Canada #1 in education: For what?

Education has been regarded by many as a great equalizer. The sad thing, however, is that not many have access to tertiary or college/university education after high school.

A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Education at a Glance 2011 recently stated that the countries with the most highly educated citizens are also some of the wealthiest in the world. Not surprisingly, most of the countries in the top 10 list of most educated countries in the world have also the largest GDPs.

Finland, which is considered the envy of the world today in educating its nation’s children, is number 10 while Canada is at the topmost of the list. The United States is at number 4 while two Asian countries, South Korea and Japan, also crack the Top 10 list.

According to the OECD report, 50 per cent of Canada’s population have attained postsecondary education. Canada has an average annual growth rate of 2.3%, the 5th lowest and with a GDP per capita of $39,070, the 10th highest in the world. Tertiary education spending accounts for 41% of total education spending in the country. Nearly 25 per cent of university students in Canada come from an immigration background.

Students at computers. Photo courtesy of Getty Images/Comstock Images.
Canada was ranked number one by OECD report among the Top 10 most
educated countries in the world.

Canada selects new immigrants on a points-system and awards applicants with higher education with more points. Since the adoption of this system of selecting immigrants, newcomers to Canada by and large possess at a minimum a baccalaureate degree from university. Some of them have also completed masteral and doctoral degrees. With highly educated parents, it is no wonder that children of immigrants have also picked up from their parents’ motivation to go to university after finishing high school.

However, Canada’s emphasis on high education for its immigrants is not necessarily correlated to job marketability. Many highly educated immigrants end up taking odd jobs that are below their educational training and skills because the market or employers usually demand Canadian work experience. It is not surprising to see people with PhDs driving taxis or cleaning buildings, jobs that are far asymmetrical to their qualifications.

Take for example the corps of live-in caregivers that Canada brings in every year.

Most Filipino caregivers possess a college degree and are proficient in English as a conversational language. These caregivers have sacrificed pursuing their original dreams after finishing college in order to come to Canada for a better life. Some of them are teachers, accountants, and nurses, and had they stayed home in the Philippines, would not be earning as much as they earn from domestic work in Canada. When they complete their domestic work contracts, they become eligible to explore the open market for jobs and apply for permanent residence.

Brain drain is an unfortunate result for the Philippines. But what can a poor economy like that of the Philippines do to prevent its graduates and professionals from leaving when there are no jobs at home? In Finland, where schools score consistently at the top of world rankings, teaching is a prestigious career. Finnish teachers are highly valued, and it is more difficult to get into teacher education than law or medicine.

In the Philippines, I could still recall that during the martial law period under Ferdinand Marcos, Metro aides—street sweepers and cleaners employed by city governments to ensure that local surroundings are kept clean and immaculate, especially for visiting tourists—were well paid, with salaries higher than what teachers got paid for. It’s therefore easy to understand why Filipino teachers would rather work as housemaids and nannies in Canada than teach in Philippine schools.

However, selecting immigrants with very high education is not necessarily a positive or practical measure in ensuring a constant supply of workers if their skills and training do not directly match industry demand.

The federal government has to implement more effective and equitable programs of accreditation of foreign credentials if it must justify continuing to place more weight on higher education rather than actual work skills that the job market demands. Otherwise, the top ranking of Canada among the most educated countries in world would be deceptive, since a big slice of its population with tertiary education are actually immigrants who are underemployed in jobs beneath their training and education.

New immigrants are not the only ones having a problem accessing jobs equivalent to their training and skills. A far more serious problem relates to the crisis among First Nations children who are unable to complete even high school education. On the average, native students receive about $3,000 less in education funding than non-natives.

A residential school for First Nations children in Manitoba, Canada. Photo courtesy
 of Wikipedia. Please click link to view "Aboriginal Education: Solutions for the Future,"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmH67ZLlFGw&feature=related

Aboriginal leaders have expressed their complaint to the federal government that only 40 per cent of youths living on reserves finish high school. Some First Nations adolescents have to leave their families to attend school off-reserve because their remote communities don’t have schools. According to a Toronto Star report, seven kids in Thunder Bay, Ontario, have died in the last 10 years while living on their own seeking an education.

Professor Cindy Blackstock of the University Alberta, who is also the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, filed a human rights complaint in 2007 accusing the government of wilfully underfunding First Nations children services. “It is discriminatory not to give First Nations kids the same chances as other Canadian children,” Blackstock said.

Canada on top of the list of most educated countries in the world is an empty recognition when the reality on the ground tells otherwise.

When you have new immigrants who cannot find decent work despite their training credentials, this indicates something is wrong with the country’s selection system. When you have native children deprived of basic high school education, Canada should not feel proud and worthy of recognition as being the top-ranked most educated country in the world.

