By Anam Zakaria
Copyright thewalrus
A tiny animated car slowly consumed the straight black line on the Uber app as it headed toward the blue dot—us. We were in the east end of Toronto, far from our home in the west. A grey SUV stopped in front of the clinic. We rushed out the door, Haroon holding a portable car seat, while Anam carried our daughter, Lina, in her arms. We were all zipped up in our winter jackets for these few minutes of transition, from the warmth of the clinic to that of the car.
We were returning from an appointment with Lina’s pediatrician. It had been another frustrating trip. Ever since she started daycare, Lina had had recurring ear infections and taken multiple courses of antibiotics. Her pediatrician had recommended we take her to an ENT specialist. She was on multiple wait lists, yet we hadn’t heard back from anyone for months.
After adjusting the car seat in the back and placing Lina in it, Anam sat next to her, while Haroon was in the front. The driver was probably in his late fifties or early sixties. We fell into conversation with him, finding out he was from Afghanistan and had moved to Canada in 2021 after the Taliban takeover.
“What did you do in Afghanistan before you moved to Canada?” we asked him.
This was our go-to question whenever we got into an Uber—which had become a frequent occurrence given our repeat visits to the doctor. Most drivers turned out to be recent immigrants from the “Global South,” like us. Without exception, everyone had a professional degree and work experience from their home countries.
In this case, a loaded silence followed. “I was an ENT specialist,” the driver eventually said. He had worked at the military hospital in Kabul before the Taliban assumed power and he came to Canada. The irony of it. There we were, on the wait list of four ENTs for a few months, being driven by one who couldn’t yet practise in Canada despite his decades of experience.
For us, the exchange marked the enduring reality of immigrant life in Canada: highly educated and skilled individuals struggling to have their non-Canadian education and work experience recognized in the job market. While underemployment of this kind has long been seen as a rite of passage for newcomers before they find their feet, it’s fast turning into a crisis.
Pay Tuition, Follow the Rules, Then Pack Your Bags
Canada’s Immigration System Is a Moral Failure
The Case for 100 Million Canadians
In a 2024 survey by Leger, 60 percent of employed newcomers said they had difficulty finding a job due to challenges with credentials and needing local experience, while 38 percent of employed newcomers were not able to find a job in their field. Last December, Statistics Canada reported that the unemployment rate for newcomers—those who had landed five years or less earlier—had risen to 9.6 percent, double the 5.4 percent for Canadians.
Landed immigrants—or permanent residents—accounted for almost 60 percent of the workforce providing personal transport or delivery services through an app in 2023, according to Statistics Canada. The overrepresentation of landed immigrants in the gig economy, particularly racialized immigrants, is in significant part shaped by their educational and professional credentials being questioned and frequently devalued in the Canadian job market.
This impacts the morale of immigrants and their experience of the country. According to the Leaky Bucket 2024 report, published by the Institute of Canadian Citizenship, the proportion of skilled immigrants leaving Canada is at an all-time high. The report highlights that, based on current trends, one in every five immigrants who land in Canada will decide to leave within twenty-five years, with 34 percent leaving in the first five years. Historical patterns show that almost 50 percent of those who decide to leave came to Canada through the economic immigration category—immigrants who were specifically invited to the country to fill an economic gap. Their leaving, particularly so early in their immigration journey, is an economic promise that never truly materialized.
There we were, on the wait list of four ENTs, being driven by one who couldn’t yet practise in Canada.
This onward migration, as it is called, needs to be seen in the context of other surveys, such as one conducted by Leger in 2023 that pointed out that 37 percent of new Canadians—immigrants who had been in the country for five years or less—and 22 percent of those who had been here for six years or more said living in Canada was worse than expected.
Such a trend also has grave implications for the Canadian economy. Economists have pointed out that a reason why Canada avoided a recession in 2023 was its population growth because of immigration: temporary and permanent. That year, the country’s population grew by about 1.3 million. Now, with the federal government’s cut of nearly 20 percent to permanent resident targets, alongside plans to reduce the proportion of non-permanent residents to 5 percent of the country’s total population from the current 7.3 percent, Canada’s population is expected to go down in 2025 and 2026 by 0.2 percent.
Throw in the fact that a high proportion of skilled immigrants are choosing to leave the country amid the “psychodrama” of the trade war with the US, and the Canadian economy is likely to take a severe hit. While there is a growing conversation around easing interprovincial trade barriers to soften the blow, another effective measure would be to fully utilize the skills and talents of the immigrants who are already here and are willing to contribute but are unable to because of the systemic challenges.
“Just to keep up with bare minimum costs, I end up driving seventeen, eighteen, nineteen hours a day,” says Kulbir Singh Bhullar, a forty-year-old from India. Kulbir drives an Uber all week long and hardly gets to spend time with his seven-year-old daughter. “When I leave home, she is sleeping. When I come back home, she’s already in bed,” he says.
