Visa workers find adventure in B.C.
Young foreign nationals hope to stay in Canada after landing temporary jobs
If you think you’re hearing a lot of French, Irish, Korean and German accents when you buy coffee and restaurant food these days in Metro Vancouver, it’s because you are.
There has been a sharp rise in the number of young foreign nationals obtaining workingholiday jobs in the Canadian hospitality industry under the federal government’s “international experience” visa program.
The number of young workers coming to Canada on temporary visas from France, Chile, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and several other countries has jumped more than tenfold since the early 2000s.
The popular visas, especially the holiday-worker visas, brought 52,000 new young workers to Canada in 2016 alone, mostly to major cities.
“I’m one of the lucky people who got an experience visa. Many of my Japanese colleagues want to become permanent residents of Canada,” said Mire Takeda, 23, who works at Kitsilano’s Beyond Bread.
The international experience program was designed to be a “reciprocal” work-exchange program for Canadians and others between the ages of 18 and 35.
Young Canadians were expected to travel to holiday and work in equal numbers in the 33 exchange countries, almost all of which are in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
But a Canadian Immigration Department official acknowledged to Postmedia that, for every three foreign nationals who arrive in Canada under the program, only one Canadian gets a job in a foreign country.
That’s mostly because unemployment is high in most of the exchange countries, says Vancouver immigration lawyer Sam Hyman.
Jobs for young people have been especially hard to come by in Spain, Italy, Chile, the Czech Republic, France and Ireland.
As a result, many foreign holiday workers, some of whom are taking breaks from their educations, are seeking not only adventure and low-skill jobs in Canada, but also an eventual avenue to Canadian citizenship.
Even though the Immigration Department doesn’t release data on which people in the international-experience program have chosen Metro Vancouver, a random Postmedia survey of five large cafes and restaurants in the metropolis found 40 to 80 per cent of the staff were on work permits.
Mickael Acosta, 30, one of the managers at Beyond Bread, was on a temporary work visa from southern France. Roughly half the staff at the highly rated bakery-cafe hailed from other parts of France, as well as Japan, Taiwan and Ireland.
When I visited other Metro Vancouver cafes, bakeries and restaurants, employees told me up to 80 per cent of staff were on international-experience work permits, which generally last one to two years.
The hospitality sector employees said they also worked alongside international students and the spouses of international students, in addition to Canadian-born workers. There are more than 100,000 international students in Metro Vancouver.
Some hospitality staff workers are also here on Canada’s international mobility program that issued 176,000 permits in 2015. The program allows employees to hire foreign nationals without doing a labour-market assessment.
Most of the young visa workers I talked to in Metro as they made sandwiches, served cappuccinos or cleaned tables (most of whom did not want to be identified) said they were going to try to get permanent-resident status in Canada.
Takeda was one of the few who didn’t intend to apply for a permanent-resident card, a process that often occurs through B.C.’s provincial nominee program.
Instead, the Japanese-born traveller plans to leave soon to study in Europe, where she said higher education is less costly than it is for foreign students in Canada.
Virtually all the holiday workers interviewed said they liked Metro Vancouver more than other cities they had visited in Canada, even while they found the rental market extremely difficult.
“There is a significant upside to these programs,” said Hyman, a veteran analyst of immigration trends.
“These programs are a marvellous recruitment tool to attract young, talented prospective immigrants who wish to make Canada their home after completing their work-study programs. These individuals are in good health, with long productive years ahead of them. They generally have official language fluency.”
However, Hyman said, one downside of the international experience visas is that they haven’t had a “neutral labourmarket impact.”
Most young Canadians aren’t able to take advantage of the experience-class permits, he said, since they find it extremely difficult or impossible to obtain low-skill or hospitality work in many of the participating countries.
“The large numbers of openwork permits issued to workingholiday visa holders has also been enabling Canadian employers to hire large numbers of foreign workers, particularly in the hospitality industry,” Hyman said.
“(They) fill jobs in ways that have arguably depressed wages and contributed to wage stagnation in Canada, especially in low-skill sectors.”
The top seven countries of origin for experience-class workers in Canada in 2016 were France (10,544), Australia (8,848), Japan (5,699), the United Kingdom (4,950), Germany (4,244), Ireland (4,171) and South Korea (3,115).
Asked about the future of the international-experience program, an immigration department official said in an email that the Liberal government “has an objective of increasing Canadian participation by 2019.”