Thread: U.S. seeks immigration 'pointers' from Canada

U.S. seeks immigration 'pointers' from Canada
Last Updated: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 | 1:07 PM ET
CBC News

U.S. officials are interested in the point system used to rate and admit highly skilled immigrants in Canada — and which has been so successful that immigrants are now better educated than Canadian-born workers, says a Kingston, Ont., researcher.

Charles Beach, an economics professor at Queen's University, told a U.S. Senate committee on health, education, labour and pension this past month that the system allows Canada to attract a higher proportion of skilled foreigners than the U.S.

Beach was invited to make a presentation to the committee alongside several U.S. researchers after collaborating on a study of the points system with Carleton University professors Alan Green and Christopher Worswick.

He presented their findings at a research conference earlier this year.

Beach told the committee that prospective immigrants with better education, training and language fluency, as well as people in certain age categories, receive high scores under the Canadian system.

"Those who don't will not be granted admission," said Beach in an interview.

"But you can contrast that with the United States where they have a huge inflow of illegal immigrants and there's every reason to expect probably many if not most haven't even completed high school."

Immigrants better educated than Canadian-born workers

The Ontario study found that 80 per cent of legally admitted immigrants in the U.S. were "family class" immigrants. That is, they were admitted not for their skills, but because they had relatives in the U.S.

In contrast, 55 per cent of immigrants to Canada are "independent economic immigrants."

The findings were based on an analysis of data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

The researchers analyzed the characteristics of foreigners who have immigrated to Canada since 1980 and found that they are even better educated than Canadian-born workers.

Wayne Samuelson, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, said Canada's immigrants tend to come from countries with well-developed training and apprenticeship programs.

"But it does raise the question of what we do in our country to ensure we can develop our young people to move into those kinds of jobs, as well," said Samuelson, whose organization represents 700,000 unionized workers in the province.

According to Beach, Canada has the highest per capita immigration in the world, and has been using the point system since 1967.

He said a shift in recent years toward admitting immigrants with a broad range of skills rather than people intended to fill labour shortages in specific fields has been effective in attracting more skilled workers.

On the other hand, studies have shown that some highly skilled and educated immigrants end up underemployed in Canada.


http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2 ... oints.html

This just CANNOT be true! Is it

Take advice from Canada now??? NO, don't believe it. They're innudated with ILLEGALS, especially Islamic ILLEGALS.