Skilled Immigration: Canada Prefers Cooks and Chefs to Lawyers

Never mind if you cannot tell the difference between a cook and a chef. Just bear in mind that in Canada any kitchen worker is more important than a Harvard-trained lawyer or a top-rate computer scientist. In the revised and updated immigration qualifications for highly-skilled migrants, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has explicitly excluded lawyers, teachers and other important professionals, waving a green flag for cooks and chefs, who are recognised as different professionals, alongside many others.

Canada is a very immigrant-friendly country. It is one of few G8 member countries where multiculturalism is respected and tolerated to intolerable levels by the political elite and even by the immigrant-threatened working class. Unlike in Germany where Chancellor Angela Merkel recently threatened immigrants to stick to the German ways or stick out, Canadian immigrants are encouraged and almost 'pampered' with attractive packages to integrate and prosper. Next year, some 265,000 immigrants will pour into the country. About the same number were expected last year. But what happens when the immigrants touch down on Canadian soil? The system tells a different story.

Stories about skilled unemployment in Canada sound like unfathomable events in a fictional narrative. If you ever imagined a professional with a PhD driving a taxi as the most unlikely occupational misadventure, then you just wrote the script. Disguised unemployment is as acceptable in Canada as snow is certain to fall in January: Teachers turn cleaners, accountants account for their new titles as security guards and psychologists become psychological cases themselves, looking for non-existing jobs. There are government-sponsored career-assisting centres that are paid to help internationally trained professionals find jobs. But the issue is not the jobs; it is the fact that they are internationally trained for locally made jobs. In most cases, internationally-trained means internationally over-qualified, which in fact means locally under-qualified.

Presently, there is no demand for lawyers in Canada, at least not immigrant lawyers. Teachers trained in Canadian universities are finding it extremely difficult to even offer their services for free. That makes the case of the immigrant teacher a mistrial, because he really has no case at all. To qualify, he would have to necessarily attend a Canadian university, where there are work experience schemes that connect students to jobs. Otherwise, he is better off teaching himself how to clean classrooms for other teachers.

However, the highly-skilled cook or chef has better prospects in a country where the obese is encouraged to make use of free medical care by eating up. If they decide to eat down, there are gyms to help out. Besides, in these parts, cooks are just as important as speechwriters. They are paid very well- well enough to afford a new SUV and a house. And unlike cooks and waitresses in Africa, they don't rely on tips: They are respected.

Not only cooks and chefs will be favoured by the new immigration rules; immigrants who want to sponsor their families to join them in Canada may go ahead and put the cart before the horse in merrymaking. The new policy would quicken family sponsorships but tighten economic immigration. The country needs people, but not just any pimple.

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin, Ottawa, Canada
[email protected]
[email protected]