Canada’s immigration landscape is changing

C anada is seen as a land of opportunity – a peaceful place – where people from all over the world come to work and seek a better life. In 1967, Canada pioneered an immigration system that removed the possibility of discrimination in the selection process.

Before that, it helped to be white. More than three-quarters of the immigrants who reported coming to Canada before 1971 were from Europe. There was a wave of immigration mostly from countries such as England, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Then, with the 1967 change to a “points system,” Asians surpassed white Europeans, making Asia Canada’s most dominant source of immigrants.

The points system ignored race and country of origin. Instead, it awarded points for education, language skills in English and French, and work experience. Immigrants were assigned points on a 100-point scale. If they reached a certain level of points set by the government annually, they were allowed into the country.

There were no quotas or restrictions placed on the number of people who could immigrate, so long as successful immigrants passed the points test. It was a system that admitted applicants based on merit and accomplishments on a first-come, first-served basis.

Canada’s immigration system was considered so visionary that countries such as Australia and New Zealand adopted a similar approach, designed to bring in immigrants who “deserved” citizenship. But in the last two decades, the success of the program has been on the decline. Immigrants have had a harder time integrating into the job market.

An example of this is Angela Palma, 33, a landed immigrant from Italy. She came here in July 2013 after her Canadian husband sponsored her. At the time, she finished her master’s degree in medical biotechnology. But so far, she’s had no luck finding work in her field.

She never thought settling to Canada would be so difficult. She expected more job opportunities for professionals like herself.

“Not being able to work is very hard. I felt rejected by the country that was supposed to welcome me,” Angela Palma, 33, landed immigrant from Italy.

Her plans to start a family have been stalled because she hasn’t been able to find stability in her new country. One of the problems she faced was a long delay at Citizenship and Immigration Canada for the approval of her work permit.

But her biggest setback is that employers are not recognizing her qualifications. Now, she is legally able to work in Canada but finds herself in a catch-22.

She’s come to realize that finding work as an immigrant with no “Canadian experience” is extremely challenging. “There are a lot of barriers that I need to get around somehow. I do not have the contacts and I still need to network a lot,” she says.

While Palma is a sponsored immigrant, she still faces the same problems that other immigrants admitted through the points system faced – the lack of Canadian experience. That lack of experience is a barrier her and many immigrants face when trying to break into the Canadian job market.

Palma’s been volunteering in the field of social work to keep her mind busy. But even if she wanted to shift to a new career path, she doesn’t have the credentials to do so. After studying for seven years at a top university in Rome, she is now considering going back to school.

Palma is not the only immigrant facing this situation. The unemployment rate for immigrants is nearly 50 per cent higher than that of Canadian-born workers, according to Statistics Canada. Many newcomers face barriers once they arrive in Canada because employers do not recognize their education or their experience in another country. Many foreign doctors end up working as taxi drivers or as gas station attendants.

In response to this, the Conservative government has drastically changed the country’s immigration system in hopes of having the credentials of immigrants recognized before they arrive in the country. Ideally, this would address the challenges Palma and other immigrants faced when trying to find a job.

On Jan. 1, the government introduced Express Entry, a new immigration system that greatly increases the importance of job offers – in areas or sectors where there are labour shortages – for people applying for permanent residency.

The new system ranks applicants on a 1,200-point scale, with half the points awarded to those with a job offer or a nomination under one of Canada’s provincial immigration plans, which connect immigrants with provincial job vacancies.

Under the new two-step selection system, all applicants are first electronically filtered to enter a pool and then ranked against each other. Those with the highest number of points are then invited to apply for permanent residency, for which they have 60 days to submit a full application. The government vows that the application will be processed in six months or less.

“Having a job offer is worth as much as all of the other criteria put together. So, this puts much more emphasis on bringing people in who have been selected by employers,” says Madeleine Sumption, head of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University in England.

Those who are not invited to apply then wait in the pool from which the government and employers can pick and choose. While skilled immigrants are still evaluated on language skills, education and work experience, much less weight is given to these criteria. Instead, once applicants are in the pool, having a job offer allows them to jump the line for an invitation to permanent residency.

