Unfortunately, David North from the Center for Immigration Studies writes too glowingly about Canada's point system for accepting immigrants. Language skills (both French and English), higher education, employment history are factored in to accept a higher caliber of immigrants.
But there are many things wrong with this model. One of the obvious is that a skilled immigrant doesn’t necessarily mean that he will assimilate any easier into Canadian society. Many skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants opt to live in ghettoes in surrounding suburbs, keeping their own cultures in tact, and staying away from the mainstream culture.
Another problem is what William Gairdner identified more than two decades ago. Skilled immigrants bring a myriad of untested relatives with them. Gairdner wrote in his book The Trouble with Canada:
The 1982 report to Parliament on immigration levels said, "Family reunification has been and is one of the traditional foundations of immigration policy."...The result is that immigrants already here determine the mix of immigrants to come, 80 percent of whom enter without regard to their merit. Employment and immigration in Hull has informed me that of the up to 175,000 immigrants planned for 1990, only 24,000, or 16 percent, will actually have to qualify under our point system [of education, work experience and language fluency both in French and English]. A full 84 percent - 174,000 - just walk through the door! For all we know, they could be ignorant, illiterate, unqualified people. We don't know, because we don't ask.Finally, even though there is a sophisticated skilled immigrants system in place (which is nonetheless full of loopholes as I show above), there is an equally strong refugee system, with a close to 100% acceptance rate.
When all this is taken into consideration, the Canadian immigration system is not as exemplary as North writes.
