[lg policy] Canada: Short-term needs shouldn=?windows-1252?Q?=92t_?=obscure long-term immigration policy goals, report says

[Harold Schiffman]

Short-term needs shouldn’t obscure long-term immigration policy goals,
report says


By Louisa Taylor, The Ottawa Citizen May 3, 2012




OTTAWA — The blink-and-you-might-miss-something pace of recent changes
to Canada’s immigration policy means Canadians have to be vigilant to
ensure long-term goals aren’t sacrificed for short-term priorities,
according to speakers at an Ottawa seminar.

Ratna Omidvar, president of the private Maytree Foundation, assessed
what she called the “hurly-burly” of immigration policy by listing
more than half a dozen policy announcements from Citizenship and
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in the past month, including a
proposal for enhanced language testing, a proposal for a special visa
for entrepreneurs, cancellation of settlement agreements with British
Columbia and Manitoba, elimination of federally funded health benefits
for certain refugees, and more. Economists Arthur Sweetman and Garnett
Picot presented their findings on how immigrants fare in the job
market, but not before joking that things may already have changed
since their report for the Institute for Research on Public Policy was
published — just last month.

“There was a time when you could go on sabbatical for a year and come
back and nothing would have changed in immigration policy,” Sweetman,
economics professor at McMaster University, told the Tuesday lunchtime
seminar. “Now I go to the basement and come back up and Kenney has
made a new announcement.

“This area is amazingly active in Canada and something we should all
be keeping our eyes on, because we have the potential to be changing
Canada in profound ways.”

In their report, Sweetman and Picot, a research fellow at the Queen’s
University School of Policy Studies and former director-general of
Statistics Canada, examined the factors contributing to a significant
decline in the earnings of immigrants and made recommendations for
policy reforms to reverse the slide. Sweetman told the Ottawa audience
that in 1980, the poverty rates of immigrants and Canadian-born
citizens were almost identical, but since then the poverty rate for
immigrants has been climbing while the rate for the Canadian-born has
dropped.

“The increasing poverty rate is politically unacceptable,” said
Sweetman. “This is something we need to confront.”

Their report, Making It In Canada: Immigration Outcomes and Policies,
makes numerous recommendations, including reducing the number of
immigrants admitted to Canada during economic recessions, selecting
younger immigrants, and continuing to make language ability a
priority. Picot cautioned that some of the recent measures announced
by Kenney, including an expansion of provincial programs for
recruiting skilled labour, are focused on meeting economic needs in
the short-term, with little planning for the long-term.

Boosting the number of people admitted under specific skilled-trades
categories may help employers fill jobs now, Sweetman said, but it
carries a potential social risk. What happens when that sector hits a
downturn, as the IT sector did in the late 1990s, throwing many
newcomers out of work?

“There’s a fundamental disconnect between the risk employers take on
in hiring an employee and the risk a nation takes on in a new
citizen,” Sweetman said. “You can lay off an employee, you can’t lay
off a citizen.”

Picot added that “if we’re concerned about the longer run ... we need
to continue to encourage traits that we know lead to long-term
success: language, education, skills training. We need to learn from
the IT bust and maintain diversity in occupation selections.”

The study highlighted two areas the authors believe are not getting
the attention they deserve from Citizenship and Immigration Canada:
the impact of immigration on the economic well-being of Canadians, and
the economic prospects of second-generation immigrants.

Noting that Canada’s annual intake of immigrants has hovered around
250,000 immigrants for several years, Sweetman suggested there isn’t
enough research to know if this is the best level.

“Is there any effect of immigration levels on the wages of Canadians?
These questions are not heavily researched in Canada,” Sweetman said.

Something well documented is that the children of immigrants tend to
be better educated than the children of Canadian-born and to have
greater earning power — with the key exception of those from visible
minority families, who fare significantly worse in the labour market
than their education levels suggest they should.

“We brought in the kinds of people whose children should do extremely
well. We should be careful we don’t lose that advantage,” said Picot.
“It’s a very different story in Europe and the United States. Their
policies are very different and those policies have contributed to
very poor outcome in particular for children of immigrants.”

Omidvar said she was disturbed that the changes being announced have
not been followed by serious national consultations or debates.

“It’s not clear if we’re going down this route as part of a coherent
policy or whether we’re painting by number,” said Omidvar. “We’re
choosing as a nation to position ourselves as a head hunter, not a
nation builder. We’re putting an emphasis on selection over what
happens to the immigrant when they arrive here.”

During a question-and-answer session after the presentations, Sweetman
said research shows that immigration has only a “small and positive”
economic benefit to Canada.

“Anyone who tells you immigration is going to solve all of Canada’s
problems is unrealistic,” Sweetman says. “However, immigration is not
primarily about economics, it’s about nation-building. I think the
social and cultural benefits are enormous. I would argue we don’t do
immigration for economic issues, we do it for other reasons, but we
need to manage the economics of it well.”

The full report is available at irpp.org.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Short+term+needs+shouldn+obscure+long+term+immigration+policy+goals+report+says/6560856/story.html#ixzz1tuelVsa1


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