Although this new system makes sense economically ­– by bringing in immigrants that have jobs lined up for them – Canada as a refuge for a better life has changed. Now, immigrants are only valued if they can stimulate the economy. Instead of being admitted based on merit, Express Entry only admits those who have a job offer, re-introducing what some say is discrimination in the selection process and opening up the possibility of fake job offers.

For many immigrants, Canada offered a new home, a chance to start afresh and build a better life. But the Conservatives’ new emphasis on employers is diminishing Canada’s idealism of the past. Canada’s new dream immigrant is younger, more educated and, unlike immigrants coming in under the old system, has a job offer. The country has shifted away from basing admission on merit or “a chance for a better life,” to the idea that immigrants are only worthy of admission if they can contribute to the economy.

For these reasons, the old points system was more fair, predictable and transparent. It awarded points based on a clear set of criteria, on a first-come, first-served basis. If an applicant had enough points ­­­­­– evaluated on education, language skills and experience – then they deserved to come to Canada. Express Entry however, is not predictable or transparent. What really matters is getting that job offer. And handing over the decision to employers on who gets admitted to the country is extremely dangerous in terms of fraud.

Permanent residency in Canada is really sought after and applicants have now a better chance at persuading employers to create fake job offers. The Conservatives also have a record of not monitoring their immigration programs. Therefore the government’s decision to privatize immigration through Express Entry, may lead to higher immigration fraud.

Now, instead of being leader in immigration policy, Canada has become a follower. New Zealand and Australia also gave up on Canada’s old point system and started giving preferences to jobholders in 2003 and 2009.

The current government is also not as welcoming of immigrants as previous governments. Since the Conservatives came into power in 2006, immigration policy has evolved from one that benefits the immigrant to one that benefits the country economically. Permanent residency for refugees and family members is restricted, and citizenship is becoming harder to get and easier to lose. Children over the age of 18 can no longer come as a dependent family member and there are tougher rules for grandparents who want to join their families in Canada.

The Conservatives tightened admission of refugees on the grounds that too many were coming to Canada to seek medical care. The government cut back on health coverage for refugee claimants, so that they could only access care if they posed a public health risk. But the Federal Court rejected the spending cuts saying the changes were “cruel” and “outrage Canadian standards of decency.” The Conservatives are appealing that decision.

The Conservatives also fell behind on their commitment to take in 1,300 Syrian refugees in 2014. Although the government has promised to resettle 10,000 more Syrian refugees over the next three years, they’ve been criticized for leaving most of the sponsorship responsibilities to private groups.

The Conservatives have also been under fire for their lack of priority on the increasing backlog of spousal sponsorship applications, which has left thousands of foreign spouses living in Canada unable to work and without access to health care.

Canada has witnessed a real shift in immigration policy over the years. The opportunity to come to Canada for many has disappeared. But the old points system also had its flaws. Although immigrants were able to escape discrimination at the entry gates, they often faced it once inside the country.

The Conservatives tried to deal with this problem by introducing the Express Entry. In making the changes, the government is focusing on the economic benefit immigrants can bring to Canada rather than the well-being of immigrants themselves.

The changes are supposed to deal with the increasing unemployment and underemployment rates of immigrants. Like Angela Palma from Italy, for example. Theoretically speaking, if she were admitted through Express Entry, her skills and qualifications would be matched with the needs of employers. She is having difficulty finding a job because she lacks Canadian experience. Express Entry is intended to match the needs of employers to the skills immigrants have to offer. It requires that applicants prove in advance that their credentials are recognized in Canada and obliges employers to prove that no Canadian is fit to do the job.

While some have praised the changes, others point out that the new system is likely to result in more discrimination, abuse and fraud by employers. Many are concerned that the new system gives too much power to employers to make fake job offers to friends or extended family in order to get them into the country.

Turning over the decision to private citizens could also reintroduce discrimination in the selection process that Canada was previously praised for avoiding, says Jeffrey Reitz, who heads the immigration research at the University of Toronto.

