Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Victor Piché Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Understanding Migration	4 min 11 sec	Windows Media |QuickTime
Why People Migrate	4 min 50 sec	Windows Media |QuickTime
Implications for the international community	5 min 29 sec	Windows Media |QuickTime
Canada and Migration	2 min 35 sec	Windows Media |QuickTime

My name is Victor Piché. I am a full professor at the University of Montreal in the Department of Demography, and I’m also a part-time Senior Adviser on international migration for Action Canada for Population and Development (ACPD), an NGO in Ottawa.

I’ve been involved in migration research for the last 30 years. A good part of my research has been carried out in Africa on the specific theme of the link between migration and employment, or migration and development through employment -- in particular, using sample surveys in different capitals of West Africa -- Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou -- and looking at the link between migration and employment. I also did some research in Canada, particularly in Montreal, looking at the integration of immigrants using a longitudinal survey, a 10-year follow-up survey, and there also I was interested in the link between immigration and employment with a specific interest in discrimination. That is what I’ve been doing for the last 10 or 15 years basically, although I’ve been doing research on migration since very early in my career.

At the moment I’m shifting to migration and human rights: that is my most recent interest and that’s where I’ll be doing much of my work and research in the future.

Migration is one of the most difficult phenomena to define and to measure, because migration is mobility, and of course the question is, “What kind of mobility do we want to study?” For instance, you left Ottawa to come to Montreal. That is mobility -- do we want to study that? It’s really a political definition of what is important. At the moment, international migration is the most important form of migration that is studied because it has political meanings and social meanings.

The definition of a migration has to be linked with a change of residence. Demographers and sociologists and generally now everybody agrees that migration is a change of residence, and of course it’s international when it’s from one country to another.

It can be temporary, it can be permanent, it could be legal, it could be illegal -- but if it’s illegal it‘s very difficult to measure. Migration can have many forms, but probably 80 to 90 percent of all migration is labour migration. Some of that may be free migration, some of that may be trafficked migration -- trafficking is a very important issue at the moment. And so when we talk about migration we’re talking about people leaving their country of birth to live in a country of choice. And if we look at the statistics, there’s about 3 percent of the world’s population which is not living in their country of birth. Three percent is not much. If we break it down into developed and developing countries, in developed countries the percentage is around 8 or 9 percent overall. Of course it varies from one country to another, but as a global phenomenon migration is not very important statistically. But it’s important politically, and that’s why we talk about migration a lot.


Why People Migrate

The control of human mobility has always been a key issue for all societies. There has always been an us and a them, so there are borders. Of course the borders as we know them today are recent from a historical perspective. They mostly date from the 17th and 18th centuries, but there have always been borders, and people occupying a territory and thinking and believing it’s their territory. They define who can become a member of that territory. I would say that is why the control of human mobility is so important -- it is one of the last characteristics that will be liberated.

From a global perspective we are opening up borders, capital, services, trade, that’s what globalization is all about. But for the time being we’re still very protectionist in terms of human beings, so there’s no freedom of movement. You can leave your country, but that makes no sense if you can’t go where you want to go. Immigration is the sovereign prerogative of countries, and therefore at the moment human mobility is very controlled. That is why there is a lot of illegal or undocumented or irregular migration, because people have to go around these obstacles that are purely administrative and political in order to leave their country and go and live in another country, basically to improve their well-being. It could be because they want to reunite with their families, it could be because they want to study in good universities or better universities elsewhere, it could be because they want to find better jobs than what they have at the moment. So that’s the basic reason: well-being.

There are many different groups: there’s the highly skilled groups, who move to enhance their professional opportunities, but there are also a lot of people moving by force... I mean by force because of extreme poverty. Actually it’s not the extreme poor who are migrating, because they cannot leave their country -- they will not be accepted anywhere. But there is a class of people, particularly in poor countries with high levels of unemployment, who want to leave their countries. Africa is a very good example. How can you understand these people who are taking chances with their life to cross a border? They are shot, they drown, but they are taking chances because where they come from there is no hope or possibility for them. Migration, the way I see it, should be the right for an individual to decide where would be the right place for him or her to live.

There are of course other reasons for migration that are very important: discrimination or violence that you want to flee, or if you’re in a very repressive society, if you’ve leaving for religious reasons, for sexual orientation reasons. But statistically these are minor reasons for migration flows. They are very important in terms of human rights, but statistically less important. The basic reason people move, as I said, is to enhance their well-being. Again, if you look at the statistics I talked about, 97 percent of the population are still living in their country of birth.

