Канада, Канада, Канада моя
Sep. 11th, 2003 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olegsИнтересные мысли насчет того, что опыт и знания иммигрантов стремительно падают в цене.
Одна цитата мне понравилась: Doctors, engineers and other people are facing the same problem. So, I mean, what's the point of increasing the point level and either of them have to have a PhD. What do they want PhD to come here and clean the toilet or deliver the pizza or run the mini-cab or something like that?
Знакомые проблемы, не правда ли?
P.S. А я-то удивлялся, почему из русской прессы исчезли все плакаты, призывающие иммигрировать в Канаду, а Мигнюз нынче рекламирует ваще исключительно Австралию.
Я не хочу в Австралию, я хочу в Новую Зеландию, там, где бегают маори, там, где после съемок "Властелина колец" распустили армию за полной ненадобностью. Наймусь подмастерьем к мужику, который делал стрелы для разных фильмов. Он, кстати, бывший канадец.
P.P.S. Но вообще зацените , насколько же тщательно китаец готовился к иммиграции! Он даже выучил всё про хоккей и стал болельщиком!
Designer Immigrants
PETER MANSBRIDGE: Ottawa is in the middle of an immigration controversy. This, just days after a census showed how crucial it is in building the nation and how important it will be in the future. But some warn new rules by the federal government are putting that future in jeopardy, and they're asking tough questions about who's coming into the country. Here's Dan Bjarnason with "designer immigrants."
DAN BJARNASON (Reporter): In Beijing, a half a world away from the action, Xao Li Sin and his wife Ying cheer on as their favourites battle for gold in the Olympics. They're not certain of the difference between icing and off side, but they are sure of one thing, their home team is team Canada. Xao and his family are planning to emigrate to Canada. Part of their preparation is this crash course in hockey. But hockey aside, to Xao, in selecting a new home, Canada already ranks as a gold medalist.
XAO LI SIN: Canada is a very safe country, and I think Canada has very good reputation for freedom and democracy, and also I like the climate of Canada.
BJARNASON: His credentials would be an asset to any country. He's got a PhD in thermo-optical engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he now works designing space equipment and as a computer animator and programmer. Sounds like a good bet for a new citizen.
LI SIN: These are some pictures of my work.
BJARNASON: Xao created his own high-powered presentation in English for his emigration consultant in Beijing, Dwight McWethy. He prepared a convincing pitch indeed to show why he'd make an excellent choice for Canada under what's called the skilled worker program. He was clearly a skilled worker. And until last December, he didn't need to convince anyone. He easily passed under our current point system. But then Ottawa changed the rules halfway through the game. Dwight did the new maths, and Xao was out of the running, along with about 90 percent of McWethy's clients. In addition to academic skills, the new yardstick would now emphasize work experience, language, and either a personal connection to Canada or a job already waiting. All bad news for Xao.
LI SIN: I don't think a Canadian company will keep a position for a person like me who may or may not go to Canada and maybe go to Canada after 40 months. Even worse, maybe I will be refused.
BJARNASON: While he cools his heels in Beijing, back in Ottawa, there's great anger over the controversial new immigration rules, and Minister Denis Coderre is feeling the heat.
DENIS CODERRE (Minister of Immigration): I'm the son of a carpenter. Believe me, my dad doesn't have a university degree, but he can build a house and I can't.
BJARNASON: The Minister of Immigration, just new to the job, has stepped in the middle of a national debate. It's about what road should our immigration policy now be going down? Increasingly, skilled immigrants have been finding it tougher and tougher to succeed, and the government's answer is to raise the bar and attract even more skilled immigrants. But critics argue that this will simply make the problem worse.
JEFFREY REITZ (University of Toronto): You want immigrants who are highly skilled and have characteristics that are going to make for success in the economy.
BJARNASON: Jeffrey Reitz is professor of industrial relations at the University of Toronto. On principle, he has no objection to raising the bar. The problem is that it's been tried before, and it's failed.
REITZ: The immigrants recruited in the '90s were much more skilled than those in the '80s. But perhaps surprisingly they've had much higher levels of unemployment initially. It's taken them longer to get good jobs, and the jobs that they've gotten aren't as good.
BJARNASON: For skilled workers coming to Canada, the picture is bleak and getting bleaker. When the current program began in the 1960s, immigrants were consistently more successful than native-born Canadians. But in the last ten years, the picture has reversed. Immigrants are sliding further down the income scale, even though the government has upped the skill requirements three times in the past decade. Now, immigrants can struggle here for ten years before they catch up to Canadians' income. According to Reitz, the problem isn't with who we've been selecting over there, it's what's been happening here.
