The more educated an immigrant is, the more likely they are to leave Canada, a new report on immigration data and patterns suggests.
It comes as the federal immigration and health ministers testified on barriers to attracting immigrants to work in the health care sector on Tuesday.
New immigrants are leaving Canada “at near-record rates, with highly educated and highly skilled immigrants leaving Canada at twice the rate of those with less education and lower skills,” a new report by the Institute of Canadian Citizenship and the Conference Board of Canada found.
The ICC releases an annual report which studies the causes of onward migration — or migration of people first into, then out of Canada using data from Statistics Canada.
The likelihood of leaving Canada goes up as the level of education increases, the report found.
“Immigrants with doctorates are nearly twice as likely to leave Canada within 5 years compared to immigrants with a bachelor’s degree,” it said.
In all, one in five migrants end up leaving Canada within the first 25 years, with the likelihood peaking within the first five years.
The risk is especially high for high-skilled immigrants, the report said.
“Five years after landing, these individuals are more than twice as likely to leave Canada as lower-skilled immigrants,” it said.
Some of the next decade’s most “in-demand” occupations were among those where highly skilled immigrants were most likely to leave Canada within 25 years, the report found, but didn’t give specific numbers for each category.
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It said business and finance management, information and communications technology, engineering and architecture management, and manufacturing and processing engineering are the fields that saw some of the highest likelihood of immigrants leaving.
Canada’s health care sector, which has suffered a lack of personnel in recent years, was also cited as one where highly skilled immigrants have a high likelihood of leaving within 25 years.
Canada is working on balancing “sustainable” immigration levels with meeting the labour needs of key sectors such as health care facing labour shortages, Immigration Minister Lena Diab told a House of Commons committee on Tuesday.
This year’s federal budget allocated $97 million over five years to create a create a Foreign Credential Recognition Action Fund. This will help foreign-trained health care professionals to gain recognition in Canada.
Diab said her department was working in collaboration with Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) to “harmonize” the foreign credentials recognition program with Canada’s immigration needs.
“Our new international talent attraction strategy builds on these efforts, positioning Canada to meet strategic labor market needs and helping employers recruit high-skilled workers faster in sectors like health care, construction, emerging technology, artificial intelligence,” Diab said.
Declining or stagnating incomes were cited as the key cause behind highly skilled immigrants choosing to leave Canada.
“This retention trend is pronounced in those with doctorates, who are nearly three times more likely to leave than those with bachelor’s degrees when faced with no income growth,” the report said.
“But this research shows that too many of the people we most need — engineers, health care professionals, scientists, and senior managers — are packing up and leaving.”
Atlantic Canada faces the greatest retention challenge, with more immigrants leaving from the region than anywhere else in the country. The report added, however, that most immigrants leave Canada from the first province they landed in, without giving other provinces a try.
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