It was sometime in late 2007, I believe, that I caught an article in the National Post about Canada’s immigration system, in which John Ivison, I think, tried to make sense of a report that had come out on how immigration cost Canadian taxpayers $18 billion a year. He explained that only 23% of all current immigrants were “net tax contributors”, while the other 77% were busy digging a very deep hole for Canada.

Within two weeks or so, the article was removed from the newspaper’s website, and I assumed the Harper government, busy as heck ingratiating itself with ethnic voters, must have pulled some strings to keep that damaging information from public view.

But now we have an updated report, and the picture it paints is even more disastrous, as the immigration-related cost has moved closer to $25 billion a year. Clearly, the Harper government should have spent less time sending its immigration minister Jason Kenney to several ethnic events a day and instead spent more time fixing the system.

The study authors recommend a move to a more American-style immigration system, one that requires a specific job offer. Once in, immigrants would not be given permanent status right away, but would have to show proof of steady employment, and only then after four years would they be able to acquire permanent landed status, followed by citizenship a year after that.

This is the kind of approach that has rendered America’s immigration system dysfunctional, and is one of the main reasons why the country is overrun by illegals. If you don’t provide reasonable means of immigration, then more people will try to circumvent the system and thus create the nightmare Americans have lived through.

Requiring a firm job offer as a precondition for being considered for immigration is wrong, as it prevents virtually all enterprising individuals, such as the self-employed, from getting in. It also runs the risk of locking an individual into an abusive working relationship that he or she can’t get out of for fear of being deported.

I myself came to Canada many moons ago, and was admitted in the so-called “Independent” category by virtue of my education and track record as a self-employed translator and writer. My file took barely seven months to be processed, and before I knew it, I found myself at Pearson airport in Toronto validating my landing papers. Permanent status within seven months!

If I had applied to get into the United States, I’d still be wasting away in Europe today. To enter the US, I would have needed a firm job offer, which in my line of work didn’t and still doesn’t really exist in the US. So, I would have had to settle for something related or completely extraneous to my skills and background. Then, my potential future employer would have had to incur costs ranging from US$10,000 to US$20,000 in connection with processing my application and dealing with the US immigration department.

Let’s assume it would have worked and I would have been admitted to the US. I would have been stuck with that employer and in a job that really wasn’t me for a number of years before being granted permanent status. Only then would I have been able to hand in my notice and start being a freelancer again. By that time, however, my freelance business would have evaporated (clients usually disappear after a month or two of absence or lack of availability), and I would have had to start from scratch all over again, facing at least five years of building it up again to a point where it provided at least a half-decent living wage.

Naturally, I prefer the Canadian approach.

Still, the Canadian system needs to be reformed, starting with reducing the excessive number of those who enter as “family class” immigrants – old and decrepit parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who will never learn English, nor work a single day or pay taxes. Those are the people responsible for clogging our public health care system and causing tremendous – oftentimes life-threatening – wait times for all other taxpayers. Our universal health care system wouldn’t be the mess it is today if it weren’t for all those fogeys from overseas who serve absolutely no purpose here.

Immigration is supposed to rejuvenate society and create more taxpayers of working age who can help with the funding of our vital government services for decades to come, as the native-born population grows older and older and the ratio between working-age taxpayer and retiree is becoming a ticking time bomb that will eventually prevent us from providing something as basic as street-cleaning services. The last thing, therefore, that immigration should achieve is adding even more old (and illiterate) people to the equation, and digging us deeper and deeper into deficits and debt.

The National Post editorial board has reached a more reasonable conclusion than the authors of the study. According to them, the real problem is Canada’s Big Government, which invites thousands of people from around the world to come to Canada in order to be taken care of – in other words, only rights, but no responsibilities, such as paying taxes for using public health care.

If we reduced the extent of government, uncles and grandparents could still join their offspring in Canada, but they’d be less of a drain on taxpayers, for example, if we required immigrants who seek to bring in old relatives to be on the hook for the costs they cause. If they had to pay the medical bills for a whole group of aged and frail relatives, they’d quickly sing a different tune and say that it’s alright for grandpa to remain back in the old country.

Finally, we could also reduce the current cost of $25 billion a year drastically if we allowed immigrants to work to their full potential. That is to say, we must end the nonsense of forcing doctors, engineers and others to drive taxis, work as overnight security guards or toilet cleaners. Barring so many qualified and skilled people from earning decent incomes and working in jobs for which they have trained and educated themselves for many years because of a lack of “Canadian work experience” is ridiculous.

Canadian work experience is no better, and mostly worse, than the foreign experience immigrants bring to Canada. Having work experience from outside of Canada should be celebrated and rewarded, not penalized.

Scrutiny at the point an application is received is key to improving the system. There are too many bad apples slipping into the country who have absolutely zero honest intentions. We must apply much finer filters in order to keep welfare abusers, career criminals and terrorists out – and we shouldn’t be afraid to blacklist entire countries if necessary (such as Pakistan in light of recent events). But those who truly deserve to become part of the Canadian fabric must be encouraged and assisted with every means necessary.