Canada raises immigration bar, leaving skilled workers out in the cold

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Fatemah Ahmedi* feels like a loser.

The 32-year-old web designer quit her job in Iran and essentially restarted her career in 2018 when she decided to spend her life’s savings to attend school in Canada. In the past six years, she studied, worked during the pandemic-induced labour shortage and paid her taxes with the hopes of becoming a permanent resident one day.

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But with her work permit set to expire in December and the conditions to become a permanent resident a lot tougher than when she first entered Canada, or even a year ago, the Toronto resident faces the “unfair” prospect of returning to Iran by year-end.

I invested a lot in this country. Going back without getting anything makes me feel like a loser

32-year-old web designer from Iran

“(This phase) actually feels like a big waste in my life,” she said. “A waste of my money, a waste in my mental health. I invested a lot in this country. Going back without getting anything makes me feel like a loser.”

About 500 kilometres away from Ahmedi, in a rural town in Ontario, Dinesh Chandra* faces an even tougher situation. The 29-year-old, who came to Canada from India as a student about five years ago, had to quit working as a cybersecurity analyst in February since his work permit ended in March.

Today, he delivers pizza for a store that’s owned by his friend and earns cash under the table.

“I think I earn as much as I used to pay in taxes every month while working as a cybersecurity analyst,” he said. “This is a drastic change in my life.”

Chandra, whose parents took out a number of loans to send him to Canada, said he has worked on projects that helped prevent hacking attempts against Canadian financial institutions and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of client investments from hackers.

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While he contributed to the economy, he never utilized “a single government benefit,” even when he got laid off, he said.

Chandra feels “embarrassed” at the possibility of heading back to India without gaining permanent residency, despite all the effort he has put in for the past five years.

“My wife is in India, and I don’t know what to tell her,” he said.

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There are thousands of highly skilled, temporary foreign residents who face the possibility of exiting Canada by year-end despite spending several years contributing to the economy because the conditions to immigrate through some of the more popular programs, and the points system being used, have become harder to satisfy in the past year, experts say, and that could worsen the country’s already struggling labour productivity.

Some immigration consultants say about 80,000 temporary residents — about a quarter of the total — have post-graduate work permits (PGWP) that will expire in 2024. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has yet to provide an updated number.

The federal government extended work permits for thousands of individuals by 18 months in March 2023 when Canada was facing a labour crunch, but immigration lawyers and consultants don’t expect a similar decision in 2024.

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Unconventional pathways

This has forced many foreign workers to take unconventional pathways to extend their stay in Canada. For example, one of the reasons why former cybersecurity analyst Chandra decided to work at his friend’s pizza shop was because he knew he was going to get all the documents and support he needed from his employer to extend his work permit.

But while there are ways to extend a work permit, they aren’t always easy.

“The company you work for will need to share a lot of information, including their financials, with the government for a work-permit extension and that feels like a hassle for many,” Chandra said.

The government also evaluates the necessity of the position before providing an extension. In Chandra’s case, he is confident of an extension since the rural town he lives in is dominated by retirees and needs delivery people.

But he wouldn’t have had to depend on this “drastic move” had he scored the required number of points needed for a temporary resident to become a permanent Canadian resident, a figure that seems to have been out of reach for thousands in the past year.

There are many immigration programs in Canada, but most temporary residents and foreigners living outside the country either immigrate as skilled workers or get nominated by a province. These programs are managed by an online system called Express Entry, which started about a decade ago and provides prospective immigrants with points for their education levels, work experience, English and French language proficiency, age and other factors.

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The higher applicants score — out of a total of 1,200 — the higher the chance they have of becoming permanent residents, which eventually leads to citizenship. The system is designed in a way to attract young, skilled people from around the world.

For example, applicants aged below 30 receive the highest possible number of points in the age category. Applicants also receive points for Canadian educational degrees and for working in Canada. In addition, people can receive 600 additional points if they get nominated by their respective province under the Provincial Nomination Program (PNP).

As such, many temporary residents, such as students, come to Canada and invest three to six years of their lives — while they study and earn a post-graduate work permit — with the hopes of receiving those additional points to make the cut and becoming permanent residents.

While temporary residents aren’t promised a permanent stay, they are influenced by the system’s stakeholders, such as foreign brokers or even comments made by political ministers, and often assume they are most likely going to make the cut. That’s one reason why many spend their life’s savings or take out additional loans to study in Canada, immigration lawyers say.

