Immigration...Between a Rock and a French Place

It's a little sad watching the predicament that Quebec has gotten itself into over immigration, a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation, where making French the number one criterion for eligibility, leaves a less than stellar pool of entrants, considering that 95% of the world doesn't speak any French.

 Aside from France, (for some reason, few immigrate to Quebec from Belgium or Switzerland) those countries where citizens speak enough French to qualify for consideration, are either basket cases (e.g Haiti, Congo) or banana republics, with a pedigree of eighth century religious fundamentalism and matching skills set (e.g. Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon) where the potential immigrants despite speaking some French, have so little in common with western civilization that integrating them into society is a daunting task.

By the way, with all the problems going on in France, you'd think that potential candidates would be flooding the Quebec immigration office in Paris, but in truth, more immigrants arrive annually from Morocco and Algeria, than France.
Part of the problem is the supposed discrimination the French face in Quebec, seen by locals as haughty and snooty. Read this scathing critique of Quebec, warning Frenchman to avoid immigrating to this province in no uncertain terms.

French Immigrants to Quebec are scammed

"Wanting to leave France is understandable. The trick is knowing where to put down one's luggage in order not to end up in a worse place, and avoid making the same mistake that so many others have already made"...
...Anti-French racism exists in Quebec, but not in the other provinces. Why? Because Quebecers often consider French as arrogant, conceited, and lecturing, which is not always true. That said, the French who have settled in Quebec usually consider Quebecers ignorant, shallow and ultra-materialist, which isn't wrong either.

The reality:
"Medical errors kill more than 2,000 people each year in Quebec, the equivalent of five Boeing 747 crashes"
"In Quebec, 14% of children aged 12 have already thought about committing suicide and 6% had previously attempted suicide '
"Quebec has crossed last year's mark of 80,000 births, but nearly 70,000 children each year are found in serious trouble"
"Patients die for lack of space in the ICU"
"Every day in Quebec, five people commit suicide and 250 others try
"Young men in Quebec recorded the highest suicide rate in the world" (31 suicides per 100,000 people)
"The results of a Santé Québec survey shows that for each 100,000 Quebecers , 850 said they had attempted suicide during the year. This corresponds to more than 40,000 individuals "
"Mental disorders such as phobias, anxiety and depression are on the increase in Montreal and nearly one in five suffers daily"
"Dr. Pierre Audet-Lapointe and Nicole Magnan, asked the Quebec government to hold a public debate in parliamentary commission of inquiry on the alarming state of the fight against cancer in Quebec"
"In Quebec, the percentage of gambling addicts is 5%. This is the highest rate in Canada and probably the highest rate in all the Western world "
"42% of Quebecers believe that suicide is an acceptable gesture"
The Canadian Suicide Average: 9 suicides per 100 000 inhabitants. Quebec, 20 suicides per 100,000"
Ratio of physicians per 100,000 people: Montreal = 120, = 144 Toronto, Vancouver = 172" 

Read the original article which includes citations Link{fr}

Not exactly a ringing endorsement!

Paradoxically, the more successful immigrants that have arrived to Quebec recently are those who have aligned themselves with the English community including the Tamils from Sri Lanka, the Chinese and the Filipinos, just to name a few.

On immigration, the PQ government finds itself decidedly between a rock and a French place.
Simply put, the better immigrants, those who find work and adapt, are doing so on the English side of the language equation, an outrageous and intolerable situation if you are a member of the PQ.

And so the PQ  proposes to fix this language 'problem' by bringing in more immigrants from the first pool of French speakers and cutting down on those ''other' immigrants who are more likely to succeed.

It's a plan
.................for idiots.

First let's look at the immigration disaster that we are enduring today, even before speculating on the impact of the new PQ policy  increasing immigrants from Pool "F" and reducing Pool "E"

I don't want to bore you with too many facts and figures, suffice to say that across Canada (except in Quebec) immigrants are being integrated into the workforce at a commendable rate.
In the Maritimes, they actually outperform locals in the job market!
But in Quebec, the unemployment rate for immigrants is about 77% higher than for locals, a shocking and bewildering percentage.

