Well, first, I think we need to underscore how our open and generous immigration programs have failed newcomers to too great an extent in the recent past. All of the economic data indicates that economic outcomes for immigrants have generally been on the decline in the past three decades. There are some exceptions to this that are the result of policy changes.
For example, federal skilled workers arriving under the points grid, which started in 2002, have seen better results, particularly those with pre-arranged jobs. Provincial nominees, who are coming in large numbers now, are doing significantly better on average in their first few years than skilled workers. We think that Canadian experience class immigrants, since we introduced that program in 2008, are doing quite well.
So there are some positive signs, but generally there is a consensus that unemployment rates are much higher for immigrants than for the overall population. It's about twice as high. Unemployment for immigrants with university degrees is nearly three times higher than among degree holders in the general population. We all know why. It's because many of the highly educated, foreign-trained professionals who we invite to Canada end up stuck in survival jobs and facing underemployment.
Just the other day in Vancouver I met a woman, a radiologist, who immigrated from Iran three years ago. She has been working multiple survival jobs. She is at the end of her tether. She said that, as much as she can't stand her country of origin, she's going to go back there now to find work so that she can feed her family here in Canada. That is a shame. We simply cannot continue, practically or morally, to invite people here to face unemployment or underemployment.
The vision is to move from a system that is rigid, passive, and slow-moving, which often underuses the human capital of the highly educated immigrants we receive, to a system that is fast, flexible, and proactive. By that, I mean increasingly empowering employers to look at the global labour market in order to identify those people who have the skills that are immediately relevant to our labour market, so that in principle they can get off the plane and go into—in the best-case scenario—a pre-arranged job, where they know the employer will recognize their skills. That's where we want to go.
We want to essentially apply some of the best features of the provincial nominee program, which is at its best an employer-driven labour market program, and also the best features of the skilled worker program. For example, we know that people who arrived in the skilled worker program with pre-arranged jobs are making on average $79,000 in income after three years, which is much higher than the average in the Canadian population.
The system we want to move towards, instead of being characterized by a seven- or eight-year wait time, will have applicants entering the country in months rather than years. It will have a much larger portion of immigrants coming with pre-arranged jobs. It will be assessing the relevance of their education and experience to the Canadian labour market, rather than the kind of arbitrary and rigid assessment that has been done in the past. So, do they have Canadian experience? We know that younger workers do better. People aspiring to work in the regulated professions, with higher levels of language proficiency, do much better. It's fair to say that not every university degree overseas is of equal relevance to the Canadian labour market, so we'll do more a qualitative assessment of their education.
I've been giving a number of speeches on this. I could easily take an hour answering your question, Mr. Optiz. But the overview is to move from this passive system to one that is much more proactive and much faster, taking into account the research and the data. We have recently done major benchmark studies on the federal skilled worker program and the provincial nominee program, and taken into account the experience of comparable countries, such as Australia and New Zealand.