Its time to curtail immigration
Letters To Editor
thestar.com
Published On Tue Jun 15 2010
Re: Points system fails immigrants and Canada, Opinion June 13
Angelo Persichilli is dead on when he poses the question of why we are luring highly educated immigrants to Canada when there are few jobs for them. Indeed, our own children are graduating with PhDs and other degrees only to find themselves working at low-end service jobs while trying to pay back their student loans.
When the North American free trade agreements were signed we were assured by government that, though manufacturing jobs might decline, we would all become knowledge workers. Of course, knowledge workers arent bricks and mortar factories and increasingly those jobs have been off-shored by major corporations for financial gain as acknowledged repeatedly in the press.
(For instance, a spokesperson for research firm, The Gartner Group, was quoted in an article last year that IBM can pay an engineers in the U.S. $120,000 or one in India $25,000.)
What must also be understood by Canadas immigration department is that as far as the Canadian infrastructure is concerned, it is taxed beyond its limits. Witness the health-care lineups, the traffic jams, the strained social services, the aging and decrepit sewer, hydro and water lines in our largest cities.
For those who say we need new people to open up our vast nether regions, they should give themselves a shake because few immigrants are heading up north. Most settle in our urban centres.
Its definitely time to curtail immigration until we can expand and repair our various Canadian infrastructures and offer gainful employment to newcomers.
J. Richard Wright, Niagara-on-the-Lake
