Editor’s Note: This article draws on the author’s participation in Canada’s Talent Advantage, the third roundtable in the CIC National Dialogue Series, presented in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) Canada. The series examines the choices Canada must make to exercise influence in a fractured world.

Canada has spent decades developing an immigration system designed to attract human capital. The system has been remarkably successful by this measure.

The educational profile of recent immigrants shows this clearly. According to the latest Census, 55 percent of recent immigrants aged 25 to 64 held a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2021, compared with 33 percent of Canadian-born people aged 25 to 34. More recent Labour Force Survey data confirm that newcomers continue to arrive with very high levels of education. 

Yet what happens after these workers arrive tells a different story.

Among recent immigrants with university degrees, only 44 percent were working in occupations that matched their education in 2021. The corresponding figure among Canadian-born workers aged 25 to 34 was 64 percent. More than one-quarter of university-educated recent immigrants were substantially overeducated for their jobs.

We have focused on the immigrant. Perhaps we should focus more on the economy

Much of the policy response to immigrant underemployment has concentrated on the barriers facing newcomers themselves. Governments and settlement organizations have invested in credential recognition, bridging programs, résumé workshops, networking programs, language training and other initiatives designed to help immigrants navigate the Canadian labour market.

Yet these interventions have not fundamentally resolved the problem. Labour market outcomes for new immigrants deteriorated for decades, beginning in the early 1980s, before improving modestly around the mid-2010s. Some of that improvement reflects changes in how Canada selects economic immigrants, particularly the growing importance of two-step migration, through which many immigrants now acquire Canadian educational credentials and work experience before becoming permanent residents. Recent........

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