by Akpan Ekpo
So you are thinking really hard about leaving your home country (I pray not a shithole one) and moving to Canada…
But a major doubt you have is how easy it will be to get a job once you “land” in Canada.
I tell you, it’s not about getting a job per se.
It’s firstly, the fact that employers in Canada don’t recognize foreign qualifications/skills, regardless of where you got them from.
This itself is partly informed by a supreme ignorance (for all their supposed pride in their “multiculturalism” and “internationalism”, they know nothing beyond their vast, uninhabited provinces, never mind beyond); and in part because they genuinely believe their standards are the highest in the world and no other country could ever dream of coming close.
Yea, right.
British-trained lawyers need to re-educate themselves in the common law (whose home is England by the way) and the English-speaking German or Dutch-trained neurosurgeons must re-learn their human anatomy as well.
The government itself has an ulterior, cruel and cynical motive for welcoming hundreds of thousands of these people each year, in the knowledge that they’ll be no threat to their Canadian peers, who are highly unionized, in any event.
Nor is there actually a shortage of domestically-trained skilled graduates: quite the opposite in fact, as has been highlighted in the media repeatedly, to the media’s credit of course.
It’s because the government here needs resourceful, desperate and motivated migrants with a track record of success, who will take just about any minimum-wage-level job or start their own businesses (qualities not common among Canadian graduates), and thus sustain its underfunded pension funds and contribute to the wider economy.
And so you have a textbook trap:
You’re highly educated/skilled, young and healthy (only their appointed doctors can attest to the last, just to be sure).
You’ve probably burned your bridges back home (and possibly sold your home).
You have no savings, etc. to return home to (in part thanks to the cost of the application process, including the approx. $12, 000 per head that you must have in your back pocket to be allowed to “land,”) and you’re now in Vancouver or Toronto, perhaps with a young family.
What are the chances of you returning home, as pro-government critics often casually suggest?
No, you take a private security job, initially as a temporary means of feeding your family, and remain trapped in it till retirement, because you can’t afford to re-learn your anatomy on top of your 15 years’ experience as a surgeon, especially if you’re already 45, and you know you’ll have a mere couple of years after re-training before retirement beckons.
These are at the root of the problem. A cruel scam on an industrial scale.
