Canada Does Immigration Right

The current state of our nation’s immigration is a national disgrace, and other countries are taking advantage of it.

Photo by Jason Hafso on Unsplash

I’ll be the first one to admit that our northern neighbor, Canada, has a few problems of its own making, from socialized medicine to seemingly out-of-control wildfires (have you seen the pictures of New York City covered by wildfire smoke from Canada?) But one area in which Canada has consistently done a far superior job than the United States is immigration.

Canada is the first country in the world to have established skill-based immigration since the 1960s. Presently, Canada welcomes about 400,000 new immigrants annually, and 60 percent are skilled workers, compared to only 20% of U.S. legal immigrants. People who intend to immigrate as skilled workers do not have to have a job offer at the time of application, but have to pass an automated point system that evaluates their skills, experiences, and education. The system is very successful: 95% of skilled-based immigrants are working in the year following their admission. Their employment and earnings exceeded Canadian averages soon after landing and continue to increase. To learn more about Canada’s skill-based immigration system, please see Chapter 8 of the 2^nd edition of my book, "The Broken Welcome Mat: America’s UnAmerican Immigration System and How We Can Fix It."

As if to mock our dysfunctional immigration system, the Canadian government announced a new work visa program, targeting foreign tech workers in the U.S. on the H1B visa.