Good afternoon.
I'm a representative of the Chinese Canadian Community Alliance. We are a non-profit organization based in Toronto. Because we're part of the Chinese community, we are very concerned about changes in immigration law. After studying these amendments, our organization has decided to support the amendments.
Basically, the community is concerned about two problems with the Immigration Act. The first is the backlog. Everybody, especially from China, has to queue up and wait—four to six years, according to the ministry. The increase in the backlog could soon go over a million people, resulting in a wait time of ten years. This is something that's not acceptable to potential immigrants.
The other problem we see is with the newcomers. At this point, we're basing the immigration application on a point system. We're basing it on people's age, educational background, and experiences, without much consideration of whether they will fit into our job market. Consequently, we see all kinds of people coming here who can't find a job and have to move back to where they came from.
During the past month or so, I was helping a friend who runs a piano school. Typically, all the students are new immigrants. I was surprised by the number of families who had only one person in Canada. The other half of the family was in China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, because they couldn't find a suitable job. There are even people who have to move down to Brazil or Argentina, because it's much easier for them to find a job down there.
Recently I saw a Chinese TV program, a program that tells how successful new immigrants are. One of the programs surprised me. It was about a person who was a famous opera singer in Shanghai. He qualified under the present system and came here, but he couldn't find a job at all. Eventually he went to a factory and had to sing an Italian song to convince the Italian owner to give him a job on the assembly line.
We would support this bill if the amendments fulfilled two conditions: reducing wait times, and bringing in people who can find a job. It goes without saying that there are pros and cons within the community. There are people for and against the amendments.
Some of the arguments concentrate on things that, to me, have nothing to do with these amendments at all. This morning I came by train, so I was reading the Chinese paper on the train. There was an article about a person who appeared before one of the committees, either this one or the one on citizenship and immigration. He was using the minister's statement that Canada cannot take in all the qualified applicants from China and India as a means to say that the immigration minister is a racist.
Now, in a rough estimate, if even 10% of the people in China alone qualified under the system, we're talking about 130 million people. I don't think any government official would dare to say that we must, we shall, take in that number of people, but this is the kind of thing used against the amendments. To me and to our association, it has nothing to do with the real meaning of these amendments.
I repeat: our association has decided we will support these immigration amendments.
Thank you.