January 18, 2006: Creating “HELL.Ca” Is A Far More Serious Immigration Issue Than Getting Jobs For Immigrant Engineers
PRESS RELEASE
Liberal MP Maria Minna suggested last week that Ottawa pay part of the initial salaries of immigrant engineers to help them become established in Canada. This may attract the sympathy of well-intentioned Canadians who are not familiar with this issue. But it does not stand the test of a reality check and it is not the most important immigration-related issue, says Immigration Watch Canada.
Ms. Minna and all MP's have been told many times that Canada makes no effort to match the number of immigrants to Canada with the number of jobs available in Canada. But Ms. Minna and most MP's have done almost nothing to correct this matter.
For example, a Citizenship and Immigration Canada publication entitled “Highly Skilled Immigrants” states that 15,000 immigrants arriving in the year 2000 declared engineering to be their occupation. The Canadian Council of Professional Engineers reports that in the same year, Canada graduated between 10,000 to 11,000 engineers from its own engineering schools. That means over 25,000 engineers suddenly entered the Canadian work force in the year 2000.
Canadian engineering schools can best answer the question of whether enough engineering jobs existed in Canada for even the Canadian graduates in the year 2000—to say nothing of the foreign-trained. But it seems highly unlikely that Canada's economy could have absorbed over 25,000 engineers in any one year. The same situation probably exists for many other professions and the immigrants who want to fill them.
Instead of stampeding to the nearest bandwagon, Ms. Minna and her fellow stampeders should answer a few important questions for Canadians:
(1) Why did Canada bring in so many engineers when it should have seemed obvious to anyone that these people would probably be unable to find engineering jobs or would be competing with Canadian graduates for jobs? Wouldn't it have been more responsible and more sensible to tell these people they had little hope of finding engineering jobs? Wouldn't it have made sense to deny these people immigrant status if it was so clear that Canada did not need them?
Canadians like to think that our immigration programme is under control and based on benefit to its own citizens. But this action is more evidence that this is not the case and that it is in a state of chaos. Ms. Minna has been a leading advocate of this chaos. It does not make sense for her to blame Canada's certification agencies and to ask Canadians to pay for her mistakes and the greed of the immigration industry whose interests she has promoted.
(2) Also, don't potential immigrants have some responsibility to investigate employment prospects before they come here to stay? Or are they merely to believe everything they hear and then complain unendingly about their victimization?
(3) Are Canada's professional agencies supposed to believe, without checking, the claims of all immigrant professionals—even though Canadians know that many of these people come from areas of the world where creating false documentation is rampant?
(4) Since Ms. Minna and others seem to be on a mission to help unemployed or under-employed become established, why don't they use their passion to pressure our federal government to take an inventory of unemployed or underemployed, highly-skilled Canadian-born? Despite claims that Canada is experiencing a “Boom Economy”, tens of thousands of highly-skilled Canadian-born are unemployed or are working in low-paying “McJobs”.
After having determined approximate numbers of unemployed or under-employed Canadian-born, why don't Ms. Minna, and others of like mind, pressure our federal government to help Canadian-born to get established?
Or, as many Canadians suspect, does the “help”, that Ms. Minna (and other great Canadian humanitarians from Canada's immigration industry) want to dispense, suddenly stop when Canadian-born are involved?
The economic well-being of skilled Canadian-born should have been a major issue in this election. The degradation of Canada's three major immigrant-receiving areas, and the cultural tsunamis that these three immigrant-receiving areas have been forced to endure should also have been treated as extremely important issues. These should have been election issues for the obvious reason that mass immigration to Canada has had a profound and particularly negative effect on the half of Canada that considers itself to be large and urban.
Why haven't these really important immigration issues been raised in this election campaign? Why have Canadians had only the recent, irresponsible talk from Ms. Minna and others (particularly the leaders of major political parties) about reducing the Immigrant Landing Fee and assisting immigrant engineers or other immigrant professionals? It is obvious that these matters are diversions from the real issues.
Canada's immigration policies should be serving Canadians.
Instead, Canada's immigration policies are creating HELL.CA for many Canadians. Anybody with an ounce of perception can see that this is happening. And now, anybody can see that Canada will need a tonne of cure to correct this situation.
It didn't have to be this way for the past 15 years. And it doesn't have to be this way now and in the future.
All candidates in this federal election and all politicians at the provincial and municipal levels have to come out of hiding, face this issue, and do something about it.
END OF PRESS RELEASE
