Shutting the doors

Canada swears in about 160,000 new citizens every year and during the Canada Day celebrations on July 1st, a total of 1,500 people took their allegiance to their adopted country. This is the biggest day in terms of the number of individual ceremonies held across the country on a single day.

Canada Day, July 1st, is celebrated with fireworks at Ashbridges Bay in Toronto.
Click link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOm-15621bs&feature=related to
view, "Peter Russell - How to Become a Canadian."

But even as Canada offered its welcome mat to its new citizens on July 1st, the doors to aspiring new immigrants under the federal skilled worker and investor program have been slammed shut by Citizenship and Immigration Canada until July of next year. Canada Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, in a speech before a C.D. Howe Immigration conference, announced it’s about time to put a moratorium on the country’s skilled labour program in order to “reset the button.” Kenney’s decision put the brakes on new applications under the two programs popular with skilled workers wanting to come to Canada from abroad, which he stressed is part of the government’s backlog elimination strategy.

Kenney said it will be just “a temporary pause on new applications for the federal skilled worker program,” to “ensure that improvements to the program have time to be put in place which will give new applicants the opportunity to be even more positioned to succeed in Canada.”

But he cautioned that the moratorium will not amount to a drop in immigration levels. According to Minister Kenney, the only way to make the system run faster is to get rid of the backlog in immigration applications and at the same time give the government the opportunity to revise the much-criticized selection criteria for accepting new immigrants.

Under this year’s budget, the Conservative government has already scrapped all applications prior to 2008 as a way of eliminating a backlog of 280,000 applications. Even after removing all those applications, there would still be plenty of others waiting, thus “there’s just no point in any longer stockpiling people in the back of the backlog,” Kenney added.

What additional changes Ottawa will make to the federal skilled worker program are not known, but Kenney said he’d like Canadian employers to have more say in selecting immigrants under a system where they can choose potential job candidates from a ready pool of pre-screened skilled immigrants.

Last year, Kenney capped the number of applications for the investor program to 700 spots and doubled the minimum investment requirements from $400,000 to $800,000. The quota was filled in 30 minutes. There are currently 25,000 investor applications representing 86,000 principals and dependents in the backlog.

Currently, the federal skilled worker program has an inventory of 463,214 people waiting for a decision. Ottawa is hoping the new law would enable Kenney to return and dispose the files of some 280,000 people submitted before Feb. 28, 2008. This has raised the ire of affected applicants who have filed a class action lawsuit against Ottawa, which has agreed not to destroy or return their applications within 90 days of the bill’s passage until the lawsuit is certified by the court. The court is yet to hear or set a hearing date in September.

Judging by his official pronouncements, Minister Kenney is apparently casting a huge precautionary tale.

First, in revising the rules for temporary foreign workers allowing them to enter and work in Canada for four years but leave thereafter, the government shows bias and preference to temporary status rather than giving them a chance to stay as permanent residents.

Second, in declaring a moratorium for sponsorship of parents and grandparents of already landed immigrants, Kenney has effectively set aside the objective of family reunification under the law.

Third, in eliminating all previous skilled worker applications prior to February 2008, Kenney has unfairly and unjustly shut closed the system to these people without the benefit of a review and assessment of their applications, which is probably a violation of their fundamental right to natural justice.

And now, with this recent suspension of all applications under the skilled worker and investor program, the government is further squeezing the door ever so tightly that those who wish to enter Canada are being excluded.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada Minister Jason Kenney. Photo by The  Canadian
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A recent poll conducted by Ipsos Reid for Postmedia News and Global TV in time for the celebration of Canada Day, shows that almost three-quarters of Canadians don’t want the federal government to increase the number of people the country allows to enter every year. However, four in 10 people feel those immigrants are having a positive effect on the country.

The message from the survey is clear: that while immigrants are being tolerated to enter Canada, there is a feeling among Canadians that there are an awful lot of them coming in right now.

Darrell Bricker, president of Ipsos Reid, said that Canadians don’t seem to realize the dramatic transition in the government’s immigration policy since the 1960s. He argued that fifty years ago, the government was trying to convince Canadians to welcome the “poor and huddled masses and refugees who made up most of the immigrant population at the time. Now, it’s about attracting people who are going to drive our economy.”

If the poll survey would be taken as a basis for government policy, then Canada should not let more immigrants come into the country as it currently allows. The survey shows that 72 per cent of the respondents said no to more immigration. This is in contrast to population projections based on the 2011 census that showed a rapid decrease in fertility rates in Canada, and if this trend continues, Canada’s population growth could be close to zero within the next 20 years. It behooves that without a sustained level of immigration, Canada’s zero population growth could become a reality.

The policy changes the Canadian government has adopted in the last few months appear to be short-sighted as they are merely aimed in attracting people who are immediately needed by industry or employers. These policies are based on the disposability of people, not on their potential contributions to the economy on the long haul. Thus, employers might be able to hire their workers needed for short-term periods and could be disposed of when they’re no longer necessary.

