Ratna Omidvar thinks Canadian cities could be doing more to welcome skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants. As president of Maytree, a Toronto-based foundation that seeks to reduce poverty and inequality, Ms. Omidvar knows how important these newcomers are to urban economies.
Through its DiverseCity project, Maytree is working to propel more members of the Greater Toronto Area’s visible minority population into leadership roles.
But the GTA has some catching up to do, says Ms. Omidvar, who is also co-chair of DiverseCity Community Resource Society. In a 2009 report, Ryerson University’s Diversity Institute in Management & Technology found that visible monitories accounted for just 14 per cent of the region’s leadership positions, even though they made up 49.5 per cent of its population.
Ms. Omidvar’s organization is also looking at ways to make Toronto friendlier to immigrant entrepreneurs by offering programs tailored to them. Barcelona and Vienna both have a full suite of services to help immigrants launch their own businesses, she notes.
Although Canada has a robust immigrant settlement and integration framework, it can learn from these cities, Ms. Omidvar argues. “It’s actually quite mind-boggling how much more creative they are than we are,” she says. “We have not grabbed the opportunity that would-be immigrant entrepreneurs present to us.”
In a global economy, cities that attract and successfully integrate immigrants gain an edge over their rivals. But an ethnically diverse leadership and talent pool is just one part of the equation. Cities must also win their share of the educated and highly mobile young workers who figure prominently in companies’ location choices.
Skilled immigrants make Canada more globally competitive, says Alison Konrad, professor of organizational behaviour at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business.
“The deep knowledge of other cultures they can bring to our businesses has a lot of potential,” Dr. Konrad explains. “Where it starts having synergies and is a catalyst for business is when people help us to understand new groups of customers that are relatively not well served.”
International immigration has played a crucial and often overlooked role in the United States’ economic success, says Joe Cortright, president and chief economist of Impresa, a Portland, Ore.-based consulting firm that specializes in metropolitan economies and knowledge-based industries.
No doubt. Between 1995 and 2005, according to a Duke University study, 25.3 per cent of U.S. engineering and technology startups had at least one foreign-born founder.
Meanwhile, U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest levels of educational attainment – a key driver of prosperity – are home to the most immigrants, Mr. Cortright says. “Places like New York, San Francisco and Miami all have very large immigrant populations, and a very high fraction of their well-educated population [was] born abroad.”
Immigrants tend to move to places where members of their community already live, Mr. Cortright adds. Also, some cities are more globally connected than others. For example, Miami and San Francisco have close ties to Latin America and Asia, respectively. “There are a whole set of cultural and institutional factors in those cities that I think make them much more capable of attracting and assimilating immigrants,” Mr. Cortright says.
The right programs can make a big difference, too. Ivey’s Dr. Konrad works with employers through the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), which was co-founded by Maytree and includes members from business, labour and government. On the employer side, TRIEC trains companies to do culturally competent selection and hiring.
One stumbling block for Canadian employers is that they may not recognize topnotch educational credentials from countries such as China and India, Dr. Konrad explains. “Our selection systems, on the objective as well as the more subjective side, are really skewed for people in our own culture,” she says. “We miss a lot of talent that way.”