Unlike the previous scheme, which was impartial about race and nationality, the new one makes it possible for employers to discriminate in ways that are hard to notice. A study by the University of Toronto found that employers in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver tend to prefer applicants with English sounding names than someone with an ethnic name, even if both candidates are equally qualified.

“Express Entry removes a great deal of predictability from the system,” says immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk because there are no set criteria and it all depends on job offers.

The old system was valued because it was transparent and predictable, he added. Candidates could look at the point’s table and know exactly whether they qualified or not based on their credentials. If the points added up, then they were eligible for permanent residency. “The idea behind that was to make it so that there was less discrimination,” says Sandaluk.

“When you remove those sort of racial, cultural and religious preferences . . . you get a far more multicultural immigration process and a far more multicultural country.”

The new system will favour people who already have connections to the country, he added. “If you had had a similar system (in the past,) we probably wouldn’t have the multicultural society that we have now because of lot of the people who came in would not have had those connections back in the ‘60s, ‘70s and the early ‘80s,” says Sandaluk.

And a lot of what shaped Canada’s multiculturalism today is the immigration system. The old point system, that disregarded country of origin, had a profound impact on Canada in the last 50 years. “It kind of made a lot of multiculturalism possible.”

The “new” Canadians will be younger, better educated and have arranged employment. Canada’s immigration landscape is, indeed, changing quickly.

C anada is a land of immigrants. In the last 20 years, an average of 250,000 immigrants were admitted to Canada each year. But according to experts, skilled immigrants with outstanding international credentials are having difficulty finding work because they don’t have “Canadian experience.” Many of them take low-skilled jobs in sectors irrelevant to their education or experience.

On Jan.1, the Government introduced Express Entry, which gives permanent residency to applicants with job offers.

“We expect to see a number of improvements to Canada’s economic immigration system that will benefit our economy, our prosperity and labour market. Which, as you know, is a top priority for our government,” Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said in a House of Commons committee meeting. In the last decade, the unemployment rate of immigrants has been rising.

Immigrants came in without a job offer and found it very difficult to find work once they arrived, says Madeleine Sumption, head of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University. “Unemployment rates were quite high and people were often working in jobs that didn’t use their qualifications.” So the idea with the new system, says Sumption, is to put much more emphasis on having a job offer.

The changes were also made because of the backlogs of permanent residency applications. With the old points system, applicants were evaluated on a first-come, first-served basis. Applicants sent in their applications and immigration officers awarded points based on education, work experience and language proficiencies on a 100-point scale. Once applicants had enough points set out by the immigration department and all their information was verified, then they were granted permanent residency.

But over the years, Citizenship and Immigration Canada has developed a large backlog of applications. Some people have accused the federal government of simply throwing applications in the wastebasket to get rid of backlogs.

The Conservatives say the new system will deal with this by scraping the first-come, first-served system. With Express Entry, applicants fill out a profile online where they are electronically filtered into a pool of eligible candidates for employers to pick and choose from. It is only after an applicant receives a job offer that they are invited to apply for permanent residency. The Conservatives promise that applications will be processed in six months or less.

“Under Express Entry, we will only accept applications from people we have invited to come to Canada. This will prevent the growth of backlogs by ensuring that only the candidates who are most likely to succeed economically – not simply the first to submit their application – are able to apply to immigrate to Canada,” wrote Sonia Lesage, CIC spokesperson, in an email response.

The problem with this system, however, is that there is no transparent way of letting applicants know the results, says Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, the NDP immigration critic. And for that reason, it will not necessarily attract the kind of skilled immigrants the Conservatives are aiming for.

“Once you are in a pool, you don’t know if your application will be picked up (by an employer),” she says. Your application may be there forever.”

In the old points system, the criteria were clearly outlined, says Blanchette-Lamote. Applicants had a good idea of knowing if they were eligible or not through an online test that indicated if they could get enough points for residency. Then applicants applied and there was an approximate processing time.

“So you were applying and you knew that in about one year you will have an answer, a yes or no . . . but you will have an answer,” she says.