Higher education, in another sense, could be a barrier to equal opportunities for success if Canadian universities continue to keep the emphasis solely on high marks. Acceptance to a Canadian university, depending on the academic program one chooses, is becoming very difficult because students need to have lots of A’s in their high school marks in order to qualify. This emphasis on marks as best indicators of post-secondary success has its limitations. Grades are not the only indicators of a student’s potential after high school. Involvement in community activities and other volunteer work, and leadership skills may also provide more objective information on an applicant’s personal profile that is necessary to predict success in a university or college program.

It is uncontested wisdom that education today prepares the students for life and work in an advanced economy. Skilled and motivated workers are required by modern economies, and they can profit from these job opportunities if they are equipped to respond to labour demands.

But this kind of thinking sometimes becomes problematic because the connection between education and work, for example, is made too simple and direct. It distorts the purpose of schooling, i.e., the development of individuals as ends in themselves, and not merely as instruments in the economic process.

Aristotle once said that we educate ourselves in order to make noble use of our leisure, which is diametrically opposed to the contemporary view that we go to school so we can a get a job. A better way to arrive at a compromise is by distinguishing education from training. By training, we mean the process we undertake to prepare ourselves for a job.

Since we start out in school at an early age, we need to be trained in basic numeracy skills—how to add, subtract, multiply or divide, and learn simple literacy skills like reading, spelling and writing. Exactly like an athlete who trains his body to react and adapt to the rigors of his sport. When we have acquired these fundamental skills, we move to the next and higher step, which is education proper. At this stage, we learn how to think and to know how to find and use information, in other words, the process of judgment and evaluation.

The same can be said about the standards we use to select new immigrants, the ways we can help disadvantaged children like those from the First Nations so that they are not left behind, and how we provide universal access to university education.

In the final analysis, the development of the human potential is the most paramount of all. To be worthy of being part of an advanced society, we should not be content with raising individuals as mere tools in achieving social or economic progress. That people are allowed to be the best that they can be should be on top of the Canadian leadership’s agenda.

Life in the underground

The exact nature of illegal immigration makes it difficult to establish the actual number of illegal immigrants in any country. At least two of them are now out in the open, from between 7 and 20 million illegal immigrants estimated to be living in the United States.

In an article in The New York Times magazine, Jose Antonio Vargas, who shared a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre, came out of the backwoods to admit he was an undocumented immigrant after turning 30 early this year. He wrote: “I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.”

Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, admits  in the New York Times
 magazine that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States. Please click to
view his website "Define American" at http://defineamerican.com/

Vargas wrote that his Filipino mother sent him to live with his grandparents in the United States because she wanted to give him a better life. He was 12 years old when he left the Philippines and only after several years did he realize that he was living in the United States with false documents. Although fearful that his undocumented status could soon be exposed, Vargas was able to finish school and pursue his dream of becoming a journalist by lying about his status and with a little help from people who became his mentors and supporters.

Meanwhile, Elisha L. Dawkins, a US army and navy veteran, is now in jail because the government wants to deport him after they found out he lied in his passport application. Dawkins served with distinction in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, although he has never ever been an American citizen. Coming to the United States from Bahamas as an infant, he was raised to believe he was a bona fide American citizen.

Elisha Dawkins, shown in Baghdad in 2007, is accused of lying on a passport application
and has spent a month in jail. Photo by Senior Master Sgt. Brian Boone -US Air Force

In general, illegal immigrants in the United States are in search for well-paying jobs, which in most cases are the type of work the average American citizen would not like to do. These are “underclass” jobs that include harvesting crops, unskilled labour in landscaping and construction, house-cleaning work in hotels and restaurants, all of which have a disproportionate number of illegal workers. Many of them would be willing to take these “underclass” jobs because they still pay relatively higher wages than those in their home countries.

Imagine if all these undocumented workers would voluntarily confess in public as what Jose Antonio Vargas has done because they’re fed up with living in the underground. They probably would not attract the same sympathy or stir up a false sense of honesty or courage to speak up, not having the cache of a Pulitzer prize-winning writer. Without a doubt, the Department of Homeland Security would have swiftly rounded them up and put them on the next flight to their home countries.

Canada, with a more liberal immigration system in place, would have from 200,000 to 300,000 illegally staying in the country. These are mostly people who came by approved visa but overstayed after their visa expired, and those who came as refugees but failed to establish their claim as convention refugees.