REITZ: For most of this period, the skills of native-born Canadians have risen more rapidly than the skills of immigrants, and that was a result of a very definite policy of the Canadian government at all levels to invest in education. But the problem is worse than that because immigrants coming from abroad have the training, but the training may not be recognized by Canadian employers as being equivalent to the skills of native-born Canadians.
BJARNASON: This is not news to Bobby Premakamaren. Four years ago, he moved to Edmonton from England bringing him a degree from Middlesex University and accounting certificates from five other institutions. So he has a recognized skill, he speaks English and has a relative, a brother, already living in Canada. With such solid credentials, he'd even be one of the select few who would score over 80 points under the new rules. Sounds like a sure bet to make his life a classic immigrant success story. Wrong. He sent 3,000 resumes out to companies across the country looking for even an entry-level accounting position. In four years, not a single offer of a permanent job. So now he and his wife Nesa earn their money cleaning office buildings and apartments. Not what they had in mind here in the land of opportunity.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: It was a disaster to me I would say. I mean mentally tortured, and I was really heartbroken.
BJARNASON: Nesa now regrets ever leaving England, giving up the life they left in London, the house they owned, their garden. She had a good government job back in England, and although she's an accredited payroll specialist here, she too cannot get a job in her field. But mostly she's pained by the stress it's all having on her husband.
NESAMALAR PREMAKAMAREN: My heart cried out for him. I just couldn't turn around and say, you know, give up. I couldn't do that. What I did was I remember I sat down, it was heavy winter, and I thought to myself, no, if I break down, he is not going to, you know, come out of it. We will find some way. So I opened a day home at home, and he went out to work. In the first year, second year I ran the day home from 6:30 in the morning until about 11:00, 11:15 at night. In a way, I feel like I'm caught in a web. Only now, slowly, bit by bit, we are coming out. I would not have put my family through this. No way.
RATNA AMITGAR: Our best public relations tool in immigration is the immigrant himself. Nothing is as powerful as the message that the immigrant sends home, and that message is increasingly negative.
BJARNASON: Ratna Amitgar's Matry Foundation has studied the access immigrants have to trades and professions in Canada. Immigrant's expectations are rising, she says, and we're in trouble if we still think we can automatically convince the cream of the crop to come here and stay here.
AMITGAR: It was an unwritten contract almost between the immigrant and Canada that the real benefits of immigration would be transferred to the second generation. So the immigrant was more prepared to put his or her own gratification, so to say, on hold for one generation. Things have changed. The lives that immigrants are leaving behind in primary source countries such as India and China are also not that terrible as before.
BJARNASON: For Bobby and Nesa, going back to England is no option. They've exhausted their savings. They've decided to stay and fight. They're suing Ottawa for compensation, claiming they were lured to Canada with false promises of good jobs here. They also want the government to make it easier for foreign skills and training to be recognized in this country.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: Doctors, engineers and other people are facing the same problem. So, I mean, what's the point of increasing the point level and either of them have to have a PhD. What do they want PhD to come here and clean the toilet or deliver the pizza or run the mini-cab or something like that?
BJARNASON: One study of skilled immigrant incomes shows that a foreign education is valued at only half of what a Canadian education nets on the job market. Foreign work experience is valued by Canadian employers at approximately zero. It's a waste of immigrant skills that costs our economy about $3 billion a year. Jeffrey Reitz did the study.
REITZ: My analysis has shown that it is getting more severe over time. That immigrant skills are being discounted today more heavily than they were in the past.
BJARNASON: But there's no reason Canadian employers should be uninformed about foreign academic credentials. Here at World Education Services, a non-profit group endorsed by the Ontario government, they've examined and rated more than 28,000 overseas colleges and universities and technical institutes. All a Canadian company has to do is phone up and ask. Let me ask you about a couple of foreign institutions that you've done a bit of work on. Middlesex in England.
TIM OWEN (World Education Services): Generally we would look at a degree from any university in England as being equivalent to like an honours degree would be here.
BJARNASON: So Middlesex University, no problem there that you're aware of.
OWEN: We would not normally have any difficulty with that.