The treatment of immigrants that these policy changes by the Conservative government seem to augur is bereft of the respect for the fundamental humanity of temporary foreign workers. They harvest our fruits and vegetables, care for our children, clean our houses, perform the most backbreaking and perilous work in our oil and tar sands. They fill all the labour needs in jobs which are unappealing to Canadians or which Canadians refuse to take. They come to us, as the Swiss playwright Max Frisch wrote, “as menial labourers, and somewhere along the way we seem to have forgotten that they are also human beings.”

This way of treating immigrants is very un-Canadian like. It parallels the immigration system of our neighbour in the south where foreign workers are denigrated after they have been exploited of their usefulness to society, where they are stripped of their basic humanity, and branded as aliens who are deemed as “illegals.”

The decision by U.S President Barack Obama to stop deporting young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, despite its humanitarian element, has been criticized and lambasted by the Republican Party as pandering to the Hispanic vote. Arizona’s “Show your papers” in cracking down on undocumented immigrants has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court while part of the law was declared unconstitutional. What the U.S. Supreme Court decision and Obama’s stop-gap measure have achieved is merely to highlight the continuing inability of the United States to wrestle with its immigration mess. Former U.S. President George W. Bush tried immigration reform but was scuttled by his own party in Congress. President Obama has hardly begun to try his hand at immigration reform but already the Republican Party has spoiled his efforts.

Too much of the debate in the United States has been focused on the legality of immigration, deflecting the more fundamental issue of the positive effects of mass immigration on American society.

In both the United States and Canada, study after study has shown immigration has been beneficial to society in general. There is enough social evidence to debunk the notion that immigrants have worsened social ills, or that they have reshaped the social fabric in harmful ways.

Writing for the Harper’s Magazine in March 1871, Louis Bagger compared the Castle Garden on New York’s Battery, where ships from Europe deposited immigrants who flooded America after the Civil War, to an absolute immigration depot. Among those who came in 1869, according to Bagger, were 99,605 from Germany, 66,204 from Ireland, 41,090 from England, and more than 35,000 from the Scandinavian countries. Millions of people afterwards would immigrate to America, making it a nation of immigrants. The same can be said of Canada, especially after the 1960s.

Yet, both countries have become wary of immigrants today. Every time immigration comes to the top of the public agenda, a dark shadow prevails -- the dark shadow of racism. Racist demonization always begins the hysterical rhetoric, and it’s not a new phenomenon. The racism in this debate is more pronounced in the United States, with its epicentre in Arizona. Canada may not be too far behind if the ruling Conservative government is allowed to continue singlehandedly, without a robust public debate, with its sweeping policy changes under the pretext of eliminating the immigration backlog and reforming a broken system.

Canada’s sinister immigration backlog solution

With a clear majority in Parliament after leading two minority governments, nothing can now stop the ruling Conservative Party in having its way over the next four years. This is why Canada’s Minister for Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney appears to be in a hurry to overhaul the country’s immigration system every time he announces new policy changes.

Kenney is in fact dismantling Canada’s immigration system at will. Public consultations which he himself has initiated will never change his position. People are being encouraged to speak up but only for the sake of token participation. It’s only a matter of time before we witness a virtually new program for selecting immigrants in this country.

Canada's Minister for Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney. Photo courtesy
of mostlyconservative. Click to view "Jason Kenney: Bottom Line
Immigration," http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVjnW6IsAAs

Under the pretext of eliminating the backlog in the main federal economic immigration program, Minister Kenney recently announced that he is cancelling all applications submitted prior to February 27, 2008, for which an immigration officer has not made a decision based on selection criteria by March 29, 2012. Close to 280,000 applicants will be affected by this decision.

“The Federal Skilled Worker Program backlog is a major roadblock to Canada’s ability to respond to rapidly changing labour market needs,” says Kenney. “Having to process applications that are as many as eight years out of date reduces our ability to focus on new applicants with skills and talents that our economy needs today.”

Before being elected as majority government, the Conservative Party had been singing a different tune over the last four years. They were the political party of immigrants, the Tories claimed. The Tories were praising immigrants for being essential to Canada’s prosperity. There was no mistake in Jason Kenney’s appeal to Canada’s newcomers when he portrayed himself as hero to new immigrants. That was before. Alas, the federal elections are over, and the Conservative Party has suddenly been afflicted with mega-amnesia.

For four years as a minority government, the Tories could not cut back the flow of immigration applicants to this country so they had to maintain or increase the projected number of immigrants to Canada every year. Canada’s minority population is getting larger due to immigrants from non-Western nations and all the political parties are after their support.

Well, things are different now. Canada’s immigration minister doesn’t have to worry about the minority population vote anymore. That’s why it is so easy for Jason Kenney to put the blame squarely on the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSW) as the main reason for the immigration backlog. As he is fond of saying, the backlog is simply a mathematical problem. “When total applications exceed total admissions, you get a backlog.”

