immigrant | The Silo

Canada’s immigration point system is designed to select skilled immigrants who have the potential to contribute to the country’s economic growth and meet its evolving skills needs. However, Canada faces challenges in fully leveraging increased immigration levels to enhance the well-being of Canadians due to weaknesses in capital investment and a quantity/quality trade-off in selecting economic immigrants. Furthermore, recent reforms may work at cross purposes to this goal. They include category-based selection that targets low-paying occupations, which can discourage capital investment, and a recent surge in the number of temporary residents in low-wage jobs that also may have adverse effects on the quality of potential candidates for permanent residency.

This study compares skilled immigration selection policy in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, with the objective of identifying key areas for improvement in Canadian policy. The skilled immigration point systems in Canada and Australia share some similarities, with both prioritizing a two-step immigration process, placing an emphasis on English proficiency and workforce age, and requiring pre-migration credential and English proficiency assessments. However, the two countries differ mainly in their strictness of criteria and their emphasis on occupational and language skills. Furthermore, Australia has shown more agility and creativity in its skilled migration reforms. Reforms in the UK and New Zealand have also put them ahead in the competition for talent.

Based on this international comparison, the author makes recommendations for improvement. They include: 1) Setting a Minimum Points Threshold for Eligibility. As it is, Canada imposes no minimum points threshold for eligibility in its Express Entry points-based system. 2) Considering a Pre-admission Earnings Factor. Studies show the importance of pre-immigration earnings in predicting immigrants’ outcomes after arrival. The UK, New Zealand and Australia include this factor. 3) Boosting Standards under the Language Requirement. Official language skills are as important in predicting the initial earnings of principal applicants admitted under Canada’s Express Entry system as pre-immigration Canadian work experience, and even more important than educational level and age at the time of immigration. 4) Raising Business Immigration Numbers. Canada faces the challenge of weak business investment but is failing to select business immigrants with entrepreneurial skills, putting it at a disadvantage compared to competitors like Australia and the UK.

The author thanks Tingting Zhang, Charles DeLand, Rosalie Wyonch, Charles Beach, Jodi Kasten, Mikal Skuterud and anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft. The author retains responsibility for any errors and the views expressed.

Read the full report here.

For the Silo, Parisa Mahboubi/C.D. Howe Institute.

Parisa Mahboubi

Parisa Mahboubi is a Senior Policy Analyst and leads the C.D. Howe Institute’s human capital policy program. Her research interest focuses on social policy with a concentration on demographic, skills, education, and labour market concerns. In addition to authoring research studies, she regularly writes a column for the Globe and Mail’s business section.

Plato’s The Republic challenged the way humankind thought. Now, a immigrant from then-Communist Hungary is posing a similar challenge: Is perception reality, why can one individual’s experience of reality differ so radically from another’s, and how can humankind’s search for a deity be what ultimately separates us from each other and from Nature?

Heady stuff, and Istvan Deak’s book, Frail Absolute, is not for the faint-hearted.

Neither is the author, who fled Hungary illegally with his wife and lived in an Italian refugee camp for six months before being allowed into Montreal, Canada. There, Deak secured a job using brooms and mops in an expert way cleaning hospital corridors, and eventually writing commercial business software programs. A short time later, he moved to Toronto, where he and his wife live now.

3rd Century AD scroll fragment of Plato's Republic — 3rd Century AD scroll fragment of Plato’s Republic

A philosophy is born. As this self-described analytical introvert began revisiting the philosophers he had read as a teenager, long-quiet questions began to surface about religion, about matter and energy, about how humans interact with one another. And he began writing Frail Absolute.

“I understood that the Force of Reality blew up in the Big Bang and created our universe,” Deak says.

“That Force, that Absolute, has been and must be present in everything in a most profound manner. Otherwise, everything would cease to exist.”

As he wrote and thought and questioned, his epiphany came.

“I asked this Force of Reality, ‘Where can I find you?’ And the reply came back, ‘Who is it who stirs your mind so that you want to know this?'” the author says.

As in The Republic, where Socrates and others discuss the meaning of justice, happiness, soul and the roles of the philosopher in society, characters in Frail Absolute discuss the meaning of reality, perception and harmony. Where Socrates vision culminates in a city ruled by philosopher-kings, Frail Absolute ultimately creates a way to exist in what Deak dubs “the Continuum (All That Is).”

“I have always sought a way to transcend what separates us from one another and from the force that exists everywhere. No matter what one believes in “science, a strict or a benevolent deity, even a non-existent god such as atheists do“ searching for this concept keeps humans apart. All reality is relative to the individual experiencing it,” he says. “Since there can be no single, absolute truth, I imagine how we can instead pursue the shareable values of love, compassion and harmonious collaboration in our daily existence.”

Mr. Deak — Recent photograph of Istvan Deak

Istvan Deak grew up in Hungary, reading the works of ancient and modern philosophers. As a young adult, he taught math and physics before fleeing Communist Hungary for a refugee camp in Italy with his wife. They emigrated to Canada, where he eventually joined a railway company and then began writing software applications as a freelancer. He plans for Frail Absolute to be just the first of many philosophical books.

Istvan Deak’s Wikipedia Page

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