by Alexandra Zabjek
Recent immigrants in Alberta have unemployment rates nearly half those found on the national level but still lag far behind their Canadian-born counterparts when it comes to landing jobs, figures released by Statistics Canada Monday indicate. In 2006, the unemployment rate for Alberta's Canadian-born workforce was 2.6 per cent, compared to 5.8 per cent for recent immigrants. The study also showed significant differences in how newcomers fared in the province's two biggest labour markets. Recent immigrants living in Calgary had a 73.6-per-cent employment rate, the highest in the country in 2006. In Edmonton the same group had an employment rate of around 67 per cent, ranking the city sixth among eight major metropolitan areas. Alberta's relatively low unemployment levels could help ease the province's labour shortage by luring newcomers away from traditional immigration settlement cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, said Michael Haan, from the University of Alberta's department of sociology. "This can only be a good news story for Alberta," Haan said. "Given that a good part of settlement choices are based on word of mouth, it won't take long for an immigrant in Toronto to find out his or her cousin in Edmonton is doing better."
But Haan noted the statistics do not reveal what kind of work immigrants are doing, which is especially telling, considering the data showed newcomers are more likely to have university degrees than their Canadian counterparts. "What the figures aren't capturing are whether a person is appropriately employed," Haan said. "I suspect you'll see many of (these educated people) driving taxis." Those who work with immigrants say barriers to employment for recent arrivals have remained the same for years - immigrants don't have their foreign credentials recognized, they don't always have enough language skills and Canadian employers are often unwilling to consider foreign work experience. "This has been a long-standing and complex challenge for immigrants and refugees for 25 years," said Alice Colak, director of immigrant and settlement services at Catholic Social Services in Edmonton. But Alberta's labour shortage has tilted the tables slightly in favour of newcomers looking for work, she said. "Employers require that elusive thing called 'Canadian work experience,' but in Alberta with the labour shortage, employers seem to be less stringent around that," she said. The Statistics Canada study looked at different groups of immigrants between the ages of 25 and 54. It found that in Alberta and across the country, immigrants who had spent more than 10 years in Canada achieved employment levels on par with those of Canadian-born workers, while the most recent arrivals had the lowest employment levels. "A lot of people see hope because they do see immigrants who succeed," said Colak. "There's a lot of frustration but there are a lot of success stories." You can count Fausi El-Al among those experiencing the frustration of a Canadian job search.
Recent immigrants in Alberta have unemployment rates nearly half those found on the national level but still lag far behind their Canadian-born counterparts when it comes to landing jobs, figures released by Statistics Canada Monday indicate. In 2006, the unemployment rate for Alberta's Canadian-born workforce was 2.6 per cent, compared to 5.8 per cent for recent immigrants. The study also showed significant differences in how newcomers fared in the province's two biggest labour markets. Recent immigrants living in Calgary had a 73.6-per-cent employment rate, the highest in the country in 2006. In Edmonton the same group had an employment rate of around 67 per cent, ranking the city sixth among eight major metropolitan areas. Alberta's relatively low unemployment levels could help ease the province's labour shortage by luring newcomers away from traditional immigration settlement cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, said Michael Haan, from the University of Alberta's department of sociology. "This can only be a good news story for Alberta," Haan said. "Given that a good part of settlement choices are based on word of mouth, it won't take long for an immigrant in Toronto to find out his or her cousin in Edmonton is doing better."
But Haan noted the statistics do not reveal what kind of work immigrants are doing, which is especially telling, considering the data showed newcomers are more likely to have university degrees than their Canadian counterparts. "What the figures aren't capturing are whether a person is appropriately employed," Haan said. "I suspect you'll see many of (these educated people) driving taxis." Those who work with immigrants say barriers to employment for recent arrivals have remained the same for years - immigrants don't have their foreign credentials recognized, they don't always have enough language skills and Canadian employers are often unwilling to consider foreign work experience. "This has been a long-standing and complex challenge for immigrants and refugees for 25 years," said Alice Colak, director of immigrant and settlement services at Catholic Social Services in Edmonton. But Alberta's labour shortage has tilted the tables slightly in favour of newcomers looking for work, she said. "Employers require that elusive thing called 'Canadian work experience,' but in Alberta with the labour shortage, employers seem to be less stringent around that," she said. The Statistics Canada study looked at different groups of immigrants between the ages of 25 and 54. It found that in Alberta and across the country, immigrants who had spent more than 10 years in Canada achieved employment levels on par with those of Canadian-born workers, while the most recent arrivals had the lowest employment levels. "A lot of people see hope because they do see immigrants who succeed," said Colak. "There's a lot of frustration but there are a lot of success stories." You can count Fausi El-Al among those experiencing the frustration of a Canadian job search.
