Category — Immigration

From Tim Horton’s to the electronic gaming industry, a larger and larger share of the city’s economic activity is being generated by temporary foreign workers, people brought here not as immigrants but as employees in a particular employer’s business plan.

When they’re no longer needed, most will go home. For the time being, they are an invisible, although disposable, element of the city’s workforce.

As many as one in 10 of the workers in the city many be in some aspect of the program, according to Westender reporter Jessica Barrett. She probes the issue, to be the focus of an upcoming report from the Mayor’s Working Group on Immigration, in this cover story.

And Sun columnist Doug Todd brings together left and right perspectives in this assessment, which challenges the view that TFWs provide long-term benefits to the Canadian economy. At the core of the debate: who benefits from the lower wages paid to TFWs in low-skilled jobs?

If the TFWs had full immigration rights, would the wages stay so low?

The City of Vancouver’s groundbreaking mentorship project, designed to give 18 recent skilled immigrants on-the-job experience in city workplaces, has achieved what few city projects can claim: a transformation in the lives of its participants in just five months.

Proposed by Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration, which I co-chair with UBC professor Dan Hiebert, the pilot project was designed to test what immigrant-serving agencies have long predicted.

A critical obstacle facing new immigrants, they warned, no matter how skilled, is lack of Canadian experience, local networks and on-the-job credentials. A mentorship program changes that by linking a “mentee” — the immigrant — with a mentor, someone in their field who will advise them on their job hunt.

As City Engineer Peter Judd, a mentor himself, told council, the advice could be as simple as adding a cover letter to a resume, something that is never done in some countries.

Today, just five months after it began, the mentorship project celebrated its first group of graduates, many of whom are already on track to new jobs. In one case, an electrical designer from the Philippines who had searched for work for three years, it led to a job with the city itself.

Veronica Zhou, one of the mentees, told council how she had learned the hard way that immigration is “not an easy journey, nor certain.” [Read more →]

Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour from TFW Vancouver on Vimeo.

Research conducted for Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Working Group on Immigration has discovered that more than 37,000 Vancouver residents are here on temporary foreign workers’ permits, doing jobs as varied as live-in caregiving, construction and engineering.

Some of their voices are in this video.

Who are these people and what are their impacts on the city? No doubt they contribute to the economy, because each one is here at the command of an employer.

But what are their impacts on housing, transportation and other city services? Are their rights protected? What happens if they wish to quit their job, or are fired?

All these issues are explored in Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour, a Working Group project that sponsored a packed forum Saturday at the Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

Should the programs be scrapped, as many at the forum urged? Or should they be reformed, as others proposed?

The Working Group is seeking wider public feedback and will publish its preliminary conclusions in a report to mayor and council in July. In the meantime, your comments and observations are welcome, either directly to me or through the Foreign Worker, Local Neighbour website.

The federal government’s proposed reductions in the family reunification program, which allows established immigrant families to bring parents and grandparents here to join them, is raising grave concern in immigrant communities right across Canada.

If Vancouver City Council passes the motion I have proposed for our next meeting, it will be the first in Canada, as far as I know, to urge the government to change direction and ensure everyone who was promised this opportunity can realize the dream of reuniting their family in this country, often after a wait of many, many years.

In this column, scheduled for publication in Philippine News Today, I set out the case for restoring the number of visas to last year’s level: [Read more →]