TAVIA GRANT, Globe and Mail Update. September 10, 2007

Newcomers are facing severe challenges finding work in Quebec, while they tend to gain employment much more easily in Manitoba and Alberta, a national study showed Monday. Immigrants throughout Canada struggle for work in the first decade they  arrive, especially in the first five years. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in Quebec, where they experience “substantially” higher unemployment rates than Canadian-born people — regardless of how long they’d been in the country, Statistics Canada said.

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MIGRATION & POVERTY
PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION
Thurs June 21st, 2007 @ 6:00pm
Room 2270, SFU Harbour Centre 515 West Hastings

Migration and Poverty is a project that No One Is Illegal – Vancouver has undertaken in order to better understand the how poverty impacts migrant communities in Canada.

There is a vital need to initiate a dialogue about the poverty of migrants and refugees within Canada, as well as recognize the struggles against poverty- and its roots in colonization and neoliberal economic policies- that force the migration of individuals from the Global South.

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Globe and Mail 1 May 2007. Sponsors balk at paying. MARINA JIMÉNEZ

A Canadian contractor is suing Ottawa and the Ontario government for trying to force him to repay thousands of dollars in social assistance collected by his ex-fiancée, a Yugoslav woman he sponsored to come to Canada. Nedzad Dzihic, a 37-year-old Bosnian immigrant, did not marry Edina Zurko. Instead, according to court documents, she used him as a ticket to Canada and then dumped him almost as soon as she arrived, on Feb. 25, 2003. An embarrassed Mr. Dzihic promptly informed Citizenship and Immigration Canada, according to the documents filed Friday in Ontario Superior Court of Justice. He says he never saw her again and assumed the government had deported Ms. Zurko.

Instead, Mr. Dzihic was shocked last year to get a bill from the Ontario government to repay thousands of dollars his former girlfriend has been collecting since she went on welfare in June of 2006.

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Labour Double-Standards Blamed for Farmworkers’ Deaths. Relatives, unions decry declining standards. By Tom Sandborn Published: March 16, 2007. TheTyee.ca

Did Amarjit Kaur Bal, Sarabjit Kaur Sidhu and Sukhwinder Kaur Punia die in vain? The results from a meeting held March 15 in downtown Vancouver may determine the answer to that question. Family members of farmworkers killed in the roll-over accident of an overloaded labour contractor’s van last week and leaders of the B.C. labour movement met on the morning of March 15 with Minister of Labour Olga Ilich and Minister of Agriculture Pat Bell in Vancouver. They presented a comprehensive list of 30 proposals to remedy safety and employment standards abuses in B.C. fields and greenhouses. The submission to the ministers also calls on the government to strike down a controversial memorandum signed by the BC Liberals and the province’s large agricultural organizations, which critics say has paved the way for lax enforcement of safety and employment standards protections in the industry.

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Immigrants battle chronic low income. Some newcomers’ fortunes haven’t risen in line with skills, 15-year study finds. Globe and Mail By MARINA JIMÉNEZ. Wednesday, January 31, 2007 Page A5

A landmark national study confirms what new immigrants already know: They are financially no better off now than they were at the turn of the millennium, and have poverty rates three times higher than Canadians, despite their high levels of education. The Statistics Canada study is an indictment of Canada’s immigrant selection model, which actively recruits skilled professionals, most of whom cannot get work in their fields, and are forced to accept jobs delivering pizza or pumping gas.

In 2002, low-income rates among immigrant families during their first full year in Canada were 3.5 times higher than those of people born in Canada– higher than at any time in the 1990s. By 2004, they were 3.2 times higher. This is the first-ever study examining the chronic low income of immigrants, and the researchers tracked as many as 280,000 people over 15 years.

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