BJARNASON: This Middlesex graduate feels his lack of success in Canada isn't about credentials.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: Straightforward, I mean if I want to put it blunt, my race. My colour is the one that causes a big problem, but I can't change it. This is the nature. This condition cannot be changed by anyone else. So I have to go like this because even if I change my name, if I painted myself, I'm not going to get a job.
BJARNASON: Back in Beijing, Xao Li Sin has no idea what happens next. The government has delayed implementing the new rules until year's end, but that's little comfort. In China, the backlog is a long stretch reaching down the road eight years. Canada, both in theory and in law, is supposed to have a colour blind immigration policy where all hopeful immigrants have equal access. In effect, there's one lineup into the country. So anyone from anywhere with enough points is admitted. But documents acquired under the access to information act suggest there are, in fact, precise limits applied to our visa offices. For example, London's limit is about 9,000 immigrants. But Beijing's, by contrast, is only 5,500. And there's more. Applicants from London or Paris or Berlin, for example, are fast-tracked in only a year or two. In Beijing, it takes eight years. Don Cameron is now an immigration consultant in Vancouver, but he worked on the inside for years. For three decades, he was an immigration visa officer, and he says the government has an immigration policy that is seemingly based on race.
DON CAMERON (Immigration Consultant): They are very concerned about the potential for enormous movements of people from China to Canada. And with regard to the other countries that are being held up, I don't know what the objection is. Maybe it's just that they're not white.
BJARNASON: So we asked the new Minister, Denis Coderre, to explain.
CODERRE: There's no quotas. Ninety percent of all the skilled workers coming from China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Philippines. We want also to make sure that we can cover, you know, the planet as a whole. We need people from Europe. We need people from Asia. We need also people from South America. So I think that we need, at the same time, to have a communication strategy, a promotion strategy to make sure also that you have some skilled workers who should come from certain areas. I don't know.
CAMERON: Those are all valid points. What is wrong with the present system is the government is denying that it exists. There's no open debate on how access to immigration to Canada should be divided in a situation where more people can qualify to come here every year than the government is willing to accept.
BJARNASON: Xao Li Sin's life is on hold.
LI SIN: I think Canada is still a beautiful country in my mind, also my dream country.
BJARNASON: So Xao bides his time, dreaming of the nation he wants to call his own, but a nation that can't decide if it wants him. For "The National," I'm Dan Bjarnason.
Транскрипт передачи канадского ТВ.
Одна цитата мне понравилась: Doctors, engineers and other people are facing the same problem. So, I mean, what's the point of increasing the point level and either of them have to have a PhD. What do they want PhD to come here and clean the toilet or deliver the pizza or run the mini-cab or something like that?
Знакомые проблемы, не правда ли?
P.S. А я-то удивлялся, почему из русской прессы исчезли все плакаты, призывающие иммигрировать в Канаду, а Мигнюз нынче рекламирует ваще исключительно Австралию.
Я не хочу в Австралию, я хочу в Новую Зеландию, там, где бегают маори, там, где после съемок "Властелина колец" распустили армию за полной ненадобностью. Наймусь подмастерьем к мужику, который делал стрелы для разных фильмов. Он, кстати, бывший канадец.
P.P.S. Но вообще зацените , насколько же тщательно китаец готовился к иммиграции! Он даже выучил всё про хоккей и стал болельщиком!
Designer Immigrants
PETER MANSBRIDGE: Ottawa is in the middle of an immigration controversy. This, just days after a census showed how crucial it is in building the nation and how important it will be in the future. But some warn new rules by the federal government are putting that future in jeopardy, and they're asking tough questions about who's coming into the country. Here's Dan Bjarnason with "designer immigrants."
DAN BJARNASON (Reporter): In Beijing, a half a world away from the action, Xao Li Sin and his wife Ying cheer on as their favourites battle for gold in the Olympics. They're not certain of the difference between icing and off side, but they are sure of one thing, their home team is team Canada. Xao and his family are planning to emigrate to Canada. Part of their preparation is this crash course in hockey. But hockey aside, to Xao, in selecting a new home, Canada already ranks as a gold medalist.
XAO LI SIN: Canada is a very safe country, and I think Canada has very good reputation for freedom and democracy, and also I like the climate of Canada.
BJARNASON: His credentials would be an asset to any country. He's got a PhD in thermo-optical engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he now works designing space equipment and as a computer animator and programmer. Sounds like a good bet for a new citizen.
LI SIN: These are some pictures of my work.
