Immigration to Canada

Immigration to Canada

Immigration to Canada is the process whereby people move from their country to Canada to settle there (Simmons and Alan, 2010). Canada is a merit system society that you can find anywhere. It is more advanced and high functioning than most people believe. It is a free market society. Most of these people end up acquiring Canadian citizenship. “Domestic Immigration Law and Policy” made some changes with the present “Immigration and Refugee Protection Act” (LaViolette and Nicole, 2003, p. 969). The four groups of immigrants in Canada include refugees, family-class, economic immigrants, and humanitarian. Refugees are those people on the run from torture, punishment, or persecution. The family-class immigrants are those people of Canadian residents who are closely related to living in Canada. Economic immigrants are business people and skilled workers. Humanitarian are those people who are accepted for compassionate or humane reasons.

The evolution of Canadian immigrant policies is still ongoing. Significant changes that were supposed to rationalize the steady flow of immigrants were made by the “Citizenship and Immigration Canada” in the year 2008. The changes included various immigrants cover and minimizing professional groups for skilled immigrants. Canada, in the year 2015, presented the “Express Entry systems,” which provided a rationalized process for application for various economic immigrants. Ahmed Hussen, who was the Immigration Minister in the year 2017, was quoted announcing that Canada would be able to admit approximately one million residents in the following three years. This announcement would be a one percent increase in its population by the year 2020.

Canadian citizenship is acquired through the process of naturalization (Beach, 2011). The government of Canada reduced the fee for landing for every immigrant by half in 2006. There was the implementation of the improvements to the Citizenship Act in 2017. The developments brought back some of the earlier requirements that existed in Canada for more than three decades. Physical presence rule no longer exists. It is a responsibility for persons of age 14 to 54 to pass the knowledge of test in Canada. They are also supposed to show a basic ability in Canada’s official languages which are either French or English.

The “Immigration and Refugee Protection Act” importance is that it authorizes Canada to follow the maximum economic, social, and cultural immigration benefits. It provides security for better credit of the foreign identifications of permanent residents and integration into the society by working with the provinces. It nurtures respect for the right of every human and by rejecting access to Canadian ground for those who are offenders or possess security risk to enhance security and justice internationally. It is responsible for providing safety to society and ensuring the general health and safety of the public. It enables entry of students, temporary workers, and visitors for various reasons like education, tourism, commerce, scientific activities, and trade. It supports the development of minor official language groups in Canada. It ensures successful assimilation of those who hope to reside in Canada permanently. It plays a role in the development of a prosperous economy in Canada. The benefits of immigration are therefore shared across the nation. It also helps in family reunions.

Challenges faced by immigrants in Canada include difficulty in finding jobs. Most of the employers in the nation prefer people with Canadian experience. This gives the Canadian residents an added advantage than the immigrants. There is always a big difference with the type, level, and quality of services offered in Canada. Immigrants can admit that adapting to new way of doing things is a challenge. The language barrier can also be one of the challenges for immigrants. French is the official language recognized by the government. An immigrant who is conversant with English can find it hard communicating with the natives who know French (Caccia and Ivana, 2010).

Work Cited

Beach, Charles M., Christopher Worswick, and Alan G. Green. “Toward Improving Canada’s Skilled Immigration Policy: An Evaluation Approach.” CD Howe Institute (2011).

LaViolette, Nicole. “Coming out of Canada: The immigration of same-sex couples under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.” McGill LJ 49 (2003): 969.

Caccia, Ivana. Managing the Canadian mosaic in wartime: shaping citizenship policy, 1939-1945. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2010.

Simmons, Alan B. Immigration and Canada: Global and transnational perspectives. Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2010.