The current system, the one we're retiring, to speak in its defence, many other developed countries see our old points system as something of a model, in part because we were at least trying to attract people with relatively high levels of education and language proficiency. On the whole they did relatively well, but many, the vast majority, didn't.
I think it's in the range of 80% who did not end up working in the occupations for which they were trained. That's probably the biggest failure of the old system, that we just took people, we warehoused their applications for seven or eight years, brought them to Canada, and dropped them into the general labour pool to sink or swim. Many of them struggled to keep their head above water. Many of them ended up having to work in survival jobs, because they couldn't find employment in their particular area.
This is why I think we've seen, on average, the incomes for immigrants going from 90% of the average Canadian income in the mid to late 1970s to about 60% of the average Canadian income now. I think it's why we see the rate of unemployment among recently arrived immigrants twice as high as the general unemployment rate, and the rate of unemployment among immigrants with university degrees four to five times higher than it is for native-born Canadians with university degrees.
These numbers are unacceptable. They reflect a social reality of too many people who have left the high levels of employment in their countries of origin coming to Canada only to face frustration stuck at the bottom of our labour market. That is unacceptable.
I think there's a moral dimension in trying to get this right so the people we invite here don't feel as if they've been exploited, that we take their high levels of education and they become stuck at the bottom of the labour market. They need to come to work at their skill level, like young Mr. Gaurav Gore whom I met, our 20,000 CEC participant.