By and large the Canadian immigration system is so dysfunctional and works against illegal immigrants. Canada wants the best of the best—those with university and post-graduate degrees—but the jobs available are trades people and low-skilled workers who have no hope of entering Canada under the current points system which favour academic qualifications and not skilled trades. The current system, therefore, is an inefficient way of meeting the demands of the labour market. Besides, applications for immigration for skilled workers take 5 to 6 years to process and that’s a long time to wait.

To stave off illegal immigration, the Canadian government has shifted its focus on recruiting temporary low-skilled workers whose applications can be processed much faster to fill in labour shortages. But temporary foreign worker programs are inherently exploitative. Based on Europe’s experience with similar guest worker programs, they could lead to more serious social issues like racialization and poverty.

A work permit ties the worker to a specific employer and a specific location, creating a relationship of dependency that imitates indentured servitude. Under programs such as the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, the Live-In Caregiver Program and the Temporary Foreign Workers Program which includes the Low-Skilled Pilot Project, temporary foreign workers are at the mercy of their employers, a situation that makes these workers vulnerable to exploitation.

At present, temporary foreign workers in Canada are authorized to work for four years cumulatively, after which they must return to their home countries. If they want to come back to Canada under this program, they must wait for another four years before they can apply, which appears like a clear strategy set by the Conservative federal government to keep low-skilled immigrants out.

Given the exploitative nature of temporary work and the lack of opportunity for temporary workers to acquire permanent residence or simply improve their working conditions in the future, it might be better off to go underground and work as illegal immigrants. With a little luck they could eventually apply for permanent residence if they have found an opportunity that underscores their education and skills or if they have met the right partner to marry and be sponsored for permanent residence. But these situations are very few far and between.

Illegal immigrants chase false hope to Canada. Photo courtesy of New York Times.
 A Mexican  illegal immigrant packs his car moving out of a motel in Windsor, Ontario.
Please click following link to view Canada's Conservative Party advertisement in the
last federal elections: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcptS3RSvyY

After the 9/11 terrorist attack on the New York Twin Towers, US immigration authorities tightened up travel to the United States. One Filipino woman was caught by the new restrictions imposed by the United States government. She and her husband both held work permits but she needed to go home to the Philippines because her parents were sick. She left her husband and children in California and decided to return after 9/11. She was refused entry and her immigration papers were invalidated. After she was ordered deported, she entered Canada and attempted to re-enter the United States first from Vancouver and later from Toronto, where she was both refused.

Although returning to the Philippines with her husband and children was an option, she thought she would never have the same economic opportunity to find a well-paying job and give her children a better future. Realizing it would be futile to enter the U.S. in order to reunite with her family, she decided to take the long route to permanent residency in Canada—find work as a caregiver, divorce her husband, remarry a Canadian and get sponsored as a permanent resident.

After ten years since 9/11, by now she would either be a permanent Canadian resident or citizen. But her connection with her family would have been effectively broken and her relationship with her Filipino husband crushed while she continues to nurse hopes she can go back to the United States to reunite and live with her family.

The are other stories about many visitors from the Philippines and South America who came to Canada during the papal summit in 2002 but who decided to stay—first, by claiming refugee status when their visas expired, and living in the underground when their claims were refused. Some of them have been successful in obtaining permanent residence through marriage to Canadians while others are probably still undocumented without status, but contributing to the economy nonetheless.

It may actually cost more for the government and to employers to deport illegal immigrants who are already working in the country. Removing them will choke healthy industries that have relied on their labour, which in the long run can seriously undermine the country’s economic interests.

It is estimated that the number of illegal foreign workers in Canada could reach a high of half a million. The Ontario Construction Secretariat has estimated that the province alone loses over 1.5 billion dollars in unpaid taxes and premiums annually to the underground immigrant economy. That’s a lot of revenue lost.

Deportation and stricter border controls are the easiest solutions but not necessarily the most effective in curbing illegal immigration. Granting amnesty to those already in the country is only a stop-gap measure and not a permanent solution.

Click following link to view National Day of Action Against Jason Kenney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty5ntADWBFg

Illegal immigrants are simply willing to work undesirable jobs even for unusually low wages and many employers are taking advantage of this situation. Opening up the borders for low-skilled immigrants and hiring them as temporary workers without any pathway to permanent residency and all the protections and rights afforded to native-born workers or citizens is not going to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. Besides being exploitative and reducing temporary foreign workers to a disposable workforce, many will choose to go underground and this could lead to other serious political, economic, social and ethical issues.

If temporary foreign worker programs are inherently exploitative and there exists a real need in the labour force, people should be allowed to enter Canada with rights as permanent residents. This is a much better approach than continuing with temporary foreign worker programs, deportation or stricter immigration controls. The key issue the government must address is the creation of pathways to permanence, anything less would be a continuing human rights violation.