Thank you for inviting me.
My name is Mikal Skuterud. I'm a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo; the director of the Canadian labour economics forum; and the Roger Phillips scholar in social policy and fellow in residence at the C.D. Howe Institute.
On my website, you'll find my disclosure statement. In it, I state:
...as a researcher, I deliberately avoid advocacy as I believe I can contribute more by seeking and disseminating objective evidence than in advancing agendas. For this reason, I have throughout my career declined funding from organizations with explicit advocacy mandates or private interests.
For 20 years, my research has been focused on the economics of Canadian immigration. I come to this research as a Canadian immigrant who deeply values Canada's exceptional record of combining high immigration levels with broad public support for immigration.
What explains Canada's exceptionalism? It's not complicated. Canada's geography and non-porous borders enable it to be highly selective in the immigrants it admits. Since 1967, we've relied on a points system that prioritizes skilled workers. The consequence is that the wage suppression effects of immigration are concentrated at the top end of the income distribution so that immigration tends, if anything, to reduce, not exacerbate, economic inequality. In Canada, lower-income citizens don't see immigrants as competition; they see them instead as doctors, professors and scientists who make their lives better.
Sadly, however, what we've seen in recent years is a dismantling of Canada's skilled immigration system as policy-makers have become obsessed with plugging holes in lower-skilled labour markets.
In March 2016, I received an email from then immigration minister John McCallum requesting feedback on six policy questions. A group of nine academic economists met with the minister three weeks later to discuss his questions, and on May 10, we sent him a 32-page written response. I think it's safe to say the feedback was never read by any of Mr. McCallum's three successors. In rereading this feedback, there's little doubt in my mind that the mess the system finds itself in now could have been avoided if our recommendations had not been ignored.
First, we advised against introducing a low-skill component to the express entry system, which is precisely what category-based selection has done. Second, we warned the government to proceed carefully in expanding foreign student admissions to two-year college programs that are focused on selling immigration, not education. Third, we recommended that the comprehensive ranking system for prioritizing economic class immigrants include as criteria both an applicant's field of study and the post-secondary institution from which they graduated.
To anyone who believes federal government policy is not responsible for the explosive growth in the foreign student admissions we've seen, I recommend comparing the federal government's 2014 and 2019 international education strategy reports. What you'll see is an unambiguous shift in focus from attracting and retaining the “best and brightest” to diversifying foreign students' fields, levels and locations of study. By 2019, there was a recognition that the potential to scale up foreign student entries and in turn immigration levels lay in the colleges that were struggling to fill their seats with domestic students. The system became fixated on growth and quantity and lost sight of the consequences for quality and our skilled immigration system.
For the past decade, Canadian voters have been told by their federal government that significant increases in immigration levels would be a tonic for Canada's sluggish economic growth. For academic economists who study immigration and understand how economies work, this narrative might have felt good, but it wasn't true. We warned the government, but nobody likes a cold shower, and we were ignored. We are seeing the consequences now.
Thank you again for the invitation. I'm happy to take questions.