WHEN IMMIGRANTS AND COMMUNITIES COME TOGETHER
Canada’s temporary foreign workers program is in crisis. In the last of a six-part investigation, Alia Dharssi looks at smaller cities utilizing provincial nominee programs to attract new immigrants.
Deep in Manitoba’s Bible Belt, the small cities of Winkler and Morden have drawn so many immigrants recently that newcomers are helping create new places of worship.
There are now more than 25 churches in Winkler, up from 18 at the turn of the millennium.
Immigrants are flocking to these cities in the Pembina Valley for two main reasons: quality of life and jobs.
But driving through their quiet streets, a visitor wouldn’t know the booming companies on the outskirts of both communities manufacture everything from down jackets to model homes.
In 2011, Winkler’s population stood at 10,700; Morden’s was 7,800.
Both cities and the surrounding region have grown by more than 3,000 people since, in great part to immigration programs.
As their populations age and young adults move away, small cities and towns across Canada are increasingly looking to immigration to rejuvenate their workforce and expand their tax base.
But many struggle to attract people and convince them to stay.
That’s not the case in Winkler, where more than half of the people who’ve immigrated there since the late 1990s have made it their long-term home.
“The best way to describe it is I used to know everybody who was in town and now I know very few people,” said Winkler Mayor Martin Harder.
With provincial programs that have enabled them to hand-pick immigrants wellsuited for small-town life and the needs of local businesses, Morden and Winkler have bucked this national trend.
Unemployment is so low, employers regularly seek immigrants from countries like Germany, Russia and the Philippines to fill their jobs.
More often than not, employers, immigration consultants or city officials from the region travel abroad to meet prospective immigrants, interview them on Skype or invite them for a visit to make sure they are a good fit.
The criteria for selecting newcomers is often the opposite of those used by the federal immigration system. At times, the two cities have favoured community connections over Canada’s points-based metrics or sought out people who didn’t speak English.
Notably, many of the people they pick probably wouldn’t have made it into Canada without them.
“We’re a blue-collar community,” said Harder. “We don’t need 500 university graduates. You bring people in here that are too highly educated and you cannot find a job for them here. It’s just a gateway to get into Canada.”
In 2008, the number of workers leaving rural Canada outstripped those coming in, partly because youth left for cities, according to the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation.
“It’s a big challenge because the demand for immigrants is often outside of big cities,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said at a news conference in Calgary in August.
The situation is urgent in Atlantic Canada, where population growth from 2011 to 2014 was near zero, except in Prince Edward Island.
Many immigrants who go to the Maritimes leave within a year of their arrival. In July, the Atlantic provinces and the federal government jointly announced a three-year pilot project to boost immigration as part of an economic growth strategy, taking in an additional 2,000 immigrants and their families in 2017.
But those working to boost immigration to small cities and towns lament that the system is geared against them.
“Immigrants get very little information that allows them to think of outside of the big urban centres,” said Sangeeta Subramanian, senior manager at the Immigrant Employment Council of B.C., which has worked on projects to recruit skilled immigrants to northern B.C.
“Most of the immigrants we attract right now, come from urban centres. If I have spent all my life in a large city like Mumbai or Durban or Beijing, my comfort level is to move to another big city.”
In recent years, smaller cities have taken matters into their own hands, collaborating with the provincial and federal governments.
Moncton and Fredericton, for example, developed their own immigration plans, while Prince George, B.C., mounted a social media campaign to attract skilled immigrants from Vancouver to work on proposed LNG projects.
Few can boast of the retention rates of Morden and Winkler.
Their immigration programs have been so successful that they have spurred people, including immigrants, to launch new businesses, including clothing shops and a home construction company.
Two decades ago, Winkler’s population was declining and there were fewer families with young kids. Classrooms sat unused and local manufacturers struggled to grow.
