Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Canada will welcome more economic immigrants in 2010

Each year, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) sets out a plan for the number of immigrants it intends to welcome within economic, family and humanitarian immigration categories. The planned range for 2010 is 240,000 – 265,000 immigrants. CIC generally achieves the midpoint of this range. In 2010, CIC anticipates achieving the upper end of this range, allowing Canada to welcome more immigrants in the economic category than originally planned. This includes federal skilled workers and record-level numbers of provincial nominees, without reducing the number in the family or humanitarian immigration categories.

Even with higher numbers of economic immigrants, Canada still receives many more applications than can be processed in a timely way. As a result, the department is limiting the number of new applications it will consider in the federal skilled worker category every year.

“Canada will continue to welcome historically high numbers of immigrants, but we need to manage the number of new applications or risk creating new backlogs and longer processing times,” Minister Kenney said. “We have more than enough applications on hand now to fill many of our needs, and we want to be fair to those people who have been waiting the longest.”

Effective immediately, to be eligible to apply as a federal skilled worker, applicants must either have a job offer, or they must have experience in one of 29 in-demand occupations. These occupations were identified through analysis of updated labour market information and consultations with provinces, territories, stakeholders and the public.

For those applying under the occupation list, the government will limit the number of applications considered for processing to 20,000 per year as a way to better manage the supply of applications with labour market demand. Within the 20,000 limit, a maximum of 1,000 applications per occupation will be considered. The limit does not apply to applicants with a job offer.

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