Although the aim for the Conservatives is to bring in the “top-ranked” candidates to Canada, Blanchette-Lamothe questions whether Express Entry will really be effective.

“How someone can plan his life if they apply in the program and don’t know if or when they will receive any answers,” she says. 

That might lead some qualified immigrants to apply to other countries, she adds, which defeats the purpose of this immigration policy change.

Immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk says he also believes Express Entry removes predictability from the system. There are no set criteria and applicants are filtered to enter a pool and then ranked against each other. So being invited for permanent residency really depends on other applicants in the pool and whether a job offer comes through.

So someone’s likelihood of being chosen, really can’t be based on the applicants’ qualifications, says Sandaluk. “The criteria are largely employer driven rather than skills or experience driven. And the truth is, you don’t necessarily know if you’ll get it because you may or you may not.” And for that reason, it’s difficult for him to advise his clients when they submit their profiles for Express Entry. 

“Instead of coming to a lawyer’s office now, it’s going to be like walking into a casino in a lot of ways,” says Joel Sandaluk, immigration lawyer.

And any process that you can’t predict and where you’re relying on essentially chance . . . puts far too much control in the hands of the government, Sandaluk says.

“Immigration has transformed from an equation to a black box. You put input in on one side, you get output on the other side, but what happens in the middle is a mystery.”

And for this reason Sandaluk says he believes the new system is much easier to abuse. “It’s much easier for the government to basically do things that affect the machinery of that system without anybody necessarily being aware of it.”

If the government decides to pick candidates from the pool, “nobody knows when the next draw is, or how many people are going to be drawn the next time. So, what happens it puts total discretion in the hands of the government.”

There is also concern that employers won’t be using the new system as much as the government would like them to. “I’m concerned that not enough employers will really be interested enough to participate in this system,” Reitz adds. The system is complicated to use and employers will only use it as a last resort, if they really can’t find the person they need for the job.

T urning the decision over to employers on who gets to immigrate to Canada makes the system vulnerable to fraud, experts say. The new Express Entry system directly involves employers by increasing the weight given to job offers to those applying to become permanent residents.

Critics worry that employers will give fake job offers on behalf of an immigrant applicant, who may be a family member, friend or a bribe in order to get them into the country.

“Employers basically control the ability of someone to have a future in Canada or not,” says Joel Sandaluk, a Toronto immigration lawyer.

It’s dangerous to experiment with that level of trust when permanent residency in Canada is so sought after, he adds.

 “Ultimately, what’s happening is the prize here is so excellent, which is permanent status in Canada for a person and their family, that it’s going to be very hard to dissuade some people from engaging in fraud.”

The federal government is attempting to privatize immigration so that immigrants coming in will have a job and in the long run stimulate the economy.

Here is a breakdown of unemployment rates to give you some perspective

“The Express Entry system for the first time really gets employers heavily involved in the permanent immigration system,” says Dan Kelly, head of the association that represents Canada’s small businesses.

Listen to what Kelly has to say:

For Madeleine Sumption, head of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, the changes make sense, economically speaking. “If someone already has a job lined up, it is one way of demonstrating that they have the kinds of skills that Canadian employers value.”

Listen to what Sumption has to say:

Jeffrey Reitz, director of immigration studies at the University of Toronto agrees. It makes sense to directly connect the needs of employers to the skills prospective immigrants can offer, he says. “Immigrants will get a better start in the country.” However, he is extremely concerned about the potential abuses of the program.

 Listen to what Reitz has to say:

The Conservatives have a poor record of monitoring these kinds of programs, Reitz adds, which will lead to people using the system in a way that was not intended.

The government tried to fill labour shortages in low- and semi-skilled jobs by increasing the number of foreign workers temporarily through the Temporary Foreign Worker program.

Some employers started sacking their permanent Canadian staff to bring in temporary workers at a lower cost. Canada’s largest bank laid off its staff, when it went out of its way to replace them with foreign workers. There were also reported abuses of migrants workers in fast-food chains such as Tim Hortons and McDonalds.

When these abuses were reported in the media, the government was quick to point fingers, claiming that the employers were not providing all the information they were required to give.

