The Canadian Immigration Minister has announced that the country needs to do more to retain the thousands of international students who study in the country each year.
Speaking yesterday, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister John McCallum said that the government is looking into easing some rules to make it easier for international students who he says have been “shortchanged” by the country’s Express Entry immigration system to obtain permanent residency.
“We must do more to attract students to this country as permanent residents,” McCallum said following a meeting with his provincial and territorial counterparts earlier this week. “International students are the best source of immigrants, in the sense that they’re educated, they’re young, they speak English or French, they know something of the country,” he said. “So we should be doing everything we can do to court them.”
Another potential reform to the Express Entry system that the minister is considering involves the Temporary Foreign Worker programme. Minister McCallum revealed that he will be reviewing the need for employers to apply for a labour market impact assessment — a document required to hire a foreign national over a Canadian one.
A report published earlier this year by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce revealed that the labour market impact assessments are the biggest barrier employers face when it comes to employing staff from overseas.
Article by David Fuller