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“Nobody was told, ‘If you come to Canada, you can successfully apply for a permanent residency,’” Zeynab Ziaie Moayyed, an immigration lawyer and a partner at Visa Law Group PC, said. “But for a couple of years, we had minister after minister saying we want the world’s best and brightest, and we want you to come and stay here.”

Rising cutoff scores

Essentially, the Express Entry system is becoming more selective than Harvard

Kareem El-Assal, founder of Section 95, an organization that provides insight on Canadian immigration

The problem, immigration lawyers say, is that the Express Entry’s Comprehensive Ranking System’s (CRS) cutoff score — which generally changes biweekly, but is what newcomers have to beat to become a permanent resident — is a lot higher today than when it just started. The scores have never remained so high for such a long period of time.

An applicant in 2017 with a score of around 470 wouldn’t even need to enter Canada for the extra points to become a permanent resident. If under 30, and armed with a foreign master’s degree, three years of foreign work experience and a decent language test score, the applicant could beat the cutoff score that ranged from around 440 to 480.

However, things began to change during the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2021, Canada reduced its score for newcomers working in Canada to 75 and admitted a record-breaking 27,300 people in just one draw. This was unheard of at the time.

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In the same year, it admitted thousands of newcomers through a new program for new graduates from Canadian institutions and workers in essential occupations.

These two steps encouraged more people to apply to Canada as international students and temporary workers, hoping to convert their stay into a permanent residency, immigration lawyers say.

But from September 2021 to July 2022, the government didn’t conduct any general draws to admit permanent residents because it continued processing the thousands it had already let in. And when the first general draw took place after nearly nine months, the cutoff score had ballooned to 557.

Since then, the cutoff score for general applicants has hovered between the high 490s and the mid-550s, so many former international students who spent five years or more of their lives studying and working in Canada now find themselves in a position where they don’t qualify.

“Canada is setting the bar higher,” Kareem El-Assal, founder of Section 95, an organization that provides insight on Canadian immigration, said. “Essentially, the Express Entry system is becoming more selective than Harvard.”

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Category-based selection

The IRCC said the cutoff score for each round of invitations isn’t set by the government, but is a result of the size and composition of the application pool and Canada’s annual permanent residency targets.

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“If the CRS cutoff score is high, it means a large number of candidates in the pool have obtained high scores and meet the criteria for a given round,” the department said in a statement.

This means that if there are more candidates with high points in the pool, the overall cutoff score is going to be higher since Canada’s permanent residency admission targets remain the same — about 500,000 people annually until 2026. But there are at least 2.5 million temporary residents, including students, workers and asylum seekers, already in the country.

Despite the government’s assertion that it doesn’t have much of a role in adjusting cutoff scores, some immigration lawyers and consultants partly attribute the high scores to a new policy introduced last year that allowed the government to bypass the points and ranking system in the Express Entry stream.

Since 2023, the federal government has been conducting category-based invitations. Under this policy, the IRCC can pick and choose applicants belonging to certain in-demand occupations or groups.

For example, the government on April 24 invited 1,400 people from the pool who had scores above 410 and were proficient in French. A month prior to that, 1,500 people who had scores above 388 were invited from the same group.

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Similarly, 975 people with scores of 430 and above and who worked in the transport sector were invited on March 13, while 4,500 people who had scored above 491 were invited from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) category in April.

This leaves fewer invitations for general applicants or for people who don’t fall into any of these categories, which further drives up the competition and cutoff scores. In the last draw for people in the general category, the score was 529. Prior to that, it was 549. This change wasn’t expected by many temporary residents who had already invested plenty of time and money in Canada.

Overall, the IRCC has invited about 47,000 people since June 2023 through these special draws in six categories: health care, agriculture, transport, STEM, trades such as plumbers and construction workers, and people with a strong proficiency in the French language. The majority of the invitations were made under the French language category.

These categories were selected based on labour market information and projections and inputs received from the provinces and territories, IRCC said on its website. The new policy could benefit Canada’s economy by bringing in the kinds of professionals the country requires, but immigration consultants say it could also have drawbacks.

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A lost opportunity

El-Assal said the whole point of starting the Express Entry system was to invite the highest-scoring individuals, since an analysis by Statistics Canada showed they would likely integrate well into the economy.

“Now the government is saying we are putting Statistics Canada’s research aside and we just want to prioritize these six categories,” he said. “Is that what Canada wants to do from an immigration point of view? That’s an open debate. I think this is a question that we really need to explore. Me, personally, I have a lot of trust in Statistics Canada.”

Bank of Nova Scotia economist Rebekah Young said she was a bit “cynical” about the government’s ability to pick winners.