Bhullar is speaking with a North American accent, using silences and hand gestures. “A lot of people think I am native here, but I am only six months old in Canada. Sixteen years of speaking to North Americans [in my professional life in India]—that’s where the accent comes from.”
We are talking to Bhullar as part of Driving Canada, a collaborative project between Qissa, a non-profit storytelling platform we founded, and the Halifax-based Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, documenting the stories of immigrants to Canada who currently drive or have driven for Uber in the past. The project was inspired by the conversations we had with our Uber drivers over the past few years. Each interaction told the same story—immigrants struggling to find meaningful employment in Canada commensurate with their education and experience.
Their leaving is an economic promise that never truly materialized.
The stories resonated with our own experience. I, Anam, was advised to take “Pakistan” off my résumé when I first started looking for jobs in Canada. I realized that every organization I’d worked for had it in its name: the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, the Association for the Development of Pakistan, Code for Pakistan. So I started using acronyms such as “CAP” and “ADP.” I started getting calls for interviews only then.
Bhullar, according to his own calculations and after factoring in all costs, earns about $9 an hour. The figure falls within the median income range of $6.37 to $10.6 an hour that a February 2024 report from the Rideshare Drivers Association of Ontario calculated using company-provided figures and City of Toronto data.
At the end of every month, the Uber app asks Bhullar if he would be driving the next month as well. “My answer to that, with a heavy heart, is yes, I would,” he tells us. “I hope that there would be a better job so I can pay for my family’s bills in a different way, but if you are already behind the wheel for eighteen hours, where is the time to apply for jobs you aspire for?”
This is not the future Bhullar and his wife imagined for themselves when they moved to Canada in early 2024. With a bachelor’s degree in computer applications, and having worked for several years with IT companies such as Microsoft and Tata Consultancy Services, Bhullar was optimistic he would be able to secure a good customer service job while his wife joined Algoma University in Brampton as an international student.
His wife struggled too, to find part-time employment that aligned with her professional background. Her last position before moving to Canada was vice president at Bank of New York Mellon in Pune, India. She now works part time as a server with an agency that staffs a casino.
It was a similar story for Yalgar Singh and Niharika Aggarwal, at least in the early part of their journey. Now married and living in Woodbridge, Ontario (they moved to Canada separately), the two were friends in college in India and lost touch once they began their professional careers. While completing an undergraduate IT degree in India, Singh worked with IBM, put himself through graduate school, worked as an analyst at another firm, and then joined the bureaucracy in Punjab. His last assignment there was with the chief secretary, the highest-ranking bureaucrat of the state. Aggarwal moved to Gurugram, a satellite city of the national capital New Delhi, for a job with a private company a few years after graduation and eventually landed a well-paying remote-work gig that allowed her to be closer to her family in Punjab.
“You’ve heard stories from other immigrants, students. Once they go [to Canada], they have a home. They have cars. You will see the [Instagram] reels,” says Singh. “My salary in India was good . . . but the grass here looked greener.”
Beautiful pictures of suburban homes, leased cars, fall leaves, the drive to Niagara, the sprawling vineyards of Southern Ontario—they all played a part in Aggarwal’s decision to leave the comfort of her home and a stable job to pursue a life in Canada. “One thing that influenced me the most was how people flaunt on social media,” she says. “You know that this person was doing this back home, but now things have changed for him. He has money. He has everything.”
Singh and Aggarwal believed that, after moving to Canada, they would be able to find jobs in line with what they’d done previously. They didn’t realize their professional degrees and prior work meant virtually nothing without the “Canadian experience” many employers covet.
Despite advanced degrees and years of work, newcomers are often forced to take on volunteer work or a lower-level job or gig to gain the local experience required and to survive. Trying to address a part of the problem, in 2023, the Ontario government announced a plan to ban requirements about Canadian work experience in job postings. The assumption underlying such requirements had always been that those applicants fulfilling the criteria would be more familiar with Canadian work culture and possess the “soft skills”—a broad term that could mean anything from a candidate’s ability to get along with their colleagues to possessing the “right” accent—to succeed quickly.
Degrees and prior work meant virtually nothing without the “Canadian experience” many employers covet.
The Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council highlights that while organizations are already prohibited by the Ontario Human Rights Code from asking about Canadian experience, the term is still used as shorthand to assess a candidate’s suitability. “The ‘Canadian experience’ barrier runs deeper than publicly posted job ads,” the council observes.
The expectation is now expressed more covertly at different stages of the recruitment process, from how résumés are filtered based on where a candidate worked or studied to how their soft skills are assessed during interviews and whether they have Canadian references.
“So this is the conundrum. You cannot break out of it,” says Singh.