But Reitz says lack of monitoring by the government was more to blame.

“It’s the job of the government to make sure that their programs are working as planned and they can’t just throw up their hands and blame it on the very people that they turned the program over to,” says Reitz.

Requests submitted by employers were being accepted at face value without proper investigation, he added. “As a result, people have been coming into the country on terms that were not intended by the government policy.”

After years of reported abuses, the government limited entry under the controversial temporary work visas last June. Express Entry is a second attempt at an employer-driven system.

Immigration lawyer Sandaluk questions the government’s decision to hand over so much power to those who not so long ago misused the immigration system.

“It feels a bit naïve for the government to criticize the private sector for abusing the system and then immediately grant the private sector this kind of ability to bring in immigrants.”

Listen to what Sandaluk has to say:

In an email response, Sonia Lesage, Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesperson, said CIC takes fraud very seriously.

However, immigration officers during a consultation process admitted that it is very difficult to verify the existence of job offers.

“During processing, an immigration officer will review and validate all information provided by a candidate in an Express Entry profile and the application for permanent residence, including any job offers,” wrote Lesage.

“If CIC has reason to suspect that a job offer is not valid, we can investigate.

But according to a survey commissioned by the immigration department, visa officers were “overwhelmingly negative” about an employer-led system, saying that arranged job offers are hard to validate.

Express Entry definitely opens up a higher possibility of abuse and fraud. The government wants to privatize immigration and have a laissez faire approach. But as experts mentioned, the Conservatives are known for their lack of monitoring, as demonstrated by the Temporary Foreign Worker program.

Who’s to say this kind of problem won’t arise again. One thing is clear, the government will definitely have to step up its game and make sure that job offers are real. They will also need to collect data to evaluate how immigrants coming in through the new system are doing in the long run.

T he federal government launched the first round of its highly promoted Express Entry program in January and a total of 779 candidates were chosen for permanent residency. But critics are concerned about employers’ participation.

According to the government, 25 per cent of the estimated 3,000 applicants that entered the draw at the end January were successful.

The successful applicants mostly had job offers, for which employers were able to prove that no Canadian could fill the job.

The successful candidates scored at least 880 points of the maximum 1,200-point scale. Having the job offer gave applicants 600 points, while other criteria such as education, work experience and language skills made up the other possible 600 points.

However, the pass mark was lower than expected. The pass mark depends on the applicants because they are graded against each other.

Jeffrey Reitz, the head immigration researcher at the University of Toronto, is concerned employers don’t have enough motivation to participate.

It’s a complicated system to use, he explains. “If you’re in a labour market where there are plenty of local people available, why go through the trouble of looking through the profiles that exists in Express Entry?”

Reitz explains that it’s difficult to locate these people and decide if you want to hire them. “The opportunity to interview is less and it is more expensive. It is just not clear why employers would prefer that kind of method . . . looking for someone outside of Canada rather than inside of Canada,” he says.

Madeleine Sumption, head of the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, says that in the early days of the Australian system – which started giving preferences to applicants with job offers in 2009 – employers were not using the system as much as the government would have liked. Since it is a complicated system, it took several years to fully implement the new program.

CIC however, defends the system. In an email response, CIC wrote that transitioning to the new Express Entry system is a significant undertaking.

And Immigration Minister Chris Alexander is happy with the first-round results.

“The fact that everyone who was invited to apply for permanent residence in this round of invitations already has a valid job offer or provincial nomination shows that Express Entry is working to fill Canada’s existing labour market gaps,” Alexander said in a news release.

“With Express Entry, highly skilled candidates with a high chance of success in Canada are invited to apply for permanent residence, bringing them to Canada more quickly and easily than ever before.”

Between 15 and 25 draws are planned for 2015.

A ngela Palma from Italy, who came to Canada a year ago, has been following the recent immigrant changes. She’s been unemployed since she came to Canada and it’s been really difficult for her.

She thinks the idea behind Express Entry makes sense because she could have come here with a job offer and could have been working. She’s spent the last year unemployed and is looking for work in the medical biotechnology sector.

