By Gerald V. Paul

“We would gain a major competitive advantage if this country were recognised around the world as one where all migrants are successful in being able to practise their own trade and raise their standard of living. As of yet, no major country has been able to stake this claim,” said Toronto Dominion ’s (TD) Chief Economist Craig Alexander, while commenting on a new report released by TD.

The report suggested that the federal government could put the equivalent of 370,000 more people to work if it tweaked the immigration system to focus on the long-term needs of the job market.

Unemployment and underemployment among immigrants is worse than ever, the report noted, but Ottawa could easily fix the problem.

Immigrants who arrived in Canada in the 1970’s used to be able to catch up to the salaries of their Canadian counterparts within a generation. But the disparity has grown steadily and now the average immigrant doesn’t have much hope of seeing the gap close until the second generation.

“The simple, but sad, truth is that many new immigrants cannot hope to close the earnings gap in their lifetime,” the report said.

Closing that gap is crucial as Canada faces the mass retirement of the baby-boom generation, the paper explains.

If immigrants were employed at the same level as established Canadians, there would be about 370,000 extra people at work, TD economists estimate.

“Canada admits hundreds of thousands of highly educated, highly skilled immigrants each year to meet labour or to fill skills gaps,” Alexander said.

“And yet, any reason for participating in skilled immigration is rendered null and void if those immigrants ultimately take lower-paying jobs unrelated to their training because of the labour market barriers that they face,” Alexander said.

The TD economists argue that the problem is not insurmountable and that Ottawa already has the tools to better match people with jobs if it just tweaked the system to focus on the long term.

Right now, the federal skilled worker programme, the provincial nominee programme and the temporary foreign worker programme all target the short-term needs of the job market.

The report says Ottawa should reorient the federal programme towards longer-term needs. And it should develop a better about labour –market information systems to identity which occupations will be in demand.

At the same time, Ottawa should make its point-based admission system more flexible, which a greater emphasis on language.