada should market itself to global entrepreneurs more assertively and create a whole “ecosystem” that nurtures new businesses – for example, giving them a tax holiday for the first few years of a startup.

Canada – an innovation laggard – would see rich rewards from getting it right. At every level of analysis, immigrants boost innovation, the Conference Board of Canada has found. Newcomers have disproportionate success in research, spark business ideas, expand trade relations and bring greater foreign direct investment, it said in a study last fall.

In the U.S, a whopping 25 per cent of all venture-backed public companies started between 1990 and 2005 had at least one immigrant as a key founder, including companies such as eBay. Immigrant-founded venture companies are clustered in the most innovative corners of the economy – high-technology manufacturing, information technology and life sciences.

It’s not enough to attract them. The next step is to ensure the soil is fertile for them to flourish once they arrive.

***

Some newcomers arrive in Canada aiming to start a business off the bat. Others turn to entrepreneurship out of necessity, lack of job opportunities or happenstance, and typically face more headwinds. Either way, immigrants are far more likely than Canadian-born people to be self-employed.

Kam Ko fits into the latter category. The Hong Kong engineer started his Ontario business in 1993 by chance, after a customer gave him an extra order to weld parts. The first year was a slog: he couldn’t get a bank loan, so he borrowed start-up money from family. He kept his full-time day job and then toiled in his rented shop as a “janitor, cleaner, engineer, robot programmer and also operator” until one or two in the morning.

The hard work bore fruit. After the first year, he quit his regular job and began to hire others. He got a patent for a new type of ergonomic dental chair. Now his company, Kobotic Ltd., has expanded into robotics and design and exports products worldwide. Nearly all of his 40 employees are newcomers, even though some struggle with English, because he knows how hard it can be to get Canadian work experience.

“I look at entrepreneurs as two types,” he says. “The first have money and experience already. … The second are younger and not as well-to-do, yet they have a lot of ideas and energy. We should make it easier for them.”

Mr. Ko says aspiring entrepreneurs could use something he didn’t have – help navigating the system.

Support needn’t be complicated, or, in this age of austerity, expensive. But so far, much of it has been piecemeal and varies by province and city.

Some schools, such as York University, are running bridging programs to help immigrant professionals adjust to the Canadian labour market. Mentoring and apprenticeships have been shown to improve immigrants’ outcomes, by expanding their networks and giving them Canadian experience.

Social networking sites, such as LoonLounge, which has 52,000 members, make connecting and getting advice easier. This spring, the Business Development Bank of Canada and the Canadian Youth Business Foundation teamed up to announce financing of up to $15,000 for young entrepreneurs who are newcomers. At an entrepreneurial boot camp – aimed at the next 36 young leaders of Canada – half of its inaugural winners are immigrants.

Marion Annau is founder and president of Connect Legal, a new charity that gives legal education and advice to immigrants with few resources who want to start a business. She helps people untangle the complex legalese of contracts, for example, and is seeing demand for her services grow.

“We open the doors to Canada and we say we are the land of opportunity,” she says. “And we get some fantastic talent – the people I deal with are incredibly smart, driven, determined – and we need to harness that talent when it comes.”

By the numbers

291

Number of immigrants who landed as permanent residents last year as entrepreneurs, down from 820 in 2006.

19

Percentage of immigrant workers who were self-employed in the late 2000s, compared with 15 per cent of the Canadian-born population.

33

Percentage of immigrants in 2000 who pursued self-employment because of a lack of job opportunities in the paid labour market.

42

Average age of immigrant entrepreneurs admitted to Canada last year, at the time of their application.

71

Percentage of immigrants who entered self-employment voluntarily, motivated by entrepreneurial values, versus 59 per cent among their Canadian-born peers.

Sources: Conference Board of Canada, Citizen and Immigration Canada, Statistics Canada.

TAVIA GRANT
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Jul. 31, 2011 6:57PM EDT
Last updated Sunday, Jul. 31, 2011 10:46PM EDT