Of course, the minister is right. But who made this happen in the first place? Wasn’t it Kenney himself who smugly boasted that the backlog issue reflects well on Canada—that it is the Number 1 choice destination of immigrants in the world? Because Canada, according to Kenney, is a land “of opportunity, prosperity and democracy.”

When you keep opening up the application process, it is only logical that you create a line-up. And when there are only a few applicants you can accept to come to Canada, then you create a backlog. If you keep doing this every year, the line-up grows longer and longer. In short, the backlog issue is never a function of the number of applications accepted or the government is willing to entertain, but the number of applications actually processed and approved.

So, is the culprit the FSW program or the federal government and its bureaucrats?

It is fairly reasonable to expect the federal government to close the door to new applications, but not to eliminate those applications made earlier. Because these early applicants will be reimbursed for their fees, the federal government deems this is fair treatment. It would never be fair. The Canadian government has dashed their hopes and dreams. They gave up other options, and for some, opportunities for personal advancement which are no longer available after waiting so long. Others have postponed marriage or raising their families, so how can you be fair to these people? Their applications were never refused but only languished in the backlog because of bureaucratic incompetence.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), the basic law that governs the country’s immigration system, says that decisions made under this law should be consistent with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including principles of equality and freedom from discrimination. Applicants directly affected by this draconian decision by Canada Immigration to shut the door to those who have applied prior to 2008 but have patiently followed the rules are mainly from China, India and the Philippines. These are applicants not necessarily the type of people from Western Europe that Canada prefers. Wouldn’t this be a clear act of discrimination against a specific race?

Right after the federal elections in 2011, Minister Kenney asked Canadians to help the government round up and deport suspected war criminals and illegal immigrants, ominously signalling the change from his previous pro-immigrant stance during the election campaign to that of an “Immigration Hunter” as the media had dubbed him.

On October 20, 2011, Jason Kenney rose before the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration and announced that immigration applications need to be reduced to fix the current backlog. He didn’t say then that those who applied before 2008 and whose applications are decomposing in the backlog would be dropped. Kenney instead decided to cap the number of applications for family reunification, thus denied the hopes of many new immigrants to bring their families with them to Canada, a clear defiance of the IRPA objective to reunite families. To allay the fears of these immigrants that they would not be able to sponsor their families, Kenney sweetened the cap by allowing parents and grandparents to come to Canada as temporary visitors under an expedited application process—8 weeks versus 8 years if they apply for permanent residence.

The Minister of Immigration wants a just-in-time system that recruits people with the right skills to meet Canada’s labour market needs, expedites their immigration and gets them working in a period of months, not years. In other words, Kenney wants employers to have a greater say in selection of immigrants.

Jason Kenney confirmed this decision in a recent interview. “The reforms are not about completely handing over to employers the power of selection, but rather about increasing their role,” he told The Huffington Post Canada this week. “There will continue to be a certain criteria that people have to meet.”

Many have criticized Kenney’s decision to put employers in the driver’s seat of Canada’s immigration system. Peter Showler, former chairperson of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, said allowing businesses to pick and choose the country’s newcomers hands “significant control over the selection of ideal immigrants to employers, who are acting in their own self-interest, not in Canada’s interest.”

Giving employers more say in selecting immigrants will result in a narrower focus because they will simply choose those who can fill a particular job. Right now, there are more than 300,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada—people who have been hired by employers to fill in their labour shortage. Unlike immigrants, these temporary workers have no guarantee of staying in Canada after their papers expire. These are the types of workers preferred by most employers; these are workers who can be hired when needed and disposed of when their services are no longer necessary.

Lately, Canada’s Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has announced that the Conservative government would now be willing to let employers pay temporary foreign workers less than what Canadians are paid. Finley said that employers will now be allowed to pay such foreign workers 15 per cent less than the prevailing wage.

So, the hiring of temporary foreign workers which was begun as a stop-gap measure in 2000 looks like the policy of choice by the Conservative government. There will be more temporary foreign workers coming to Canada who are disposable after their contracts expire. No more backlogs, then. Exactly what the economy needs in order to prosper and for employers to make more profits: by lowering wages.

There is something more sinister in the government’s scheme to eliminate the backlog and reform what is now considered a dysfunctional immigration system. The reason is more economic than anything else: to drive down wages or else the government will take in more temporary foreign workers, trained and cheap labour from abroad.

The Conservative government wants to put a stop to Canadians whining about jobs going to immigrants and foreign workers. He is not mincing words: Canadian workers had better stop complaining and accept lower wages. Jason Kenney has already warned that unemployed workers who refuse to take low-wage jobs will have their employment insurance benefits cut off. If Canadians agree to work for less, says Kenney, Ottawa won’t have to bring in as many low-wage outsiders.