Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
career prospects lay behind their decision to return (Guo and Iredale 2002;
also Ip and Friesen 2001). A similarity in circumstances of the smaller mil-
lionaire migrant populations in Australia and New Zealand indicates a more
general set of motivations, strategies and outcomes. At the same time the
imprint of Canada's Business Immigration Programme in contributing to
these outcomes cannot be overlooked.
Deconstructing the Business Immigration Programme
Among the paradoxes of the BIP is how a programme so revered by senior
governments has contributed so much anguish among its clients. The annual
scorecard broadcasts triumphal success in the hard numbers of jobs created
and investment secured. Undoubtedly there have been positive outcomes,
perhaps many of them, for immigrants as well as governments. In a panel
study beginning in the early 1990s with 70 entrepreneurs in southern
Ontario who had arrived from many countries, Marger (2001, 2006) identi-
fied patterns of assimilation, naturalization and weak transnationalism.
Business endeavours have been harnessed to local economic development
just as the BIP anticipated. It is important to keep these positive counter-
examples in mind. Yet at the same time Marger noted the contraction of his
panel; in seven years half of its members disappeared and could not be
traced. A majority of these originated in East Asia.
There has been a persistent tendency to overlook such attrition in the
BIP (Ley 2003). A detailed review of the entrepreneur and self-employed
streams conducted by Price Waterhouse in 1989 provided detailed analysis
on outcomes for a large sample of immigrants who had landed in the previ-
ous two to three years. But left implicit was the high level of non-response.
Over half the respondent list could not be traced or were unwilling or una-
vailable for interview. Of those interviewed, only half were meeting the
terms and conditions of the programme, while only 35 percent of these
businesses were profitable (EIC 1990). Attrition was also a feature of a
second evaluation, conducted by Ernst and Young on the investor stream
(EIC 1992). In this study, 40 percent of investors in the sample who had
landed in the preceding four years could not be traced; of those interviewed
a third were not working. Perhaps piqued by this shrinking interview list
and other significant failures, the consultants produced a highly critical
report, including the charge that the annual scorecard of measurable bene-
fits was significantly inflated.
This is a substantial challenge for as we have seen the scorecard is
the trump card when it comes to defence of the BIP. But there are sign-
ificant grounds for challenging the robustness of its persuasively large num-
bers. Among many shortcomings Ernst and Young found in the Investor
