BY ALISON RAMSEY
Studies in both the United States and Canada have shown that job creation increases and the economy improves as the number of immigrants swells. Immigrants are, as a group, better educated than Canadians and since 1967, when the government introduced its point system, the selection process favours those with marketable skills.
Is there a market here for skilled labour? Actually, Canada is seeing signs of worker shortages in several professions – including engineers, doctors and nurses, to name a few. Added to this is the fact that the population in some provinces is shrinking, and employers are having difficulty filling their rosters with skilled help. Paul Darby, director of the Conference Board of Canada, estimates a shortfall of 3 million skilled workers by the year 2020.
Boosting immigration could be a very effective way of helping to ease the shortage, but there are other impediments.
Immigrants often have difficulty working in their fields after they arrive. On average, it takes 10 years for immigrants to get hired in jobs for which they have skills and, even then, they are not necessarily working at the skill level to which they have been trained. In March, Jeffrey Reitz of University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations, released a study showing that immigrants whose skills are underused cost the Canadian economy $2.4 billion yearly. He also estimated that they are underpaid to the tune of $12.6 billion every year. No type of job is exempt. "We used comparisons across the labour force," says Reitz.
Some organizations are answering the growing demand by helping immigrants become licensed to work in Canada after they arrive. The Ontario Ministry of Education, for example, is spending $12 million over three years to help get more foreign-trained medical professionals – nurses, doctors and pharmacists – into their professions. The money is given to local professionals associations to recruit and retain personnel. Another $3.5 million is being spent by the province to train foreign professionals to ensure they meet Canadian standards.
Yet, at the same time, experts are worried that the flow of immigrants is about to dry up, thanks to legislation coming into effect in June that changes the rules for people hoping to enter the county. Reitz says the proposed guidelines constitute a much more stringent selection criteria. He theorizes that the government hopes to eliminate a backlog of applicants, which numbers about 660,000 people. The Association of Immigration Counsel of Canada has run dozens of scenarios to determine how many of the 660,000 would be eligible under the new guidelines. "We anticipate that only five to eight percent will be allowed in," he says. The problem, adds Reitz, is when the backlog is gone but the need for skilled workers remains.
Growing demand for skilled labour is not limited to Canada. In India and China, for instance, the high-tech industry is developing. Workers from those countries who might have had to emigrate to ply their job skills in the past, now have a better chance of finding work at home. Even after skilled workers arrive, it can be a challenge to keep them here: the United States is also eager to attract the best and the brightest.
According to a survey by Canada’s Federation of Independent Business, one out of 20 jobs remains unfilled because of an inability to find suitably skilled labour. This represents about 250,000 to 300,000 vacant jobs in small- and medium-sized businesses alone. The lack is not just in professions that require higher education. The worst off are employers looking for skilled construction workers, who reported 7.7 percent of jobs went unfilled. They are followed closely by the business services and agriculture sectors. Hospitals and the personal service sector ranked tenth at 3.8 percent.
The need is greatest in Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta.
Wealthy Chinese flock to the West
Image by williamcho via FlickrGrowing numbers of rich Chinese are applying for permanent residency in Western countries under programmes that allow investors with a high net worth to "buy" citizenship.
The number of Chinese investors granted permanent residency in Canada has doubled in two years. Ottawa has now halted all applications to its federal immigrant investor programme while it consults on plans to double the funds needed to obtain a visa.
Applicants are still allowed to apply to a scheme run by the province of Quebec, however,
And at seminars run by visa consultancy firms in China, advisers are encouraging people to apply for the scheme before Quebec also doubles its minimum requirements to match the federal government's proposals.
Cash and experience
The average age is 40 to 45, says visa consultant Vincent Chen
On a rainy Saturday afternoon, in a conference room at a five-star Shanghai hotel, more than 30 potential "investor applicants" arrive to hear how they might be able to exchange their cash for a foreign passport.Many are in their 30s. There are several young couples. Most are professionals. Few are dressed smartly. They appear to be a pretty average cross-section of Shanghai's moneyed middle class.
They are shown a video that the visa company has made to promote Canada, and the country's visa application service.
"You don't have to worry about integrating," the video's commentary declares. "You don't even need to speak English."
