Immigration
solution lies in recruitment
Canada
needs the best and brightest from around the world to fill the workforce;
let's keep foreign students already here
Saturday,
November 01, 2003
Quality, not just quantity,
should guide Canada's immigration policy. But with many developed
countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and
Germany competing for skilled workers, Ottawa is not going to have an easy
time getting the best and brightest from around the world to make Canada
their home.
Nevertheless, if Canada is to
be a favoured destination for foreign as well as local investment, and we
are to continue to improve our standard of living, Ottawa will have to
devise a program that puts out the welcome mat for these highly
sought-after immigrants from every corner of the world.
After all, productivity growth
-- defined as an increase in economic output per worker -- requires firms
to combine the latest machinery and equipment with the best minds. And
higher productivity is the most surefire way of improving our lot in life.
Canada's productivity growth
has been anemic over the past two decades. We need to reverse this trend
to improve our living standards.
A Conference Board of Canada
study predicts that, within the next two decades, a million skilled jobs
could go unfilled if this country doesn't substantially increase its
talent pool.
Those Canadians who are worried
that these newcomers will be taking jobs away from them don't have much to
fear. The study points out that the job openings for electrical engineers,
computer programmers, software engineers, financial analysts, accountants,
business managers, doctors, nurses and health care technicians far
outstrip the domestic supply.
But there are several recent
studies documenting the fact that skilled immigrants are not contributing
as much as they could because of the roadblocks that are put in their path
by provincial licensing bodies. Getting these provincial authorities to
remove the impediments is a difficult, if not an impossible, task.
So what can Ottawa and the
provinces do to attract skilled workers and fully utilize their knowledge?
Rather than roaming around the
world looking for talented people to fill the job openings here, Ottawa
could recruit some of the bright foreign students already at universities
in Canada.
After all, these students,
educated in Canada, will not face the same obstacles a foreign-trained
engineer or accountant would face. They will have some Canadian work
experience, which employers are usually on the lookout for, and they'll
have some working knowledge of English or French and be familiar with the
Canadian way of doing things.
Also, younger immigrants tend
to better integrate into Canadian society, make a good living and
contribute to the tax base.
So aggressively pursuing these
foreign students who are in undergraduate and graduate programs at our
universities makes eminent sense.
There are more than 80,000
undergraduates and 52,000 graduate students from overseas in Canadian
universities.
More importantly, most of these
students are in fields of study that the Conference Board of Canada study
identifies as the ones that we have trouble filling the jobs through
domestic sources alone.
With the U.S., one of the
biggest magnets for foreign students, tightening its borders since Sept.
11, 2001, there will probably be more foreign students who will try to
attend a Canadian university.
This development should
increase the pool of foreign students available for Ottawa to fish in over
the coming years.
Other jurisdictions are
relaxing rules that force foreign students to go home as soon as they
graduate. They are also allowing these educated students to apply for
permanent residency status on the basis of their skills. And they are
fast-tracking them through cumbersome immigration processes.
In the past, students had to
leave Canada to apply for permanent residency. Ottawa has recently
signalled its desire to rescind that requirement. That is a good first
step, but not good enough.
It should send immigration
officials to universities across the country and sell foreign students on
the merits of staying in Canada. Then it must provide the resources to
fast-track the permanent residency applications of these foreign students.
The business community must
prevail upon Ottawa to move fast so that we will have the minds we need to
compete on a global basis.
