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Broken Gates: A star immigrant gives up on Canada
The best foreign physicians give up on Canada
With great reluctance, Umesh Yalavarthy, a physician from southern India, is
giving up on the Canadian dream. He and his wife moved to Toronto 2½ years ago.
Young, educated and fluent in English, they were ideal immigrants, according to
Canada's recruitment plan.
His wife, a chemist, qualified under the point system that seeks to bring
professionals to Canada. She sponsored her husband, a recent graduate in family
medicine, who expected he would obtain his medical licence here without a
problem.
Dr. Yalavarthy, 27, knew Canada had a dire shortage of doctors and was in
particular need of family physicians in rural areas. He was prepared to go
anywhere.
He passed the Medical Council of Canada evaluating exams. However, three years
later, he still couldn't obtain a residency position to repeat the training he
had just finished in Hyderabad. There were more than 2,000 foreign-trained
doctors vying for just 200 spots.
Turns out, the elusive residency post was much more attainable south of the
border. This spring, Dr. Yalavarthy will leave the multicultural milieu of
Toronto for Chattanooga, Tenn., a city less than one tenth Toronto's size and in
the southern Appalachian Mountains, where hardly any foreigners live. He will
become a resident in internal medicine at a hospital there.
"I really love Toronto, and if they ever let me practise here I'll be happy to
come back. Our dream was not to emigrate to Tennessee. It was to emigrate to
Canada. We have lots of friends here," said Dr. Yalavarthy, whose wife and
newborn daughter will join him in a few months.
"But in Canada they doubt our credentials. I think that is unfair. I was one of
the top students in my college. In the U.S., if you score well on the exams, you
can get a residency to repeat your training."
This conundrum -- the recruitment of qualified professionals whose skills do not
compute in the Canadian labour market -- has become a critical issue facing the
Immigration Department.
In 2002, Ottawa changed the way it selected immigrants, abandoning the idea of
matching newcomers with worker shortages. Now applicants must score 67 out of a
possible 100 points in education, skills and language to be accepted here.
The theory is that Canada gets plug-and-play immigrants able to integrate into a
knowledge-based economy.
However, the reality is far different. A Statistics Canada study found that 70
per cent of the 164,000 immigrants who settled in 2000 and 2001 had trouble
entering the work force. Six in 10 eventually took jobs outside their areas of
training.
A 2004 study of 829 immigrant engineers in Ontario found that 55 per cent were
unable to find jobs and 29 per cent were working in fields other than
engineering and not commensurate with their skills.
There is a crucial bottleneck preventing professional newcomers from working in
their chosen fields. The provincial bodies and agencies that regulate medicine,
engineering, pharmacy, accounting, teaching, nursing and other professions
cannot assess credentials in a timely manner. Many discount overseas training
and experience.
At the same time, Canada faces a shortage in the trades, and many white-collar
workers are being forced to take jobs sweeping floors and delivering flyers.
Foreign doctors have become bricklayers.
Nurses are slinging coffee at fast-food restaurants.
This failure to use foreign brain power is not just a problem for immigrants.
The Conference Board of Canada found that it costs the economy more than
$1-billion a year in lost immigrant income due to underemployment.
Social ills will also result from the deterioration of earnings, warns
University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz. "Among them are increased
demands on the social safety net, more widespread public perception of
immigrants as a liability or social problem and political reaction on the part
of immigrants themselves."
It used to be that immigrants over time did as well or better financially than
their Canadian-born counterparts. The rags-to-riches story was part of the
immigrant mythology.
Today, Canada accepts 220,000 to 245,000 newcomers a year (and aims to increase
this to 300,000, or 1 per cent of the population), to help offset an aging work
force and declining fertility rates. By 2011, immigrants are expected to account
for all net population growth.
But they no longer are able to catch up to native-born Canadians, despite their
high levels of education. Statistics Canada released two recent reports showing
the new long-term trend of increasing low-income earners among immigrants.
Researchers found that the "rate of improvement for recent immigrants has not
brought them back in line with the economic fortunes of their predecessors."
Another recent research paper concludes that the return on a year of foreign
work experience is only about a third of what Canadian-based experience provides
in terms of higher earnings.
Prof. Reitz believes that the competition is stiffer now for immigrants, in part
because their native-born counterparts are better educated than they were a
generation ago.
"Canada now has its own intelligentsia. Our method of selection will only work
if employers recognize a foreign education."
The problem is complex because while the federal government sets immigration
policy, the provinces are in charge of the newcomers. "There is acknowledgment
about the need for collaboration," Prof. Reitz said.
"But at the end of the day there is nobody in charge of implementing the
solution."
Those who study immigration believe it is time to retool the selection system to
ensure human capital is not wasted. Recruitment should be flexible so the
country obtains the workers it needs and highly qualified people are not wasting
their skills -- or giving up and heading south.
Ottawa knows the immigration system is flawed.
"We need to have a national immigration framework," a senior immigration
official said. "How do we build a system that is more responsive to labour-market
needs that will bring a healthy flow of professionals, as well as trades people?
"The answer is work with the provinces and maybe make the temporary-worker
program more responsive to labour market needs."
Last month, a government roundtable began crisscrossing the country to canvass
the public for solutions.
"The committee would like to see a process in place whereby immigrants will be
able to obtain the Canadian
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