Editorial

Canada gets educated immigrants for free from developing countries

Last weekend, the Toronto Star wrote of the frustrations of Thiru Thirukkumaran, a chemistry teacher at a Scarborough high school. The Sri Lankan immigrant has been filling in for a teacher who is on vacation. He’s been doing it as a volunteer for the last three months because the Ontario College of Teachers (OTC) has denied him a license to teach in the province. It took OTC 16 months to inform him of the rejection.

The point of the article was a lament for a highly qualified professional who has met all the requirements to obtain a teaching license, but OTC begged to differ.

“I felt like I was being told I couldn’t grow, like I was being blocked from progressing in my life. From that day until now, I’ve felt like a dead person inside,” Thirukkumaran said.

This man by every reasonable measure is a victim of the bureaucracy at a time when Canada is affected by a shortage of professionals in many fields; health care and teaching, for example. The Sri Lankan immigrant and the hundreds, if not thousands, of others who are in the same boat deserve sympathy. But it doesn’t end there. It starts in the countries of origin.

The term “brain drain” has been in use as early as the 1960s. It describes the migration of skilled resources for trade and education. The majority of migration is from developing to developed countries.

As has the rest of the world, developing countries know that a well-educated population is a fundamental requirement for material and moral improvement and so have invested heavily in education. The majority of migration is from these countries to the richer ones. This translates into massive loss of highly qualified human resources to well off countries which did not spend a cent on educating them. It is another form of the flight of capital with no way of recovering any of it.

According to a 1970 report: “Higher education is one of the principal conduits of permanent emigration…the intellectuals of any country are some of the most expensive resources because of their training in terms of material cost and time, and most importantly, because of lost opportunity.”

The report calculates that as far back as 2000 “almost 175 million people, or 2.9% of the world’s population, were living outside their country of birth for more than a year…and about 65 million were economically active.” One can imagine what that number is in 2022. What we do know is that the majority of these people came from countries that can ill afford to lose these resources because they have also lost the contributions these people would have made in their respective fields.

So while we shed a tear for those hard working immigrants in Canada, the tears must also flow for those countries that “donated them.”