Nearly five years after moving to Canada, Mani Bhandari still hasn’t secured a full-time job.
Despite holding a master’s degree in business management from India, Bhandari isn’t hearing back from the countless employers to whom she’s applied for work — both within her field and outside of it.
The 48-year-old — who immigrated to Canada in 2020 with her husband and two children — said she’s done everything she can to stand out to employers: attending trainings and webinars during the pandemic to boost her skills, and networking and volunteering with several organizations. In 2023, she finally secured a part-time role as a project co-ordinator at an NGO, but it still falls short of covering the high cost of living.
“It’s an emotional roller-coaster,” Bhandari said. “When I send in applications I put all my heart and hard work into it — but I never get responses back.”
Record immigration levels to address labour shortages saw Canada’s population grow by more than three per cent in 2023, twice what it has averaged over the previous decade. But amid a weak Canadian job market, recent immigrants like Bhandari are shouldering much of the pain despite their skills and qualifications.
As of December 2024, the unemployment rate for recent immigrants — people who became permanent residents in the past five years or less — rose to 9.6 per cent, an increase of one percentage point from the previous year when it was 8.6 per cent and nearly double the 5.4 per cent rate for Canadian-born individuals, according to the most recent data from Statistics Canada.
“It’s concerning to see an unemployment rate that’s twice as high” among newcomers, said Jim Stanford, economist and director of the think tank Centre for Future Work. “It shows that many of these folks have been sold a bill of goods about Canada’s economy … and the pain of unemployment is being borne by new Canadians.”
As new entrants to the Canadian labour market, recent immigrants often struggle to find work that matches their education, training and skills, said Stanford — part of this is the result of discrimination in the labour market and a lack of recognition of credentials.
Many are arriving only to find mostly low-skill, low-paying jobs available to them.
“Newcomers are economically compelled to take any jobs they can find,” Stanford said. They “get funneled into lower-wage and more insecure positions, often without regular hours, schedules or permanency.”
Immigrants who came to Canada within the last five years were more than three times more likely (5.8 per cent) to have done paid work through a digital platform compared with Canadian-born individuals (1.6 per cent), according to Statistics Canada’s December labour force survey.
Data from September’s labour force survey also showed that recent immigrants are less likely to work in a job related to their field of study. More than 35 per cent of newcomers with a post-secondary diploma or degree reported their job had little to no connection to their field of education.
At the same time, more than 30 per cent of recent immigrants between the ages of 25 to 54 with a post-secondary education reported they were overqualified for their job, significantly higher than for Canadian-born workers (19.7 per cent).
While newcomers find employment with time, “the earnings gap remains quite large compared with Canadian-born workers,” said Rupa Banerjee, associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and Canada Research Chair of economic inclusion, employment and entrepreneurship of Canada’s immigrants.
According to Banerjee, recent immigrants “often resort to survival work … where they’re earning less than comparable Canadian-born workers.”
These are often jobs in the service sector or jobs that “don’t really build professional skills” but pay the bills, she said.
Statistics Canada’s August labour force survey said the average hourly wage growth for those who arrived in Canada over the last five years decreased by 1.3 per cent on a year-over-year basis.
Meanwhile, Canadian-born workers’ wages have risen six per cent over that period.
A 2023 report by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario found the annual wage gap between newcomers and the total population over nearly four decades only narrowed to $6,200 in 2019 from $10,700 in 1982.
Bhandari said her family is living “hand to mouth.” Her husband works in IT, but his income alone isn’t enough to cover expenses.
“We’re not able to save a single penny. Whatever comes in goes,” she said.
Despite the challenges, Bhandari is trying to stay positive, cutting back wherever possible while continuing her search for full-time work.
“You get demotivated, but you have to keep going,” she said. “I have to think of my family and raise my kids.”
