Changes to immigration policy will affect nearly all aspects of Canadian life

Member nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co...
Member nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Countries depicted are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea (South), Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, United States, Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, People's Republic of China, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Chile, Peru, Russian Federation and Vietnam. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

The Canadian immigration landscape is shifting beneath our feet. When the dust settles, where will Canada be?
Some of the proposed changes, such as dealing with the backlog, are long overdue. Other changes may also be necessary. They will nevertheless have a series of unintended consequences for the makeup of Canada’s immigrant population and its ethnic diversity. It is these consequences that we should be concerned about.
Recently, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration has spoken highly of the Australian immigration model with its strict language requirements. High levels of language proficiency are a requirement in our labour market. But raising the bar on language competency may trigger an increase in immigration from English-speaking countries – Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand – at the cost of immigrants from emerging economic superpowers such as China, India, Russia and Brazil.
Add to this administrative changes such as the closing of visa offices in Bangladesh, Iran and elsewhere and we will begin to see a shift in source countries. Recent media reports show that the numbers of immigrants applying for permanent residence from China, India, the Philippines and Pakistan fell drastically in 2011 – perhaps in response to changes made to our immigrant selection system in the last year.
What implications will these changes have for Canada’s future? One unintended consequence relates to the success of second-generation immigrants. Research shows that the children of immigrants have higher rates of postsecondary education than those of non-immigrant Canadians. What’s more, those born to parents from Africa, China and other Asian countries attend university and college at far higher rates than both non-immigrant Canadians and those born to immigrants from anglosphere countries.
The changes are coming at a furious pace on an almost daily basis. By seeking to eliminate the backlog by expunging those waiting in the queue, we choose efficiency over fairness. By moving to “super visas” and away from permanent residence for our immigrants’ parents and grandparents, we choose transience over inclusion. When employers select workers who will become future citizens with little guidance, we choose head-hunting over nation-building. When we raise the bar on language, we choose homogeneity over diversity. By streamlining the refugee adjudication process, we may well be choosing efficiency over human rights. Finally, when we say to employers, “Pay temporary foreign workers less than you might pay Canadians,” we choose exploitation over fairness.
And yet, no one has asked us what we think about these changes.
Immigration policy touches almost every aspect of Canadian life and is too important to be made in a piecemeal manner. It determines who our neighbours are, who we sit with on the bus and who our children go to school with. It goes to the very heart of our imagination of ourselves as a people.
To simply maintain our population and keep our standard of living, we will need to welcome hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year. To compete with global cities such as New York, London and Hong Kong, our cities must grow substantially and sustainably. Immigration can never be the only solution, but we ignore immigration and its accompanying diversity, including their knock-on effects on issues such as international relations, trade and innovation, at our peril. We need to bear in mind that Canada’s success as a multicultural society is an essential and defining part of our international brand.
It’s important that The Globe and Mail brings focus, debate and discussion to these issues, but this debate cannot take place only through the news media. We need to include all Canadians in this discussion – in Parliament, in committee rooms, at the chambers of commerce and industry associations, labour unions, resident associations, local and provincial governments, not-for-profits and civil society organizations, faith groups, think tanks, academics and in our communities. Together we must answer the questions:
• Why do we have immigration?
• How should we do it?
• How do we achieve our short- and long-term goals?
Let’s have this discussion. Our future prosperity depends on it.
Ratna Omidvar is president of the Maytree Foundation.

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Let the job market choose our immigrants

Senate Chamber, Centre Block of the Parliament...
Senate Chamber, Centre Block of the Parliament of Canada Français : Chambre du Sénat, édifice du Centre du Parlement du Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From Friday's Globe and Mai

Since the early 1980s, Canada’s immigration selection policies have focused on the principal applicant’s highest educational achievements and language skills, explicitly to ensure that immigrants would be suitable for employment and economically successful once they arrived.

But data based on the 2005 census and published by Statistics Canada show these policies have not been successful. Immigrants who arrived between 1987 and 2004 earned incomes that were on average equal to only 70 per cent of the incomes of Canadians. These recent immigrants have higher than average levels of unemployment and lower labour force participation rates. They also disproportionately have incomes below the official poverty line.
Significantly, these recent immigrants pay income taxes that are only 54 per cent of the national average. Because of their low incomes, they also pay less than the average in other taxes. At the same time, these immigrants are entitled to all of Canada’s generous social programs and enjoy the benefits of the country’s spending on infrastructure and security.
In our paper Fiscal Transfers to Immigrants in Canada: Responding to Critics and a Revised Estimate, my co-author Patrick Grady and I estimated that the average new recent immigrant is imposing a fiscal burden on Canadians of about $6,000 annually as they use that much more in government services than they pay in taxes. The total fiscal burden in 2012 was around $20-billion for immigrants who arrived between 1987 and 2011.
This fiscal burden will never be repaid. The 2005 employment income of the sons of second-generation visible-minority immigrants (where one or both parents were born abroad), was only two-thirds of non-immigrant Canadians. Third and later generations will most likely have the same average incomes as other Canadians and thus will never pay enough taxes to compensate for the fiscal shortfall recorded by their parents.
Reforms of the present immigrant selection policies are needed to prevent a growing future fiscal burden. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has begun this process.
One of the most important changes is giving preference to applicants who have a pre-arranged employment contract for work in Canada. Patrick Grady and I recommended this change because it would relieve civil servants of the responsibility of selecting immigrants on the basis of information that by its very nature is imperfect and would allow employers to make the initial decision as to which applicants have the needed occupational and language skills to earn their pay and become economically successful Canadians.
Limited experience with this prearranged job-offer criterion, which provincial governments have also embraced enthusiastically, shows much promise. It is time to use job offers as the main criterion for the admission of all skilled immigrants, who may be accompanied by their immediate family members.
The successful operation of this system will require a quick approval process and continued government involvement in its administration and the screening of immigrants to protect public security and health. Adequate resources must be devoted to monitor the income tax returns of immigrants to make sure they are indeed paid the amount promised in the employment contract and that they have not become unemployed for prolonged periods.
The avoidance of the fiscal burden also requires that the immigrants’ prearranged contract offers pay equal to at least the average income of Canadians. This condition is needed to prevent a flood of low-skilled immigrants with little earnings capacity who would not pay enough taxes to cover the cost of the public social programs to which they are entitled.
The proposed policy would not only stop the growth of the fiscal burden but would solve two problems associated with the present system. It would make the number of immigrants responsive to business-cycle conditions and would determine how many immigrants are allowed to enter Canada annually.
This number would no longer be the result of arbitrary decisions driven by politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups but would be determined by labour market conditions and thus better serve the needs of the economy and all Canadians.
Herbert Grubel is a professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University and a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.

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