Abstract
The Federal Skilled Worker Program (hereafter FSWP) in Canada has been a widely debated programme since the liberalization of the country’s immigration policies in 1962, and the introduction of the points system in 1967. Questions have been raised primarily around the programme’s efficacy from a national prosperity perspective and its fairness from the perspectives of FSWs themselves, who continue to face barriers in the labour market. These debates in academic, policy and popular fronts have intensified since early 2000 when the Canadian Government started introducing major changes in the policy to accommodate immigrants more likely to be integrated within the Canadian labour market (e.g. by strengthening the provincial nominee programme, changing the points system, expediting the permanent residency of international students, etc). Thus, Charles Beach, Alan Green and Christopher Worswick’s new book appears in a rapidly changing and highly debated policy arena.
The introduction reiterates the crucial role immigration plays in addressing Canada’s demographic and market based challenges. Chapter 2 provides an extensive literature review on the skilled immigrant policy including its early stages, its recent changes and its overall challenges. While fairly detailed, the chapter, however, shows a clear and (frankly) disturbing lack of acknowledgement of the racism of the early immigration policies. For instance, the reference to the pre-liberalization admission criteria as merely a distinction between ‘preferred and non-preferred countries’ (p. 9) is an erasure of the racialized grounds for preference. Chapter 3 discusses the changing patterns of immigration to Canada, specifically the shift towards temporary migrant workers in order to fulfil employment needs. Chapters 4 to 6 take the reader to the central purpose of the book, which is to develop ‘a tool or criterion […] to evaluate how well different classes of immigrants are doing in the Canadian labour market’ (p. 3). The authors discuss a three-stage empirical framework to evaluate how changes in major policy levers (i.e. total immigrant flow in a year, the share of economic class and the share of emphasis between education level, age and language proficiency) affect average earning levels among immigrants. Chapter 4 discusses the effects of the aforementioned policy levers on the skills characteristics of Canadian immigrants. Chapter 5 examines how skills characteristics affect average earning levels of immigrants. Chapter 6 combines these two sets of results ‘to estimate how changes in major policy levers ultimately affect average earnings levels of immigrants and the skills channels through which these effects operate’ (p. 37). For instance, the authors consider changes in the overall levels of immigration, share of economic class, years of education, age on arrival and language fluency. Chapter 7 revisits the goals of the book and recommends, among many others, maintaining the current levels of economic class, prior assessment of immigrants’ credentials and relocating points toward younger immigrants.
The book has a number of strengths which will be discussed below, but first one pervasive concern should be noted, i.e. the authors’ distinction between the economic and the social. While they acknowledge ‘immigration’s valid and important non-economic roles, [their] focus is on […] the economic role of immigration’ (p. 5). Thus, they seem to think that the FSWP could be discussed as a solely economic policy when it has actually had profound social implications for the people who migrate as FSWs and for Canada. It does not come as a surprise therefore that the devaluation of internationally obtained skills is also reduced to a matter of policy only. Could the issue of FSWs’ devaluation be discussed without incorporating the tenacity of colonial modernist assumptions about the value of racialized labour? Questions of value (e.g. the value of human capital) is neither merely economic, nor merely cultural. Looking at one without the other instead of looking at their co-constitution erases important details of how social differences determine differences in value (Wright, 2001).
Further, it is well documented that the notion of skill is a way to hierarchically organize relations between workers, which again is integral to the maintenance of neoliberal global capitalism (Mojab, 2009). This book, however, lacks an acknowledgement of the close relations between capital accumulation and vulnerability of labour. For instance, while it is clearly informed by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) discourse of global competition for skilled labour, there is no acknowledgement of the fact that the West’s race for skilled labour also necessitates a steady supply of politically disenfranchised labour.
These limitations, while serious, do not take away from the fact that the book is well researched (from a classical economic point of view), has updated statistics and gives extensive details of the calculations leading to the proposed framework and recommendations. Its form of analysis, while exclusively quantitative, is accompanied by accessible authorial commentary which makes it appealing to audiences from a variety of epistemological and methodological backgrounds. I will recommend this book to students and to scholars of immigration policy in Canada, especially those interested in studying that policy’s recent manifestations.