Then the advisers go through the detail.
The Quebec scheme requires applicants to show they have a net worth of C$800,000 (US$776,000; £502,000) and they must invest up to C$400,000.
They also need to show they have had two years' experience in management.
Different requirements That's considerably cheaper, they point out, than the UK, which requires investors to invest £1m ($1.5m) for five years.
Canada's applications currently take about two-and-a-half years, but the financial requirements are the lowest in the world.
The United States requires applicants to invest up to $1m (£646,000) in a business that creates at least 10 new jobs. Applications take up to one-and-a-half years.
The UK's application process is the quickest. It can be completed in just three months, according to the visa consultants at the seminar, and there is no interview.
But it is also the most costly.
"Usually, the applicants are business owners or senior managers," explains Vincent Chen, senior consultant for the Visa Consulting Group.
"The average age is 40 to 45, but it's getting younger."
Easily achievable Canada has not changed its "immigrant investor" programme requirements since 1991.
Some just want the passport before they move back to China
"Back then, C$800,000 was a huge amount," Mr Chen says."But now, with the increases in property prices in cities like Shanghai, people don't think it's that hard to achieve.
"That's why you've seen the numbers granted permanent residency have doubled."
Other factors are also at work here.
Increasingly, those who come to the seminars have friends who have already emigrated.
Reasons to move
David Lu, 38, a manager in a telecommunications company, has come to the seminar to find out more about how to apply to move to Canada.
End Quote Dr Wang Huiyao Centre for China and Globalisation
At the end of the session he starts filling in the forms eagerly.He has positive reasons to move. Some of his relatives already live in Canada. And during holidays there he has enjoyed the lower pollution levels there.
Also, he says, the Canadians are "a lot more relaxed" than the Chinese.
There are other reasons though why he wants to leave China.
"People hate you [here] if you have money, and the rich bully the poor," he says.
"Another issue for me is health care," he adds.
"I don't think anyone interested in moving abroad would worry about the costs. We want their better quality medical care."
Brain drain
Fabio Xu, 30, runs a paint company in Shanghai.
He says he wants to move to the US "because of the better medical care there, and better educational opportunities for my child".
"In China, all my money goes on my mortgage, food, clothing and travel," he says, "but in the States there's generally more freedom. I would be able to develop myself more creatively and get more out of life."
Some Chinese academics worry that China is losing its brightest and most able citizens, as well as huge amounts of money.
Last year 1,823 investors were granted citizenship in Canada under the immigrant investor programme.
Even if they had only invested the minimum amount required, that would mean almost US$700m had been taken out of the country.
"China is losing the talent it really needs," says Dr Wang Huiyao, the director general of the Centre for China and Globalisation.
"As China tries to develop its economy and change it from 'made in China' to 'created in China', it needs these people to build the country."
In touch with China Dr Wang believes many people want a foreign passport because it is so hard to travel freely around the world on Chinese documents.
Indeed, one woman at the seminar is anxious to know how quickly she could get her Canadian passport, so she could return home to China.
For her it appears the motivation is not to get a new home abroad, but to obtain a passport that might make life more convenient.
A Western diplomat in Shanghai offers another explanation for the increase in these kinds of visa applications.
The internet, he says, means you can live abroad, but never leave China.
"You can wake up in the morning and browse the People's Daily online over breakfast. You can trade your stocks on the Shanghai exchange with the click of a mouse," he says.
"You can chat all day to relatives for free on Skype, or run your business remotely."
His point is that emigration is no longer necessarily the emotional wrench that it once was for people.
The need to assimilate in their adopted country for practical reasons is not as great as it once was - which in itself could yet pose its own challenges for Western societies.
Chinese Paving the Road to Freedom With Cash
Image via WikipediaBy DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
Published: August 5, 2010
As part of his job, Mr. Charette, a lawyer from Montreal, scrutinizes clients’ financial records. Back in 2005, when he began working at Harvey Law Group in Beijing, he was struck by how often a family’s wealth began with the transfer of the assets of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in the 1990s. Over the course of about eight years, he estimates, those factories became fully profitable.
“Now, I look back over a decade of records, and I see that the factory is running itself. The money of the family is in the second generation, and the children are often already overseas-educated, and they, too, own real estate here,” he said.
