The Rocky Path to a Better Life

Imagine this: you are a physician who, after spending six years in medical school, full of stress and sleepless nights, has gained lots of experience and expertise. Dissatisfied with the government of your country and enticed by the opportunity for a higher quality of life, you decide to move to Canada. However, despite your extensive experience and hard work, you can’t continue with your profession without shelling out thousands of dollars and hours at a Canadian medical school, which you currently cannot afford. So, instead, you get a survival job as a taxi driver and never seem to find the chance to return to your original profession.

This scenario is an extreme case of the struggle that immigrants too often experience to varying degrees—a struggle that, despite its prevalence, might not be as obvious as slurs spray-painted on the side of a building. Despite having high levels of education and professional experience, immigrants often have difficulty finding jobs that match their skills and qualifications (“Immigrant Employment”). There are countless stories of immigrants coming to Canada, only to find that it is not the land of opportunity that they expected. Take Sanjay Mavinkurve and Samvita Padukone, for example, a couple who married in 2008, when Indian-born Mavinkurve was working at Google in Silicon Valley and Padukone was a successful financier at the biggest investment bank in Singapore. Padukone then moved to the United States so that the couple could be together. Due to restrictions with Mavinkurve’s American work visa, however, his wife was not allowed to work in the US, so he was transferred to Google’s office in Toronto. There, Google executives believed Padukone, who had degrees in engineering and finance, would be able to find a job, but she had a much harder time than anticipated. When she applied for work, the response, if any at all, was that she needed Canadian work experience. Once Padukone finally got a US work permit, the couple moved to Seattle, and she was hired by Amazon, the first company she applied to (McMahon). Many immigrants cite similar experiences. One newcomer who taught English literature in India for ten years, Jasleen Bindri, characterized the experience of looking for a job in Canada as a “vicious cycle… you're expected to have the Canadian experience, but you can’t have the Canadian experience unless you get into something.” To gain experience in Canada, Bindri said she was volunteering with different organizations, but she still needs a Canadian certification in order to start teaching again (“A vicious circle”). 

In addition to companies’ demand for Canadian work experience, the barriers immigrants face during job searches include employers’ inability to recognize international education, insufficient information about employment opportunities, and a lack of a professional network (“Immigrant Employment”). The latter is especially problematic because a large proportion of jobs in Canada are never advertised. Workers are much more successful at finding jobs if they have connections that can point them toward openings and refer them to employers (“The Value of Networking”). Unsurprisingly, developing a network can be a major challenge for people who did not grow up or attend school in Canada. Many newcomers also do not have any family or friends in the country, meaning they essentially have to start from scratch. The onerous process of spending months and months networking before ever getting a call back for a job is just one of the reasons moving to a faraway country can be so frightening.   

Nationwide statistics largely support personal accounts of the obstacles that immigrants face. For example, from 2006 to 2011, the average unemployment rate was 10.92 percent for recent immigrants and 5.56 percent for Canadian-born people living in the Toronto region. Additionally, only 24 percent of foreign-educated immigrant workers were employed in professions they actually trained for in 2006, compared to 62 percent of Canadian-born workers (“Immigrant Employment”). These figures are surprising given the education level of the immigrants that Canada admits. Census data from 2016 showed that the percentage of immigrants with a master’s or doctorate degree was double that of people born in Canada; 24 percent of the Canadian-born population had a Bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 39.5 percent of immigrants (Curry). Considering immigrants’ qualifications, questions remain about the fairness of workplaces’ hiring practices and specific requirements to work in certain fields, such as education and medicine. Though these concerns remain, there appear to be growing opportunities for newcomers as older generations retire, birth rates decline, and Canada becomes increasingly dependent on immigrants to keep the economy afloat (“Immigrant Employment”). In 2018, 45 percent of British Columbia businesses reported having a hard time finding workers to hire, which was still smaller than the percentage for Atlantic Canada. One strategy suggested to mitigate the labour shortage was to “make their businesses more appealing to immigrants, a sizable portion of the workforce that isn’t engaged as much as they could be by business…” (Humphrey). With the need for immigrant workers becoming clearer and clearer, there is hope for progress in how they are treated by recruiters and potential employers, no matter how slowly. By recognizing these issues, among the many others that immigrants face, we can come closer to being the haven for newcomers that many in the international community see us as, one step at a time.

Works Cited

“'A vicious circle': Newcomers struggling to find jobs in Canada despite education, experience.”

CBC, 11 Sep. 2018,  www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canada-immigrant-job-experience-1.4818095. 

Curry, Bill, and Madeleine White. “Census 2016: Canadians, including recent immigrants, are

among most educated in the world.” The Globe and Mail, 29 Nov. 2017, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/census-2016-education-labour-employment-mobility/article37122392/. 

Humphrey, Matt. “45 per cent of B.C. businesses report difficulty finding workers, survey says.”

CBC, 5 Sep. 2018, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/labour-shortage-b-c-1.4812042.

“Immigrant Employment: Facts and Figures.” TRIEC,

triec.ca/about-us/focus-on-immigrant-employment/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.

McMahon, Tamsin. “Why the world’s best and brightest struggle to find jobs in Canada.”

Maclean’s, 24 Apr. 2013, https://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/land-of-misfortune/. 

“The Value of Networking.” Settlement, 15 Nov. 2016,

settlement.org/ontario/employment/working-in-canada/workplace-culture/the-value-of-networking/.