Mr. Chairman and members of the standing committee, my name's Kate Hooper and I'm an associate policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.
We are an independent, non-partisan think tank with offices in Washington, D.C., and Brussels. MPI analyzes international migration policies and trends around the world. My colleagues and I have long analyzed Canada's immigration system and admired it as a rare, successful example in which policy-makers can use evidence on immigrant outcomes and input from employers, industries, regions and localities to regularly adjust their system.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today.
To begin, I would like to set out how the world of work for many industrialized societies is likely to change dramatically in the next couple of decades. This carries implications both for countries' immigrant workforces and for their selection policies. These changes are spurred by a number of different trends, four of which I'll outline for you now.
The first is technological developments, such as digitization, automation and artificial intelligence, which are likely to both eliminate and create jobs. The automation of certain routine tasks is likely to transform or even eliminate certain jobs, but those jobs that rely heavily on creative skills, cognitive skills such as abstract thinking, or interpersonal skills are likely to be much harder to automate. Some jobs will also replace others. While we expect some jobs in manufacturing or administrative in-office roles to be lost, other jobs in data analytics or computer science will be created.
The challenge, of course, is helping those who are displaced to find new work.
The second trend is demographic. Populations are growing all day in Canada and elsewhere, and the share of people in the workforce is shrinking. This creates additional pressure, both on welfare systems and on pensions. Policy-makers often look to immigration as a way to offset these trends, but this hinges on both ensuring that newcomers enter the formal labour market and on continuing to admit large numbers of people as both the native-born and immigrant workforces age.
The third trend is the growing polarization of labour markets between high-skilled, highly paid and more stable jobs on the one hand, and low-skilled, poorly paid and more precarious jobs on the other hand. We're seeing knowledge-intensive industries grow, which is likely to result in growing competition for skilled workers, both among traditional immigrant destination countries like Canada and in emerging economies as well.
The fourth trend is changing work arrangements. Here, I refer both to the development of the gig economy, which allows people to participate in freelance, flexible types of work—this ranges from Uber to food delivery services to child care—and also to improvements in remote work arrangements and digital collaboration. This means that location is becoming less important for certain types of work.
While the flexibility and informal nature of the gig economy hold potential for getting immigrants and other under-represented groups into the workforce, these jobs offer less stability and fewer protections and benefits, such as health insurance or disability insurance. This risks increasing the vulnerability of these groups.
While it is clear that the world of work will undergo dramatic changes, it is far harder to predict either the scale or the pace of these changes. What is clear is that we're likely to see a lot more churn in many sectors, as jobs transform and more workers either need to leave their occupations or undergo quite significant training in order to continue performing their duties.
These trends place growing pressure on education and training systems that will need to deliver lifelong training to help people navigate these changes in their occupations or even their professions. That obviously has implications for social protection systems, which will not only need to support those workers who leave their jobs but also need to provide benefits to the growing number of native-born and immigrant workers employed in the gig economy.
As Canada's policy-makers reflect on this global scenario, I think the emphasis should therefore be on creating flexible selection policies that can incorporate and respond to labour market information in a timely fashion. This includes creating responsive systems that can admit all categories of low, semi-skilled and skilled workers as needed and as indicated by labour market information, and making sure that the system is really easy for immigrants and employers alike to navigate.
Changing work arrangements also carry implications for selection policies. For example, remote work arrangements may reduce the need to admit some immigrants on a permanent basis, and employer-sponsored channels may become less relevant, given the proliferation of self-employed workers who freelance and collaborate with a number of different employers.
Policy-makers should also think about adaptability when they're assessing prospective immigrants. If you admit an immigrant to do one job but that job disappears, what qualities will help them find work in a different occupation quickly?
One part of this is looking at the factors that Canada's longitudinal data suggests help immigrants integrate quickly, such as strong English language or French language skills and ties to the Canadian education system and labour market. However, policy-makers should also consider the soft and cognitive skills that are likely to be more valuable to employers going forward.
This may require rethinking how we evaluate immigrants. Currently immigration systems focus on formal education credentials, but these don't really give us a sense of these softer skills that are becoming more valuable.
Policy-makers should also look beyond admissions policies to think about how they can help more people enter and remain in the labour market. Canada already invests in the immigrants it admits, because it understands that the investments in language training and credential recognition ultimately pay off for migrants, employers and society.
Canada will also need to think about those groups that are currently under-represented in the labour market and provide them with the training that can equip them for the emerging jobs.
Ultimately, I think immigration policy can only be one aspect of these efforts to prepare Canada for this changing world of work.
I thank the committee for the opportunity to testify, and I'm glad to answer any questions.