Singh and Aggarwal both immigrated through the economic stream—which involved getting degree equivalencies for their qualifications and an assessment of their work experience to give them points that measured their suitability to integrate into the Canadian economy. These points are allotted on the basis of the applicant’s age, education, language skills, professional experience, marital status, and more—and are referred to as the Comprehensive Ranking System, or CRS, score. The higher the points, the more of an economic asset the prospective immigrant is to the country.
The economic stream accounts for the bulk of immigration to Canada, with almost 60 percent of new immigrants in 2022 coming under it. There are two prominent pathways in the economic stream—the Federal Skilled Worker Program and Provincial Nominee Program—both of which use a points-based system to ensure that highly qualified skilled workers are invited.
Introduced in 1967, the economic stream opened up the road to Canadian citizenship for aspirants from around the world; before then, Canada prioritized immigrants from Europe. The points-based system has been streamlined over the years, with the introduction of Express Entry in 2015 to rank candidates based on their CRS score. The system is designed to address the pressing economic needs of the country, leading to applicants being invited from a worldwide pool of talent.
In the past few years, as the global conversation around immigration has become more xenophobic, many countries, including the US, Germany, and the UK, have looked toward the Canadian economic migration path as a model and have introduced something similar or expressed an intention to do so. Due to the highly competitive nature of this stream, the system ends up attracting the cultural, political, and economic elite of the country of origin. However, once immigrants land, the same experience that they were allotted points for is discounted and discredited in the job market.
Having a transparent ranking system with no added points for your country of origin has meant that there has been a major demographic shift in Canada in the past few decades, with more immigrants from the Global South using the economic stream. Due to a combination of push factors in their home countries and pull factors related to Canada, a majority of recent immigrants have come from India, China, Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Iran, with India accounting for 27 percent of landed immigrants in Canada in 2022.
But while the context of immigration to Canada has changed drastically, particularly attracting top talent even at the cost of negative economic impacts on the immigrants’ home countries, Canada continues to struggle to fully utilize the depth of experience and expertise they bring. Doctors driving taxis has been an enduring cliché about Canada (and while all internationally trained doctors face barriers to practising in Canada, those trained in countries such as Australia, Ireland, the UK, and the US are given streamlined pathways, putting those trained elsewhere at a disadvantage). Underemployment among immigrants remains a persistent problem despite being documented for decades.
To actually fix this chronic issue will require much more hands-on engagement across industries and sectors. One step could be to identify racialized newcomers as a distinct equity-deserving group in the job market. This would bring more attention to the specific challenges new immigrants face.
Some policy-focused organizations—such as World Education Services, the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants—are already working to help employers better understand and value the diverse experiences newcomers bring. These efforts include building tools for foreign credential evaluations, designing playbooks for employers with strategies on how to hire and onboard immigrants, and spotlighting promising practices that help drive inclusion. But more needs to be done to confront the implicit biases in hiring practices and their impact on new immigrants.
There is also a need to evaluate and improve supports provided to newcomers. The majority of immigrants coming to Canada are economic immigrants, and they are least likely to avail themselves of services offered by settlement agencies. The people we spoke to as part of Driving Canada echoed this sentiment. The thinking behind these services seems to be that immigrants lack language fluency and other basic professional skills such as résumé building, but that is rarely the case. What’s needed is a shift away from this deficiency mindset to a recognition that it is systems that need an overhaul—a move away from assumptions about who immigrants are and what they require to centring their experiences and designing programs that respond to their situation.
A 2019 report by RBC Economics, titled Untapped Potential, says that the Canadian economy can add up to $50 billion in annual gross domestic product by bringing immigrants up to the wage and employment levels of those born in Canada. It highlights that the Canadian economy is missing out on the talents and skills of immigrants by forcing them into professions not suited to their professional backgrounds, noting that only 38 percent of university-educated immigrants aged twenty-five to fifty-four work in an occupation requiring a university degree, compared with 52 percent of those born in Canada.
The Canadian economy can add up to $50 billion in annual GDP by bringing immigrants up to the employment levels of those born here.
What the report also points out, something that resonates with our experience, as well as of those we spoke to, is that the immigrant earnings gap has worsened in the past thirty years even though immigrants have become significantly more educated than the Canadian-born population. For years, Canada has been one of the top destinations for skilled immigrants in the world, but one cannot take for granted the desirability of Canadian citizenship in the years to come. If this shift happens, it’s hard to imagine how the country will maintain its competitiveness in already challenging times.
Canada is at a point where it can no longer afford to waste the value that immigrants bring. Instead of slashing immigration targets, it needs to focus the national conversation on how best to utilize their vast talent pool. As we sat in that Uber with the ENT specialist, we couldn’t help but wonder why he couldn’t see our daughter. How did it make sense for an understaffed health care system to make patients wait for months to have basic medical needs met while experienced doctors are prevented from practising? Put another way, what does Canada stand to gain by failing to realize its own potential?
