Wretched tales abound of even highly qualified Indians landing up in Canada, only to find that they don't get the job that their college degrees and experience require, having to instead settle for a dead-end job, even to the extent of being a sweeper with a PhD!

Unfortunately, for those who actually manage to land the job they want, are sometimes paid 80% or even 70% of the amount a white Canadian will be paid for the same work. This is increasingly happening in recent years, signalling that Indians and the rest of Asians are deliberately discriminated against.

While many say that previously most white Canadians were not really highly educated and that is why immigrants from Asia in the 60s, 70s, and 80s were able to bag jobs that were highly lucrative and satisfying, turning Canada into the proverbial land of milk and honey for themselves.

No longer. The International Herald Tribune's Clifford Crauss tells the tale of Gian Sangha who was so desperate for a job that he willingly cut his hair and removed his turban to canvass for employment, even though he was a Sikh.

An environmental scientist, Sangha even had a doctorate from Germany and had taught in US. "Here in Canada, there is a hidden discrimination," Sangha said. He says Canadian institutions have refused to give him jobs sometimes providing excuses that he is over-qualified for the job!

He is suing them for discrimination. To scrape by, he once cut lawns. Now he does clerical work and shares his house with his extended family. It was not supposed to be this way in Canada, which years ago put out a welcome mat to professionals from around the developing world. With a declining birth rate, an aging population and labor shortages in many areas, Canada, a sparsely populated nation, has for decades opened its doors to engineers, health professionals, software designers and electricians.

But the results of this policy have been mixed, for Canada and for the immigrants. Recent census data and academic studies indicate that the incomes and employment prospects for immigrants are deteriorating. Specialists say a growing number of immigrants have returned to their homelands or migrated to the United States. About 25 percent of recent immigrants with university degrees are working at jobs that require only high school diplomas or less, government data show.

However, writes Crauss, the Canadian public continues to support the government's goal of increasing immigration, and relations among ethnic groups are good, though neighbourhoods in some cities are becoming more segregated. But some fear that if opportunities for immigrants do not expand, social cohesion may suffer. "The existing system is broken," said Jeffrey Reitz, a sociologist who studies immigration at the University of Toronto. "The deteriorating employment situation might mean that Canada will not be able to continue this expansionist immigration program in the positive, politically supported environment that we've seen in the past."

Reitz estimates that foreign-educated immigrants earn a total of $2 billion less than an equivalent number of native-born Canadians with comparable skills because they work in jobs below their training levels.

What immigrants may also be up against is a system that refuses to recognise many of the degrees earned by these people back home. It creates the kind of piquant situation where Canada advertises for doctors and nurses abroad, yet refuses to give Indian medics a job in a hospital, because their degrees are not valid here. Thousands are left jobless.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, but not for immigrants. Crauss says, the children of immigrants, who enter the job market with Canadian credentials, typically do better at acquiring high-paying jobs. "We have an arcane infrastructure of professional organizations that essentially mitigate against the immediate integration of these highly skilled immigrants," Joe Volpe, the minister of citizenship and immigration

Volpe said he was concerned that news from disappointed job seekers would seep back to their native countries and discourage qualified people from immigrating.

For Sangha it may have become what he says is "a painful life. I'm angry and frustrated. I never thought it would be like this in Canada."

Immigrants find themselves going cold, wet and hungry in a land they had sacrificed everything they owned to reach. Believing they would be treated well, that their willingness to work long and hard even in inhospitable conditions of Canada would bring them wealth, that jobs would be aplenty, these people are now in a situation that is threatening their health and life because of the longstanding nature of their woes.

They can't even go back to India. Some feel ashamed to go back penniless to their families. It would mean that they were not smart enough to do well as the going principle is that, 'In vilayet even monkeys become millionaires'. Others simply can't put together enough money to pay for their ticket.

This trend has increasingly translated into numerous Indian families moving into so-called slum areas of Canadian cities as they increasingly get impoverished.

For these people ebullience has turned into depression and their chance for plenty has transformed into poverty. Many of them have been left scrounging on Canada's unemployment benefits even having to rely on unemployment insurance and welfare, which is anathema to an Indian.

The only thing in all this misery that is making them continue to hold body and soul together are their children. They are expected to do better and achieve the dreams that have been denied to their parents.

Hope, and scant else, is all that these Indians have been left with after travelling tens of thousands of kilometres to a foreign land. They must be ruing the day they decided to get their passport and jet out of India.