Konferenzbericht (PDF-Dokument, 3 MB) - SID

Wissen wandert
Canada‟s two official languages, economic immigrants
now need at least a Master‟s degree to be competitive
applicants. This was supposed to ensure that immi-
grants would continue to be able to compete well in
Canada‟s post-industrial society.
Challenges immigrants face
Yet, the opposite seems to have happened. On average,
immigrants had hitherto obtained above-average in-
comes within seven years of setting foot in Canada.
Since the mid-1990s, however, that is no longer the
case. As a matter of fact, on average recent immigrants
do not reach average Canadian income. In other words,
stricter selection criteria notwithstanding, immigrants are
having a harder time than ever succeeding in Canadian
society. Compared to Canadian society as a whole,
they are twice as likely to be unemployed and much
more likely to be either underemployed -- that is, not
working at the level of their skills – or to work in a good
job but one that does not match their skills.
The stricter criteria are an important part of that story.
Due to the stricter criteria, the average Canadian immi-
grant has a higher level of education than ever before.
That means there are more professionals than ever
before coming to Canada. Almost a third of all immi-
grants hold degrees in engineering with another 21
percent holding degrees in the natural sciences. The
remainder holds degrees in medicine, the social science,
humanities, and education. And even after four years in
Canada, barely half of them end up finding employment
in their occupation. The main breadwinners in immigrant
families now overwhelmingly hold professional creden-
tials. Combined with their un-, under-, or occupationally-
mismatched employment, that has brought the issue of
credential recognition to the forefront of the Canadian
debate.
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knowledge migrates
Specific challenges immigrants face and remedial
measures
Immigrants face many challenges in finding gainful em-
ployment in their occupation:
- Most jobs are never advertized. Since immigrants
have not had a chance to build the same network as
people who grew up in Canada, they have a much
harder time finding out about available jobs for which
they may be suited. And since immigrants have had
a particularly difficult time finding employment in the
professions, their ability to find out about profes-
sional jobs is particularly poor.
- Employers frequently hire based on personal re-
commendations and the trust they have in someone
who may recommend a new employee. Since immi-
grants are not as well connected, they do not have
ready access to people in a professional network
who might be able to recommend them to a prospec-
tive employer.
- Many employers nowadays use behaviouralist inter-
view techniques. Their objective is less to assess the
prospective employee‟s professional competence
than to get a sense of how good a fit an employee is
within the organization and its culture by seeing how
the prospective employee reacts when faced with
particular circumstances. On the one hand, this
method poses a problem for many immigrants be-
cause the institutional cultures in which they have
tended to be educated and worked before coming to
Canada tend to be quite different – more hierarchi-
cal, that is – than those of Canadian organizations.
On the other hand, employers tend to be looking for
very particular reactions and often misread and mis-
judge the way an employee handles a situation be-
cause of the cultural rift that exists between the in-
terviewee and the interviewer.
- Immigrant source countries tend to be more socially
conservative than Western society. A young em-