A curious thing is happening in Quebec: immigrants from France, highly prized and ardently recruited, are packing up in droves and quitting the snowy province.
"We are strangers here, and yet we had been assured we would be warmly welcomed," Rodolphe Claret, who emigrated to Montreal in 2005, recently told an interviewer from La Presse. "They made their pitch very effectively, it was a beautiful package, they showed us graphs and photos, we wanted to believe in it."
But after two years of working at menial jobs and struggling to make ends meet, Claret and his wife sold their bungalow and possessions and returned to France.
The Clarets and thousands like them are enmeshed in the perennial problem that afflicts immigrants to Canada: the inability to transfer foreign qualifications and work experience.
To address the problem, a new study from researchers at the Université de Montréal is recommending that Canada overhaul its immigration policy to favour younger candidates like foreign students and temporary workers, for whom foreign experience and credentials form less of a barrier.
"There is a serious lack of consistency between the government policy of wanting to attract qualified new immigrants to the labour market, and the reality that confronts those immigrants when employers refuse to recognize their experience and qualifications," the study finds.
The review is also needed, say the authors, to reverse the current trend that sees each successive generation of immigrants earn less money than its predecessor.
The study shows that Ontario's immigrants have historically fared better financially than new arrivals in Quebec and British Columbia, but that situation is changing.
In the 1990s, immigrants to Ontario fell behind those in Quebec and B.C. in terms of salary. Together the three provinces are home to 90 per cent of immigrants to the country. The income gap is growing, the researchers say, despite new programs aimed at integrating immigrants, largely because Quebec has a greater say in what immigrants it accepts, and because B.C. has a longer experience with new arrivals from Asia, who now form the bulk of immigrants to Canada.
The study found new arrivals to Ontario in the 1990s earned an average of 18 per cent less than those who immigrated in the 1960s. Those figures stood at 27.1 per cent in Quebec and 31 per cent in B.C. for the same time period.
But in the 1990s, Ontario immigrants earned an average of 5 per cent less than in the 1980s, whereas Quebec and B.C. immigrants' salaries remained flat.
The study, billed as the first comparative analysis of its kind, also tried to explain the phenomenon by examining economic conditions, country of provenance, gender and language skills.
"And we found that language skills by far are the most important factor in determining economic success," said Université de Montréal industrial relations professor Brahim Boudarbat, a labour economist who co-authored the study with doctoral student Maude Boulet.
Economic cycles, by contrast, have had a negligible impact.
The researchers also discovered that immigrant women in Quebec and immigrant men in B.C. tend to be the hardest hit in terms of earning potential, and that immigrants from Africa and Latin America have a comparatively harder time having their qualifications recognized.
The situation is particularly difficult for women, "who must effectively be prepared to start from scratch" upon arriving in Canada, Boudarbat wrote in the study.
Because of an agreement reached in the 1960s, Quebec is allowed to select its "economic class" immigrants, and in the last six or seven years has changed its policies to favour North African and European francophones.
"Quebec has effectively managed to stop the bulk of the economic decline of its immigrants," Boudarbat said. "The fact that other provinces don't have as much control over their immigration policies is necessarily an important factor. Ontario and B.C. simply don't have the same means to adjust."
While Quebec's immigrants now tend to be better educated than elsewhere in the country – the result of a provincial policy decision – it's also where the income gap between university-educated immigrants and those without higher degrees is deepest.
"A society and an economy doesn't just need PhDs, you need to recruit all kinds of people in a diversified economy, skilled and not," said Yann Hairaud, head of a non-profit Montreal agency that helps French immigrants adjust to Quebec life.
"The fundamental problem we see, and it's one that affects all immigrants to Canada, is the recognition of experience and qualifications."
Source : The Star
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