So it’s not true that everybody wants to leave their country; I think the postulate should be reversed. I think people want to stay in their county, but want to stay if they can have a good job, have a good income and be able to fulfill their potentialities.


Implications for the International Community

One implication is the brain drain -- or the brain waste, it depends which way you look at it. Of course the developed countries are at the moment choosing the best people from other countries, particularly developing countries, which supply 80 percent of migrants today. They’re really selecting the best of these people, and an example of that are the students who come to Canada, for instance for their master’s or PhD. Canada has a program to try to attract them to stay. So there is a very important brain drain for these societies at the macro level. At the micro level, these individuals have no choice. There is in a lot of countries no hope, so as individuals they have strategies to leave. And there are very important monetary transfers, so we have to look at it from a global perspective. Yes, they leave their country. Yes, there is a brain drain. But on the other hand there is a transfer of funds towards the families of these individuals, so it’s really a collective family strategy.

From the point of view of developed countries, or the country of destination, of course migration is very important. If we didn’t need migrants, there wouldn’t be any migrants. The whole migration policy in Canada is based on economic needs and demographic needs. Of course there are also humanitarian factors, but basically the levels of migration increase when there are needs, particularly in the labour market. And so it has to be positive; otherwise we wouldn’t have these people coming in.

At the micro level, a lot of immigrants come here and have difficulties integrating. Not because they don’t want to integrate, but because the labour market isn’t necessarily open to all of these groups, there is discrimination. It’s a fact that some groups have a lot of difficulties, but still at the individual level these people want to be here and really work very hard, particularly the first generation, to give a better education to their children.

Immigration is a process. Immigrants have difficulties in the beginning, particularly certain groups, but they find all kinds of ways to turn around. And after five, six, seven years, they’re probably doing as well as anyone else in Canadian society.

There is no link between migration and terrorism. Absolutely no link. We can today travel from one country to another much more easily than we can immigrate, and if terrorists want to go into a country they can do it very easily. They don’t need to migrate, they don’t need to immigrate. So there is no link between migration or immigration and terrorism. Of course there may be a link in terms of mobility, physical mobility. If the terrorist is not from the country, this person has to make a move, not necessarily a migration, even if it‘s temporary. Millions of people cross borders every day, and there‘s no way you can stop that. So to say we need to look more closely at visas and immigrants, and so, on is really false as far as I’m concerned.

It‘s the same thing for health. There is this whole idea about immigration being a threat to health, and so we screen these immigrants with a medical test to see if they have HIV, or whatever, but it has nothing to do with a threat to public health. Take HIV, for instance. Look at all these people coming into Canada as tourists -- you‘re not controlling health there. People come in as tourists, they‘re not even screened. They can be HIV positive and they can have unprotected relations here in Canada. So if you want to look at it from that perspective, it’s mobility per se that may be a threat. But you can‘t stop mobility and you can’t screen tourists, so if you want to talk about a threat it would be there, but certainly not migration.

So, why are we screening immigrants? It’s not because we think they will bring HIV here to Canada, it‘s because if they have HIV we don‘t want to pay for them. We don‘t want the system to have to pay for them, and that‘s a completely different perspective. I think the threat of immigration to health is to health costs, not to public health.


Canada and Migration

At the moment, migration is becoming an increasingly multilateral phenomenon. For years migration was a unilateral or sovereign prerogative. Nations did not want to discuss migration or immigration in international forums, because Canada would say, “It‘s our business, it‘s nobody else‘s. We will decide who will come here and no one else.” Increasingly -- because of globalization and the mobility of goods and services and capital, and even of people -- migration has become more difficult to manage on a national level and therefore you are having these multilateral discussions. We‘re not yet into a global management of migration, although a lot of people are talking about that now. But Canada is increasingly discussing immigration with other counties, particularly with the United States and particularly after September 11, where the United States has pressured Canada to harmonize its policies with those of the United States. The European Union had to harmonize and standardize their policies because now people can move around the European Union without visas and without border controls. So there is increasing multilateralism, and I don‘t think Canada will be able to get out of that. Canada is participating more and more in international forums.

The other agenda is human rights, and that’s a very important foreign policy. Canada has a very good record in terms of human rights. The immigration program we have is a program that is considered very open and is a model, apparently. That’s the way it’s presented and in certain ways it is true. Migrants that come here as immigrants have all the rights that Canadians have except the right to vote -- they have to become nationals for that -- but otherwise they have all the rights. In terms of human rights of immigrants coming to Canada, I think we are a model country. The problem with Canada is the programs for temporary workers. We have a lot of these programs, and these workers do not have all the rights.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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