I cannot remember where I got these figures, probably antagnoiste.net and so I wish to give credit where credit is do...

So to all those detractors who will jump on me for bringing up these uncomfortable facts, my question to them is this....Why?
Why does Quebec do such a horrific job in getting immigrants into the work force?
There can be but a few reasons.
Either the immigrants are of an inferior quality compared to those selected by other Canadian provinces, or the province of Quebec doesn't do as good a job in integrating them into the workforce. Or perhaps Quebec immigrants face a level of employer discrimination, superior to that of other provinces.
So which is it.....Door number One, Two or Three, or in fact some combination of all three?
I think you'd agree that none of these reasons are particularly flattering to Quebec.

Delving into the figures further, its important to understand who exactly is unemployed among the immigrants and like I said, it's not the immigrants aligned on the English side of the language equation.
For immigrants from the Maghreb, (Muslims from North Africa,) the unemployment  rate is an astonishing 30%, followed by those from French Black Africa at 20% and the Haitians at 17%.

As for the unemployment rate for those immigrants aligned on the English side, no figures are provided, so I put on my fancy ciphering cap (As Jed Clampett would call it) and did a few calculations on a spreadsheet.
It isn't that complicated.
If you know the unemployment rate and number of a subset of the immigrant population, as well as the total number and unemployment rate of the whole group, you can easily calculate the unemployment rate of the other.

Simply put, I calculated the unemployment rate of immigrants excluding those from Morocco, Algeria, Haiti, Lebanon, Cameroon and Egypt, who collectively have an unemployment rate of about 25%.
The data comes from Immigration Quebec and the unemployment rate from various news sources.

According to my calculations, the unemployment rate for immigrants not from the above countries, works out to around 6 percent, an astounding number.
Now that number may not be entirely accurate, but even with a margin of error set at 25%, the figure would not be  higher than 7.5%.
But it can actually be lower as well. The data set I used was incomplete and this other 6% group could further be broken down if more data was provided.

Again to be clear, removing from the calculation, immigrants from those countries listed above, the unemployment rate for the rest of the immigrant population is around 6%. Wow!

But all of this is small potatoes to the PQ, of no matter or import.
Closing the French/English gap trumps all and so, the PQ government is willing to sacrifice the economic and social well-being of the province by increasing the number of unproductive French-speaking immigrants accepted from those countries with low success rates, just to increase the French demographics.

It's a familiar PQ strategy, that when a plan or a program falls apart, the response is to increase the government's commitment, as if more money will make it better, just like the decision to increase funding for wind-generated energy, a proven loser and money pit.

OK  readers,.....it's a Einstein quote filled post....I could do worse!

And so here we are, the PQ government repeating and actually accelerating the error of a foolish immigration policy, a desperate attempt to change the language equation at the expense of social and economic cohesion.

Now before I sign off, I want readers to understand that this isn't an anti-Muslim screed. If 30% of the Maghrebians are unemployed, it means that 70% are and doing their best.
The problem is that there are just too many admitted from these countries without real skills, their acceptance based only on language.
According to statistics from the Quebec immigration department, about half of immigrants have no discernible skills.
Don't blame those who are accepted, it isn't really their fault for their failure to adapt and as for assimilation, no law, Charter of Whatever is going to change their faith.
That experiment in France hasn't exactly been a booming success.

Quebecers have a right to question and fear the policy of bringing in so many ill-suited immigrants, the European experiment is frightening and bodes poorly for the future.

But what else can the PQ do to make sure that immigrants assimilate to the French side of the language equation?
Actually they can do a lot.
The government can succeed in bringing in a more productive pool of immigrants and they can have them assimilate into the majority language and culture, if they change course.

It's time to think outside the box and I'll tell you in my next post how they can change the disastrous immigration dynamic, in other words, have their cake and eat it too.