BJARNASON: Xao created his own high-powered presentation in English for his emigration consultant in Beijing, Dwight McWethy. He prepared a convincing pitch indeed to show why he'd make an excellent choice for Canada under what's called the skilled worker program. He was clearly a skilled worker. And until last December, he didn't need to convince anyone. He easily passed under our current point system. But then Ottawa changed the rules halfway through the game. Dwight did the new maths, and Xao was out of the running, along with about 90 percent of McWethy's clients. In addition to academic skills, the new yardstick would now emphasize work experience, language, and either a personal connection to Canada or a job already waiting. All bad news for Xao.
LI SIN: I don't think a Canadian company will keep a position for a person like me who may or may not go to Canada and maybe go to Canada after 40 months. Even worse, maybe I will be refused.
BJARNASON: While he cools his heels in Beijing, back in Ottawa, there's great anger over the controversial new immigration rules, and Minister Denis Coderre is feeling the heat.
DENIS CODERRE (Minister of Immigration): I'm the son of a carpenter. Believe me, my dad doesn't have a university degree, but he can build a house and I can't.
BJARNASON: The Minister of Immigration, just new to the job, has stepped in the middle of a national debate. It's about what road should our immigration policy now be going down? Increasingly, skilled immigrants have been finding it tougher and tougher to succeed, and the government's answer is to raise the bar and attract even more skilled immigrants. But critics argue that this will simply make the problem worse.
JEFFREY REITZ (University of Toronto): You want immigrants who are highly skilled and have characteristics that are going to make for success in the economy.
BJARNASON: Jeffrey Reitz is professor of industrial relations at the University of Toronto. On principle, he has no objection to raising the bar. The problem is that it's been tried before, and it's failed.
REITZ: The immigrants recruited in the '90s were much more skilled than those in the '80s. But perhaps surprisingly they've had much higher levels of unemployment initially. It's taken them longer to get good jobs, and the jobs that they've gotten aren't as good.
BJARNASON: For skilled workers coming to Canada, the picture is bleak and getting bleaker. When the current program began in the 1960s, immigrants were consistently more successful than native-born Canadians. But in the last ten years, the picture has reversed. Immigrants are sliding further down the income scale, even though the government has upped the skill requirements three times in the past decade. Now, immigrants can struggle here for ten years before they catch up to Canadians' income. According to Reitz, the problem isn't with who we've been selecting over there, it's what's been happening here.
REITZ: For most of this period, the skills of native-born Canadians have risen more rapidly than the skills of immigrants, and that was a result of a very definite policy of the Canadian government at all levels to invest in education. But the problem is worse than that because immigrants coming from abroad have the training, but the training may not be recognized by Canadian employers as being equivalent to the skills of native-born Canadians.
BJARNASON: This is not news to Bobby Premakamaren. Four years ago, he moved to Edmonton from England bringing him a degree from Middlesex University and accounting certificates from five other institutions. So he has a recognized skill, he speaks English and has a relative, a brother, already living in Canada. With such solid credentials, he'd even be one of the select few who would score over 80 points under the new rules. Sounds like a sure bet to make his life a classic immigrant success story. Wrong. He sent 3,000 resumes out to companies across the country looking for even an entry-level accounting position. In four years, not a single offer of a permanent job. So now he and his wife Nesa earn their money cleaning office buildings and apartments. Not what they had in mind here in the land of opportunity.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: It was a disaster to me I would say. I mean mentally tortured, and I was really heartbroken.
BJARNASON: Nesa now regrets ever leaving England, giving up the life they left in London, the house they owned, their garden. She had a good government job back in England, and although she's an accredited payroll specialist here, she too cannot get a job in her field. But mostly she's pained by the stress it's all having on her husband.
NESAMALAR PREMAKAMAREN: My heart cried out for him. I just couldn't turn around and say, you know, give up. I couldn't do that. What I did was I remember I sat down, it was heavy winter, and I thought to myself, no, if I break down, he is not going to, you know, come out of it. We will find some way. So I opened a day home at home, and he went out to work. In the first year, second year I ran the day home from 6:30 in the morning until about 11:00, 11:15 at night. In a way, I feel like I'm caught in a web. Only now, slowly, bit by bit, we are coming out. I would not have put my family through this. No way.
RATNA AMITGAR: Our best public relations tool in immigration is the immigrant himself. Nothing is as powerful as the message that the immigrant sends home, and that message is increasingly negative.
BJARNASON: Ratna Amitgar's Matry Foundation has studied the access immigrants have to trades and professions in Canada. Immigrant's expectations are rising, she says, and we're in trouble if we still think we can automatically convince the cream of the crop to come here and stay here.
