It’s 2 p.m. on an unusually warm January morning as Xhelil and Makfire Neziri are enjoying a day off. A relative is watching their youngest daughter, age two and a half, and their eldest, almost seven, is quietly drawing at the table in their small but comfortable duplex. The smell of Turkish coffee flows out of the kitchen and into the small living room, where the Neziri’s have managed to cram two sofas, a TV and a dining room table into a space made for much less than that. On the stand, next to their television, sits a small reminder of where they’ve come from: a flag with six white stars and a yellow patch of land over top of a blue background. Kosovo.
“The big factor was economic,” Makfire says when asked why they left. She’s the more fluent English speaker of the two, but her husband doesn’t hesitate to chime in.
“Canada’s economy is a little bit better,” Xhelil calls from the upstairs bedroom, where he’s searching for some immigration documents.
Facing a tough job market and a rising cost of living, “Lil” and “Maki” made the choice to move to Canada in 2010. Lil’s sister was in Regina, as was a friend of Maki’s and they both spoke highly of the city. The couple arrived through the Saskatchewan Immigration Nomination Program, which allows people to sponsor highly skilled immigrants looking to come to Canada. The government’s website says the program is for “individuals with post-secondary education and highly skilled work experience that have the education, experience, language ability and other factors to help them to successfully establish and integrate into Saskatchewan’s labour market and communities.”
“Because they were looking for (people with) degrees and we thought ‘why are they looking for degrees?’” Maki says. “(We thought) because we’re going to work in the same job, but now things have changed.”
Maki was a nurse in Kosovo. She also has a degree in literature and poetry. Now, she works as a cleaning lady at SIAST. Lil was in the army for seven years. He was also half way through a history degree, which he gave up to bring his family to Canada. Now he works as a high school janitor.
“Sometimes I feel so shy. I feel so down when I see students,” Maki says. “Maybe they think, well, look at her, she’s a cleaner. They don’t know I’m a nurse, and almost a professor, and I’m able to write poetry and do everything.”
Lil is a bit blunter.
“It’s a really, really big difference,” he says.
The Neziri’s situation is not unique. More than 250,000 immigrants arrived in Canada between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2014, many of them with post-secondary degrees or skilled job training. Studies estimate that less than 50 per cent of them are working in their chosen field. Researchers call the phenomenon “brain waste,” and it only seems to be getting worse.
“We’ve dramatically increased the emphasis on higher education in our immigrant selection policy,” says Jeffrey Reitz, an Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “Today among the skill selected immigrants, those who are selected on the basis of points, over 80 per cent have university degrees, whereas 15 years ago it was half that. That means that there are just a lot more skilled immigrants. There are more brains to waste you might say.”
In a paper published in 2013, Reitz and two other colleagues estimated that brain waste was costing the country $11.7 billion. However, it also causes great personal problems for the immigrants themselves. Reitz says it’s one of the most frequently mentioned problems in the federal government’s longitudinal survey of immigrants. It’s a lose-lose situation.
“If immigrants are falling into poverty, they’re not earning money, they’re not spending money, they’re not paying taxes and so on,” he explains. “By creating barriers to immigrants actually doing the kinds of things that they’re capable of doing, that we selected them to do, we’re not getting the benefits from immigration that we’d like to see.”
Reitz says the problem is particularly bad for women, who tend to work in areas with what he calls “social and cultural dimensions.” Maureen Selvamohan is an excellent example. She spent more than 20 years as a high school biology teacher in Sri Lanka before she left with her husband and two children for Regina. Like the Neziri’s, her family was sponsored by someone from Regina. Before leaving Sri Lanka she took a Canadian equivalency course through the World Education Service, hoping to find a similar teaching job here. Right now, she’s working at Wal-Mart, and applying for administration positions. She’s resigned to never teaching again, even though she was briefly hired as a tutor at SIAST.
“It’s very competitive for (immigrant teachers),” she says. “That’s why I don’t want to go (in) for teaching.”
Selvamohan was told her upgrades weren’t enough, and she’d have to take another test. This one would cost her $345. It may not seem like much, but when you consider even her two children have to work just to help pay the bills, it suddenly seems like a lot more.
“I don’t want to waste the money,” she says.
To combat the problem, the federal government has tried finding jobs for immigrants before they arrive in the country. However, they haven’t been successful in connecting highly skilled and educated immigrants with employers. Reitz says he wants to see more organizations like the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, which provides bridge training, credential assessment and mentoring, among other things.
“I think that the federal government could make a big step forward by simply providing additional support for those efforts,” he says.
Meanwhile, the Neziri’s say they love Canada and are happy their daughters are growing up here, even if it means leaving the jobs they loved. They still have their dreams though. Lil originally applied to the RCMP, but wasn’t accepted. Now, he says he’s hoping to open his own small car dealership. Maki is taking English classes, and hopes one day to become an LPN. Canada has been good to them they say, but they would like to see some changes in how the country chooses its immigrants. They wonder why Canadian immigration rules place an emphasis on education when it isn’t needed, or worse, isn’t worth anything.
“If you’re looking to bring in a doctor, it’s to work as a doctor, not to (be a) cleaner. If you bring in a soldier, it’s to be a soldier,” Lil says. “I’m thinking my first job (will) be to work in my profession... no, you need four years to go to school and then apply. Maybe (the) government needs to check the rules.”
