I share your concern about the quality. The fact of the matter is that many studies have shown that the immigrants who have come since 1990 are not doing well. Many of them are living below the poverty line. They're not getting the jobs. A part of that is because of the pressure of numbers. To take a quarter of a million every year, and add to that an equal number of temporary workers and foreign students who all have to be processed, means that very few of the immigrants are even being interviewed by our visa officers now. They're not being seen. It's being done by paper. If you're an immigrant who applies in Bangladesh, you fill out your paper, and it's sent to London, where an officer inspects it or looks at it.
My view is that we have to see these people, interview them, and talk to them. Quite apart from quality, we find that many of the people who come with qualifications cannot get employment. We've all heard the story of doctors and engineers driving cabs, and there's some truth in that. The other part of the truth is that we shouldn't be letting professional immigrants in until they are able to meet the provincial licensing requirements.
If you're a medical doctor, an engineer, or an architect, you don't get into Australia until you have proven that the state government will accept you and allow you to practise, and you must be fluent in English.
We allow professionals in who may have had 12 or so years of education, but we don't know the quality of that education. We give it the equivalent quality of someone from Oxford, Columbia, or Harvard. That's the basis of the problem with a professional who comes here and can't get work.
There's also the problem of provincial regulations and the professional requirements, but the base of it is we're letting in a lot of people who simply are not qualified. In my view, we were successful prior to 1990 because immigrants were not only interviewed and selected, they were counselled. They were counselled about what was expected of them when they came to Canada, what they could expect, what the union requirements were, and what cities they should probably go to in order to match their occupation.
That's all gone by the boards, and now it's a question of numbers.