AMITGAR: It was an unwritten contract almost between the immigrant and Canada that the real benefits of immigration would be transferred to the second generation. So the immigrant was more prepared to put his or her own gratification, so to say, on hold for one generation. Things have changed. The lives that immigrants are leaving behind in primary source countries such as India and China are also not that terrible as before.
BJARNASON: For Bobby and Nesa, going back to England is no option. They've exhausted their savings. They've decided to stay and fight. They're suing Ottawa for compensation, claiming they were lured to Canada with false promises of good jobs here. They also want the government to make it easier for foreign skills and training to be recognized in this country.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: Doctors, engineers and other people are facing the same problem. So, I mean, what's the point of increasing the point level and either of them have to have a PhD. What do they want PhD to come here and clean the toilet or deliver the pizza or run the mini-cab or something like that?
BJARNASON: One study of skilled immigrant incomes shows that a foreign education is valued at only half of what a Canadian education nets on the job market. Foreign work experience is valued by Canadian employers at approximately zero. It's a waste of immigrant skills that costs our economy about $3 billion a year. Jeffrey Reitz did the study.
REITZ: My analysis has shown that it is getting more severe over time. That immigrant skills are being discounted today more heavily than they were in the past.
BJARNASON: But there's no reason Canadian employers should be uninformed about foreign academic credentials. Here at World Education Services, a non-profit group endorsed by the Ontario government, they've examined and rated more than 28,000 overseas colleges and universities and technical institutes. All a Canadian company has to do is phone up and ask. Let me ask you about a couple of foreign institutions that you've done a bit of work on. Middlesex in England.
TIM OWEN (World Education Services): Generally we would look at a degree from any university in England as being equivalent to like an honours degree would be here.
BJARNASON: So Middlesex University, no problem there that you're aware of.
OWEN: We would not normally have any difficulty with that.
BJARNASON: This Middlesex graduate feels his lack of success in Canada isn't about credentials.
BOBBY PREMAKAMAREN: Straightforward, I mean if I want to put it blunt, my race. My colour is the one that causes a big problem, but I can't change it. This is the nature. This condition cannot be changed by anyone else. So I have to go like this because even if I change my name, if I painted myself, I'm not going to get a job.
BJARNASON: Back in Beijing, Xao Li Sin has no idea what happens next. The government has delayed implementing the new rules until year's end, but that's little comfort. In China, the backlog is a long stretch reaching down the road eight years. Canada, both in theory and in law, is supposed to have a colour blind immigration policy where all hopeful immigrants have equal access. In effect, there's one lineup into the country. So anyone from anywhere with enough points is admitted. But documents acquired under the access to information act suggest there are, in fact, precise limits applied to our visa offices. For example, London's limit is about 9,000 immigrants. But Beijing's, by contrast, is only 5,500. And there's more. Applicants from London or Paris or Berlin, for example, are fast-tracked in only a year or two. In Beijing, it takes eight years. Don Cameron is now an immigration consultant in Vancouver, but he worked on the inside for years. For three decades, he was an immigration visa officer, and he says the government has an immigration policy that is seemingly based on race.
DON CAMERON (Immigration Consultant): They are very concerned about the potential for enormous movements of people from China to Canada. And with regard to the other countries that are being held up, I don't know what the objection is. Maybe it's just that they're not white.
BJARNASON: So we asked the new Minister, Denis Coderre, to explain.
CODERRE: There's no quotas. Ninety percent of all the skilled workers coming from China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Philippines. We want also to make sure that we can cover, you know, the planet as a whole. We need people from Europe. We need people from Asia. We need also people from South America. So I think that we need, at the same time, to have a communication strategy, a promotion strategy to make sure also that you have some skilled workers who should come from certain areas. I don't know.
CAMERON: Those are all valid points. What is wrong with the present system is the government is denying that it exists. There's no open debate on how access to immigration to Canada should be divided in a situation where more people can qualify to come here every year than the government is willing to accept.
BJARNASON: Xao Li Sin's life is on hold.
LI SIN: I think Canada is still a beautiful country in my mind, also my dream country.
BJARNASON: So Xao bides his time, dreaming of the nation he wants to call his own, but a nation that can't decide if it wants him. For "The National," I'm Dan Bjarnason.
Транскрипт передачи канадского ТВ.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 01:05 pm (UTC)