“I don’t think they are going to solve many issues by trying to narrowly target specific skillsets as the track record is weak in this regard, while losing out on the high potential that we have got here already,” she said. “Certainly, the higher scoring is better through an economic lens and generally better through a productivity lens … these would be ideal new Canadians from an economic standpoint.”

Young said Canada’s housing problems cannot be solved by just importing construction workers, noting that despite record-high employment in the sector, it’s producing fewer houses. There is a “pretty high unemployment” rate in some of the big sectors for people already in Canada and the government isn’t doing a great job of training Canadians in some of these spaces, she said.

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The upward pressure on the Express Entry pool means there currently could be at least 50,000 highly skilled applicants with points ranging between 470 and 600 who aren’t sure about their Canadian futures.

Losing a large chunk of this group could be a lost opportunity for Canada, immigration consultants say.

“Someone under the age of 30, who has a master’s degree from Canada and multiple years of work experience in Canada can barely scrape the 500 mark, and even they are facing a hard time,” Moayyed said. “This is the premium talent that countries want and they will now choose to go elsewhere.”

The government seems to be aware of this and has announced a number of work-permit extensions in the past that allowed newcomers to stay beyond the typical three-year work permit after completing their educational degrees.

Former immigration minister Sean Fraser announced an 18-month extension last year. Current minister Marc Miller announced an extension for 6,700 workers in Manitoba in early May.

These kinds of moves suggest the government is of two minds: it wants temporary residents to stay, but it doesn’t have the political capital to let these highly skilled temporary residents stay permanently, according to immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens.

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“It creates this weird scene where the government is like, yeah, we want you to stay permanently, but we are not going to do anything to make that happen,” he said.

Processing delays

The government has faced criticism in the past couple of years as the population grew at record rates — by at least a million each year — primarily due to an increase in temporary residents at a time when the country was going through a housing crunch.

This was followed by the government placing caps on international students, holding the number of permanent residents it admits annually and announcing its intention to reduce the overall number of temporary residents.

Muerren said there is merit in trying to slow the population’s growth, but that shouldn’t impact the people who are already working in Canada.

“It’s a lost opportunity for them and their employer, and presumably having to replace them is going to be a drag for employers,” he said. “I struggle with the idea that people who are already working in positions should have to leave just because of an arbitrary permanent residency cap.”

Aside from the skill-based federal immigration programs, the provincial streams also seem to be facing issues. Provinces can nominate someone for entry based on their needs through the Provincial Nomination Program. Once nominated, an applicant can receive 600 points that are then added to the person’s Express Entry score, making it easier to pass the cutoff.

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However, the increasing pressure on the provinces in the past year or so has led to delays in processing applications, pauses in crucial immigration programs and sudden changes in requirements, which even led to a protest in Prince Edward Island in May.

The Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program, one of the more popular PNPs among immigrants, currently has an application processing delay of about eight months to nine months, according to immigration consultant Kanwar Sierah.

“This means that if someone applies to Ontario today and their work permit is expiring by the end of this year or early next year, they cannot expect the province to process their application before the expiry,” he said. “That’s a big problem.”

Against the odds

Despite all the obstacles, some people have managed to meet the permanent residency requirements before the expiration of their work permits, albeit through rather tough, unconventional pathways.

Jaspreet Singh*, 26, who came to Canada in 2018, earned a diploma in automotive business studies. He couldn’t find a job in his field and, therefore, the required points to become a permanent resident.

With just a year left on his work permit, he decided to take a gamble and change his career to a profession that was in demand in Canada and, particularly, Ontario. He became a certified pest controller and the federal government soon added the profession to a trade list that would give him extra points in the Express Entry pool, which helped him get over the cutoff.

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“Never in my life did I think I would be killing bugs,” Singh said. “It did not feel great in the beginning, but today, I am one of the top-selling specialists in my company.”

Siyam Ahmed*, who came to Canada in 2015, made the Express Entry cut in April thanks to the category-based STEM draw as a software developer. The catch, though, is that he works as a software tester. His company decided to support him with the appropriate letters since it didn’t want to lose him and because the responsibilities of his roles overlapped to a certain extent.

For many others, however, concerns continue as their work-permit expiry date approaches. Some, such as Montreal-based system testing engineer Vineeth Thomas*, have left it to fate.

“If I have to go back, I have to go back,” said the 28-year-old, who currently has 490 points. “It will be difficult to restart your life from zero after spending five years here. But it is what it is.”

* Names have been changed to protect identities.

• Email: nkarim@postmedia.com

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