We train lots of doctors but they leave and go to the US. The brain drain is still on.

I work with a lot of immigrants. Here’s some random thoughts opinions and observations

They aren’t the problem. I’ve met and learned a lot from the people I work with. They are as amazing or as shitty as anyone else you know.

Most of the immigrants I know are from India or the Philippines(just establishing perspective), and some are first generation Canadians(children of immigrants)

It’s not hard to make friends with these people. They care a lot about community because it’s what has allowed then to succeed as much as they have. I’m an atheist the vast majority are solidly theist.

But like everyone else, they want something familiar if and when they have the choice, just like anyone else seems to

Most of our opinions are forged by how we grew up and what we learned about the world at that time. (Meaning this was the same for everyone I worked with and didn’t matter where you came from)

communication is by far the most common problem, it’s hard to be successful when you don’t understand what you are being told. Often that means not understanding what you are doing wrong. Hard to do if you don’t speak the language that company does business in. I felt this same way when I had to go to Quebec City to work. I don’t speak French. What I learned to do is exactly what the people I work with do, rely on the person or people that can translate for us. It can turn bad coworkers into your best assets if you can communicate effectively, even if that’s just a box with Google translate on it as your interpreter. Wanting to understand and trying to is going to get you far, even when you are embarrassed about the difficulty you have. You will be appreciated for not just getting yes yes, okay boss, and continuing to make mistakes.

Minimum wages in Canada are way better than most of the places people are coming from, but the cost of living quickly catches up to people. Immigrants often have much better coping mechanisms to combat cost of living than local people do. This is the crux of blaming immigrants for low wages, if the wages didn’t suck already then you wouldn’t have so many immigrants coming here. That’s not on them, that’s on domestic policy and employers fucking everyone over.

Nobody cared when immigration was 200k a year instead of 1.4 million. Its people like you that helped destroy the poor by making people feel too insecure to talk about it openly.

This is the crux of blaming immigrants for low wages, if the wages didn’t suck already then you wouldn’t have so many immigrants coming here. That’s not on them, that’s on domestic policy and employers fucking everyone over.

Happily, I don’t think many people here are blaming immigrants for the system that’s taking advantage of them. Most of the comments I’ve seen on Lemmy get that this is a policy failure by our governments, and that newcomers are getting screwed.

Maybe not on here, but it is typical that is the problem I encounter with people who are vocally against immigrants. My experiences being my experiences(my algorithms online)

I didn’t read through most of the comments before I felt like commenting, for whatever that’s worth if anything

I don’t know that I would agree that newcomers are necessarily getting screwed, not anymore than anyone else anyway. And I think that’s why I have worked with so many. (Corporate greeeeeed)

Most of the people I work with still are better off than where that came from, it’s still a better life for them comparatively, and like I mentioned, they often have skills(opinions, preferences, familiarity etc) that allow them to utilize their situation to make them happier than non immigrants typically find.

Against my experience, I don’t mean to sorry for everyone else, but I do have first hand experience in this place so I feel comfortable offering an opinion

I don’t know that I would agree that newcomers are necessarily getting screwed, not anymore than anyone else anyway. And I think that’s why I have worked with so many. (Corporate greeeeeed)

Agreed, I think they’re getting the same lousy experience the rest of us are: food and housing are expensive, the job market can be tough.

I do have first hand experience in this place so I feel comfortable offering an opinion

Thanks for posting. It’s good to see that many immigrants are still finding Canada to be preferable to their home.

Would you believe that’s the whole ethos of the CanadaHousing2 subreddit, that it’s the government’s fault and they are taking advantage of immigrants and Canadians alike, but it gets labeled as a hate sub, lol.

Glad you found it worth reading

Sorry it took some time for me to reply to your comment.

The TFW program was initially meant to bring in hard to find specialists to help local enterprises. This system was corrupted under Harper to exploit unskilled foreign workers for jobs in Tim Horton’s and other low-wage positions. Companies couldn’t hire anybody anymore with their shitty low wages so they found a workaround to keep wages cheap.

Later, as boomers started to retire, they increased the amount of immigrant workers that could enter the country to fill the missing positions. But they literally flooded the market with these workers to keep wages low. There were so many in fact that there wasn’t enough positions for all of them. Many ended up doing Skip and Uber deliveries instead, living 5 people in a 1 bedroom apartment to make ends meet. This completely cut off any chances for local talent to access these new positions or even access entry level positions. That’s why we still have entry level software engineer positions at 50-60k/year here in Montreal for example. (I was paid that when I graduated in 2008 btw, so adjusted for inflation, they are paid a LOT less than they should during a time where living expenses have never been so high.)

This caused all kinds of pressures in Canada. On the job market, on rental housing, financial support programs, food banks, etc. Canadian citizens in need suddenly had all these other people to line up with for all these things and that’s unfair.

Sure we need immigration to cover lack of workers. But the rate at which they were let in was way too high.

if only we invested more in housing instead of forcing scarcity to enrich a small percentage of the population.