Wall Street Journal
By Alistair McDonald
August 31, 2013
As American lawmakers debate how to revamp U.S. immigration policy, Canada has embarked on a major immigration overhaul of its own aimed at choosing newcomers who are a better fit for its economy and society.
The impact of Canada's reforms will be watched in Washington, where elements similar to the Canadian approach toward screening applications have found their way into the immigration plan that passed the U.S. Senate in June.
This August, Canada began to accept its first immigrants under part of an overhaul that puts greater emphasis on factors such as an applicant's job skills and fluency in English or French.
A major objective: Fix what the Canadian government sees as a growing economic chasm between locals and many of the immigrants that Canada's old applicant-screening system selected—a chasm it worries could spark the sort of immigration-related social tension that has flared in other developed countries.
Canada accepts more immigrants per capita than any of the Group of Seven most-advanced economies. The country, which has officially embraced multiculturalism for decades, won mostly praise for how it selects newcomers, particularly through a points system that tries to evaluate an applicant's ability to thrive economically.
But since the 1970s, pay among new arrivals has increasingly fallen further behind pay of locals. And some Canadians question whether immigrants are integrating well enough into Canadian society.
"I don't think we can take for granted our relative success in integration," Jason Kenney, Canada's immigration minister until July, who oversaw the reforms, said in a March interview. Now minister of employment and social development and minister of multiculturalism, Mr. Kenney through a spokeswoman confirmed his earlier comments but referred further questions to his former department.
The August newcomers were the first under measures that Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government deployed in May aimed at attracting immigrants with certain trade skills. The measures also included the revamped points system at the center of the wide-ranging series of changes the government has enacted or pushed through Parliament since mid-2010.
Canada's new points system places greater emphasis on an immigrant's fluency in the nation's two official languages. It weighs how closely applicants' qualifications match Canadian credentials, whether they have employment arranged in Canada and, in the case of the August arrivals, if they have specific skills in demand, such as plumbing. The system also gauges so-called adaptability: factors such as time spent previously in Canada.
Critics have accused Mr. Harper's Conservative Party of tilting policy back to benefit European nationalities such as the British and French, whose immigrants once predominated. "There is a strong feeling that this is about keeping people from Pakistan, the Philippines, from India, away," said Jinny Sims, an Indian-born lawmaker with Canada's opposition New Democratic Party.
A spokesman for Mr. Harper referred questions to the immigration ministry, Citizenship and Immigration Canada. A spokeswoman for the current immigration minister, Chris Alexander, said he wasn't immediately available for comment. "Regardless of their country of origin," she said, "we want to ensure that new Canadians contribute to Canada's economic success."
U.S. policy makers have drawn lessons from Canada's experience. The architects behind the immigration bill drawn up by the White House and a bipartisan group of U.S. senators studied the points systems of countries such as Canada, the U.K. and Australia, said people familiar with the bill's creation. The bill passed the Senate in June, but the GOP-controlled House has yet to vote on its own slew of immigration bills.
Current and former Canadian government officials were consulted during the bill's creation, these people said. The Senate plan differs in important ways from Canada's approach, placing less emphasis on English fluency, for instance. But the U.S. plan follows Canada's basic model of grading applicants on their ability to fit into the economy and society.
"Much like the Canadian system does in Canada, our points system very carefully weighs the need to make sure Americans get first crack at available jobs but if none take them, allows American companies to find the people they need," New York Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat who helped write the bill, said in an email.
The authors also learned from aspects of the Canadian points system meant to encourage greater social integration, said Enrique Gonzalez, an immigration lawyer and former adviser to Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on the reforms. "Assimilation was a measure we picked up reviewing reforms going on to the Canadian and the Australian point systems," he said.
Canadians for decades have largely embraced waves of immigrants. More than 20% of Canadian residents were foreign-born in 2011, compared with 13% in the U.S. In 2012, Canada allowed 275,887 new permanent residents, about 0.79% of the population; the U.S. granted just over one million green cards, about 0.32% of the population.
But the government now says the old applicant-screening system placed less emphasis on language skills and youth, which research shows help immigrants to compete, and gave points for job qualifications even where they were unlikely to be sought by Canadian employers.
In the 1970s, new immigrants earned 85% to 90% of what the Canadian-born did. That had fallen to between 60% and 70% by 2006, according to a study by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, a nonpartisan Montreal think tank.
One reason, said Arthur Sweetman, an economics professor at McMaster University of Hamilton, Ontario, and an author of the study, is that a bigger proportion of immigrants are those from the developing world, whose generally poorer English and French, coupled with education and training that is often incompatible with job descriptions in Canada, make competing with locals harder.
Europeans accounted for 78% of immigration into Canada before the 1970s, while Asians and Middle Easterners made up 8.5%, according to government statistics. From 2006 to 2011, Asians and Middle Easterners were 57% of arrivals; Europeans made up 14%.
"There is a fear that as immigrants fall behind, social cohesion will deteriorate," Mr. Sweetman said.
South and Southeast Asians are falling behind fastest. In 2012, for example, 13% of Pakistanis aged 15 and over were unemployed in Canada, against 9% of the wider Canadian population and 4.5% unemployment for Britons in Canada.
By some measures, public opinion also appears to have tilted away from Canada's traditional open-armed multiculturalism.
Canadians went through a round of soul-searching last year after the high-profile convictions of three Afghan family members who murdered four other members they deemed too Westernized. In a December survey, 70% of respondents said too many immigrants aren't adopting Canadian values, up from 58% in 2005, according to Environics Institute, a Toronto research group.
"We are reproducing ghettos of immigrants and migrant workers and diluting Canada's traditional values to accommodate immigrants who will not integrate," said Salim Mansur, a University of Western Ontario political-science professor and immigrant from India.
In addition to stressing language fluency, the government has bolstered its social-integration efforts. In April, it doubled the size of its guide to aspiring Canadian citizens, which now emphasizes Canada's historic ties, such as to the British monarchy.
The new guide says Canada won't tolerate "barbaric cultural practices" such as "honor killings," forced marriage and "other gender-based violence." The government in December 2012 banned face-covering garments such as the burqa when immigrants take a citizenship oath.
Mr. Kenney, the former immigration minister, said the government worries about "deepening ethnic enclaves" and that Canada's immigration overhaul is taking a "hardheaded approach" to the multiculturalism that has been a hallmark of Canadian policy.
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