“I sat on the school board at that time and I was a member of the chamber of commerce on their executive,” recalled Adele Dyck, who has German Mennonite heritage, but grew up in Paraguay and settled in Winkler after marrying a Canadian. “And I heard the same story over and over: ‘We need people. We need people.’ ”
At the same time, Dyck, who is an immigration consultant, had many friends in Germany who wanted to come to Canada, but couldn’t get in through the federal immigration system. She approached the provincial government with the idea of piloting a program in which they could recruit immigrants specifically to settle in Winkler.
She tapped into her Mennonite connections, travelling to Germany to recruit immigrants from Mennonite families that had a history of migration. Many had moved to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall from Russia or Kazakhstan, where they had lived in the countryside in a climate comparable to that of Manitoba.
Some had relatives and friends in the area. Often, they spoke little English.
All of this, combined with Winkler’s Mennonite heritage made it easier for them to integrate.
Of the 50 families Dyck recruited for a pilot project, 42 were still around 10 years later. It was one of Canada’s first experiments with nominating people through provincial immigration programs, a system that has since expanded to all provinces.
Since that first pilot, Winkler has drawn people from Latin America, the Philippines and India, among other places.
Zafrul Hasan, Nilufar Yeasmin and their two daughters started dreaming of Morden in 2013 with the help of Google and YouTube when they were 11,700 kilometres away in their home in downtown Dhaka, the crowded capital of Bangladesh.
“We knew everything about this city. We even knew the roads,” said Yeasmin over a Bangladeshi breakfast with her family at her home on one of Morden’s quiet streets.
Her husband, Hasan, was the first to actually see the community. In December 2013, he visited and interviewed with prospective employers in the midst of winter, with temperatures dipping to a bone-chilling -45 C.
Even so, Hasan loved the peace and calm.
It was what he and his wife had been looking for, and local employers were interested in his experience operating heavy machines. The family moved to Morden in October 2015 through the city’s Community Driven Immigration Initiative.
Launched in 2012, the program gives locals a chance to hand-pick about 50 immigrant families annually. They send their selections to the Manitoba government, which nominates them to come to Canada.
The competition is stiff. About 100 immigration applications land each month in the hands of Shelly Voth, the city’s immigration coordinator.
She uses a rigorous selection process, including looking at each candidate’s work experience to determine if they would be a good fit for jobs in the region. A short list of candidates get interviewed on Skype.
Applicants become ineligible if they have relatives elsewhere in Canada, which would make them more likely to use Morden as a launching pad to settle somewhere else, Voth said.
They must also convince her that their temperament is suited to small-city living.
For the top picks, the process culminates in a weeklong exploratory visit to Morden, so they can see what they’re getting into. They also meet employers and members of the community who make the final decision about whether they get through.
Eighty-five per cent of families that have come through the program since 2013 have stayed.
Jobs are the reason people come to Winkler and Morden, but the lifestyle and welcoming dynamic of the cities is why many say they’ve stayed.
In Morden, a team of 40 to 50 volunteers welcome immigrants that come through their provincial nominee program. They give the newcomers tours, help them open bank accounts, obtain their provincial health card, prepare their resumes for job applications and more.
When she can, Voth drives to Winnipeg to pick up new immigrant families and drive them back to Morden.
Hasan and his family were stunned when she picked them up at the airport.
“It was unbelievable,” he said.
Their first dinner in Morden was also one they haven’t forgotten. The family hosting them had prepared a spread of Bangladeshi dishes they learned to cook online.
On a warm Sunday in July, a soccer game in Winkler brought together immigrants from across the globe, including Brazil, Germany, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A decade ago, the Winkler Storm soccer team in the Manitoba Major Soccer League did not exist.
Reinaldo Oliveira, a Brazilian member of the team raising three kids with his wife, said, “The team is building unity.”
THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE IT IS I USED TO KNOW EVERYBODY WHO WAS IN TOWN AND NOW I KNOW VERY FEW PEOPLE. — MARTIN HARDER, MAYOR OF WINKLER, MAN.