Abstract
There is a mismatch between Canadian federal government immigration policies which are geared to attract high-skilled workers with high levels of education and fluency in one of the two official languages and the actual experiences of immigrants in Canada, who, controlling for education and language, experience unemployment and underemployment at significantly higher levels than native-born Canadians. Despite Canada’s preference for highly skilled immigrants, and despite the fact that immigrant professionals bring significant human capital resources to the Canadian labor force, a number of studies have shown that many highly educated immigrant professionals experience deskilling and devaluation of their prior learning and work experience after immigrating to Canada.
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Notes
- 1.
In this book, the term ‘immigrant’ applies to all categories of persons who arrived in Canada through any of the immigration programs offered by the government of Canada unless a specific program category is identified in the discussion.
- 2.
Some promising new sources of data that have yielded important results include the monthly Labour Force Survey, which has included an immigration question since 2006, and the IMDB, which links immigrant landing records with tax file data (Kelly 2014, p. 2).
- 3.
On average, Canada has offered permanent residency to about 250,000 immigrants and refugees from more than 190 countries each year over the past decade (CIC 2010). Between 2011 and 2016, 60.3% were granted permanent resident status through the Economic Immigration Program, 26.8% arrived under the Family Class Program, and 11.6% were refugees.
- 4.
In his summary findings in this report, Kelly uses the term ‘immigrant’ to include all categories of persons who arrived in Canada through all immigration programs, including refugees; however, in one section of the report, he does provide data based specifically on analysis of refugee outcomes.
- 5.
Refugees typically enter Canada one of four ways: (1) government-assisted; (2) private sponsorship, which accounted for one-third of the refugees; (3) the In-Canada Asylum Program (i.e., they were already in Canada when they applied for refugee status), which accounted for one-quarter of the refugees; and (4) as refugee dependents, who accounted for only 3% of the refugees (Picot et al. 2019, p. 28).
- 6.
In 2006, the number of points allocated to educational level was increased from 12 to 25, and the number of points allocated to knowledge of an official language (English or French) was increased from 15 to 24, so that nearly half of the total of 100 points that is used to decide who will be admitted to Canada were allocated to educational level and knowledge of an official language.
- 7.
The Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) is a task-based language proficiency instrument on a 12-point scale, divided into three levels: stage 1 (Basic Proficiency), stage II (intermediate proficiency), and stage III (advanced proficiency). There is also a French version of the CLB.
- 8.
According to Dr. xxx, Dept. of Family Medicine, University of Calgary, in the province of Alberta the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) sets aside a percentage of places (i.e., a quota) for International Medical Graduates for residencies; the quota is around 10%, so that if there are 100 residencies available in a given year, around 10 are allocated for IMGs; therefore, the system is not merit-based within the total pool of applicants, but rather on a bifurcated system in which IMGs compete with other IMGs within their allocation of 10% of the total applicants.
- 9.
Following Bourdieu (1986), cultural capital includes both embodied forms (e.g., language/language variety) and institutionalized forms (e.g., educational credentials).
- 10.
Reitz, Curtis, and Elrick (2014) use census data to present a calculation of losses due to both lower earnings for immigrants and less access to skilled employment. In constant 2011 dollars, they estimate that these aggregate losses to the Canadian economy rose from $4.80 billion in 1996 to $6.02 billion in 2001, to $11.37 billion in 2006.
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Ricento, T. (2021). The Problem. In: Refugees in Canada. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76453-1_1
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