But regardless of how wealthy they become, China’s new rich simply don’t feel secure.
“I’ve had rich businessmen say to me, ‘You can be a tiger, but there is always a hunter somewhere,”’ he said.
So they come to Mr. Charette, who specializes in investment immigration to his home province of Quebec. Or they go to other lawyers dealing in immigration to major destinations like the United States, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Unsolicited text messages from immigration firms have become a standard feature of life for Beijing’s upper-middle classes.
“Zero-risk emigration to America: Invest in an Idaho gold mine. For the first time in Beijing the governor himself will explain how, officially,” ran one, supplying a time and date for the meeting. “Emigrate to Australia for $200,000, 95 percent success rate, free education, generous welfare,” ran another.
In just over three decades, China has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world to its third-biggest economy. Per capita gross domestic product in 1975 was $410. In 2009, it was $6,567, according to the World Bank.
The Hurun Rich List, based in Shanghai, says there are now 875,000 known dollar millionaires in China, an increase of 6.1 percent from a year ago.
Yet even as China grows richer, the number of its rich choosing to emigrate is rising. Many want to maintain two homes, merging their money-making abilities in China with what they perceive as the greater security and ease of international travel offered by a foreign passport or permanent residency.
Last year, for the first time, Chinese citizens became the largest group of immigrants to Australia, displacing the traditional sources of Britain and New Zealand. From July to December 2009, 13,371 Chinese became “permanent additions” (gaining or entitled to permanent residency) to Australia, overtaking Britain’s 13,037 and New Zealand’s 7,342.
While most immigrants are admitted on the basis of sought-after skills or to reunite families, investment immigration, in which applicants make a minimum financial investment or create jobs in their destination, is also booming. So much so that Canada, excluding Quebec, temporarily halted its program in June in order to double the amount that would-be immigrants must invest to qualify. Whereas before applicants required a net worth of 800,000 Canadian dollars, or about $790,000, and a 400,000-dollar investment, in the future they will need 1.6 million dollars and an investment of 800,000 dollars.
“All these changes are because we are overloaded,” Mr. Charette said. “This is a huge, sophisticated market.”
The result for Mr. Charette has been gratifying — a surge in applications to Quebec. He estimates that the window of opportunity will last until October, when Quebec, too, will adjust its policies. In February, 233 people from around Asia applied to the program, he said. In June, the month the national program closed, the number was 519. Chinese constitute up to 85 percent of applicants.
On June 26, the same day the rest of Canada temporarily closed doors, Mr. Charette addressed about 40 would-be investment immigrants in Beijing. The middle-aged men and women listened intently, most taking notes.
The looming higher rates “shouldn’t be a problem for my friends,” murmured Ms. Hou, who did not want to be identified by her full name and said she was with the People’s Liberation Army, representing rich property developers from the city of Xinxiang, in the central province of Henan.
Would she also emigrate, if she could? “Yes,” she said immediately.
Why? After all, China’s living standard is rising as the rest of the world watches the apparent success of the so-called “Beijing Model” — authoritarian politics plus fast economic growth.
Her answers mirrored those given by other would-be emigrants: Better education for the children; a pollution-free environment; better medical care; a safer food supply; bigger and cheaper housing. Added up, they are what psychologists and sociologists dub Q.O.L., or quality of life issues, factors not measured by G.D.P.
“Education is very important,” offered another woman at the seminar. “It’s different over there, and it produces different values.”
Did the current economic crisis in the West put her off?
“Not really,” she said. “They talk about it in the papers here, but I don’t know if they’re telling the truth. I trust my friends, and my friends say things aren’t that bad.”
Joy Xi emigrated to Canada nearly a decade ago. When I asked why people leave, despite rising prosperity in China, her answer was swift: “Sanlu,” the company notorious for producing melamine-laced milk powder that killed six babies and sickened hundreds of thousands more in 2008. Few believe the problem is over.
Also, said Ms. Xi, China is growing richer, but it’s also growing more unequal, and that makes the rich feel unsafe.
Summing up how many Chinese think, she cited a widespread saying: “Life in China is too risky. Consider carefully where you want to be reborn in your next life.”
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