According to reports from the Canadian newspaper Ming Pao, the trend of immigration quotas favoring Asia over Latin America in recent years seems to confirm that senior officials at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) have an underlying policy of "country profiling."
The latest issue of Maclean's magazine points out that a report titled "Social and Economic Outcomes of Second Generation Youth," leaked from the office of Deputy Minister of Immigration Neil Yeates, mentions that "immigrants from China and South Asia, who mostly possess university degrees or higher, easily secure high-skilled jobs." In contrast, the second-generation children of immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America find it relatively more difficult to obtain higher degrees, and compared to native-born Canadian youth, "they have lower levels of education and consequently secure lower-level jobs."
Richard Kurland, editor-in-chief of the immigration newsletter LEXBASE and a well-known immigration lawyer in Vancouver, revealed the aforementioned information. He noted that industry professionals involved in immigration affairs are not at all unfamiliar with these views, even jokingly referring to them as an open secret.
He pointed out that the immigration department has long collected data on the performance of new immigrants and their next generation based on ethnicity and country. Although officials deny that they open more immigration quotas based on the best-performing ethnic groups, statistics confirm that since 1999, China and India have consistently been the largest sources of immigrants to Canada, with an average of 60,000 arrivals per year, while the number of new immigrants from the Caribbean has declined sharply during the same period. Following the implementation of the C-51 immigration law, spousal reunion applications for Jamaican immigrants take a year and a half, which is three times the standard processing time of the immigration department, whereas the waiting time in New Delhi is only 6 months.
According to senior immigration officials interviewed by the magazine, China and India bring in immigrants with higher socio-economic levels, which better aligns with Canada's future prospects.