But on the other hand, she says, under the new system, it would be very difficult to get a job offer in Canada while living outside the country. She also doesn’t like the idea that once applicants enter the pool of potential candidates, they are not sure if they will ever get an answer.

Potentially, candidates with higher points and a job offer will always skip the line, pushing some applicants further and further down the line. Palma imagines that for her it would have been very frustrating to wait.

Palma also says she believes that if she had applied to the Express Entry, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to be in Canada. “I have a lot of friends that because of this Express Entry, they cannot meet the requirements.”

Some of her friends back in Italy want to try working in Canada just for the experience to see how they like it. They usually applied under a program called Canadian Experience Class that gave younger foreign nationals a temporary work permit to experience what it’s like to work in Canada. The program allowed a successful candidate to come to Canada for a year and work for six months.

Now, the Experience Class also falls under the Express Entry. So a job offer is the real deciding factor for a chance to come to Canada. “It was a wonderful program, you didn’t have to have a job offer but now you have to if you want enough points to be in the country.” Palma’s friends that have no connection to Canada and have no chance in getting a job offer are discouraged to apply.

With Express Entry, applicants may get filtered into a pool of eligible candidates where they wait for a job offer. Once candidates are offered a job they are invited to apply for permanent residency, where processing should take six months or less. “That’s nothing compared to the 12 months that I had to wait, and I still have just the work permit,” says Palma.

An applicant then has 60 days to send all the necessarily documents such as language tests, police certificates and medical checks. But Palma says 60 days is not enough time. She’s done it already to come to Canada and it took her some time to get the proper documentation. “Getting police certificates from Holland because I lived there for a year, that was very difficult. Every country has its waiting time.” She isn’t sure it’s realistic for an applicant to get the documents in such a short amount of time.

Once an applicant makes it into the pool for employers to choose from, an applicant could be waiting indefinitely. Since police and medical checks expire quite quickly, it’s not possible for an applicant to get the documentation before they are invited to apply for permanent residency.

Express Entry would try and match available jobs and immigrants’ skills and would encourage immigrants to live outside large centres such as such as Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. “So instead of moving to Toronto or Vancouver, they’ll be moving to Northern B.C or the Maritimes perhaps,” says immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk.

Top places permanent residents live – source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada data 2013

Being an immigrant herself, Palma worries that the isolation would be tough for newcomers. She imagines herself moving to an unfamiliar and isolated place for work. She says it’s great on one hand because she would have permanent residency but it would be much too difficult for her to do.

Angela Palma found support with other immigrant women who are struggling to adapt to a new country.

“It’s going to be a huge frustration and a huge cultural shock.” She says she’s already had a lot of difficulty adapting in Ottawa, where she found some immigrant communities for support. “If you do not have this help because you are in the middle of nowhere, I think I would be totally depressed and really struggling because work isn’t everything.”

When an immigrant is granted permanent residency under Express Entry, he or she is free to live and work wherever they like in Canada. “There’s no way to restrict the movement of a permanent resident within Canada,” says Sandaluk. So once they arrive to Canada they could pick up and leave anytime and choose to live wherever they like in Canada.

So potentially applicants could abuse the system by accepting a job offer in order to get permanent residency but then leaving that job right after they arrive to Canada. The government could place restrictions on new permanent residents that oblige them to keep a job for a certain amount of time, but as of now the government has not done that, explains Sandaluk.

Although dispersed in isolated areas of Canada, where there are labour shortages, Sandaluk says it’s up to the applicant to decide if it’s worth going. “It’s going to be one of those decisions that people have to make for themselves. And what’ll makes sense to some may not make sense to others,” says Sandaluk.

While the old system seemed to have many positive effects for Canada, such as building the multiculturalism we see today, the new Express Entry tries to address the problem immigrants were facing in integrating into the Canadian labour market. Over the past decade, Canada has shifted from a place of refuge for a better life to a place where immigrants are valued for their economic benefit to the country. Whether it will achieve that or not is too early to tell; however there is a high possibility of abuse in the new system. The government will need to monitor the program in order to ensure it is successfully implemented.