"The truth is that Canada is competing with other industrialized countries to attract the best human capital," it said, "that we are not always on the winning side of this competition, and that something needs to be done to change that." Our problem is not that we are attracting too many immigrants, but not enough.

Yet, aside from one or two such nods in the direction of greater openness, the report remains fundamentally restrictionist in its assumptions. Where it proposes to prune away some of the more absurd regulations that have grown up around the Immigration Act since its introduction twenty years ago, it is more out of a manager's zeal for rationalization than any vision of a larger and more inclusive Canada.

Within its own, limited terms, however, there is much to like in the report.

The proposed reforms to the system of selecting "economic" immigrants are especially welcome. Gone is the ludicrous "points" system, in which prospective immigrants were graded according to their possession of certain attributes thought desirable: 16 points for education, 18 for "specific vocational preparation" and so on, as if either the weights assigned to each category or the points awarded to each immigrant reflected anything more than the subjective evaluations of immigration bureaucrats.

Gone, too, is the "occupational demand" category, an enterprise that required the department to maintain a list of every conceivable type of job, more than 2,000 in all, together with an assessment of the demand for each: "crossword-puzzle makers," for example, might be given one point out of 10, on the grounds that there were relatively few openings for such professionals; "remedial gymnasts," on the other hand, might rate a perfect 10. (Note: all examples certified as genuine.)

The comittee wisely takes a broader view of "human capital," and a more circumspect view of the ability of state planners to predict labour market trends. Apart from the obvious difficulties in tracking the demand for crossword-puzzle makers, there is simply no way of knowing whether immigrants admitted under one occupational category will choose to remain there -- nor any reason to prefer that they should. Studies show that the occupational profile of immigrants converges to that of society as a whole within a few years of admission.

Better by far, as the committee recommends, just to set a few minimum conditions of eligibility: proficiency in at least one official language, at least two years' post-secondary education (for skilled workers) or two years' business experience (for entrepeneurs), not much more (the committee also proposes an age restriction, 21 to 45, without much apparent justification).

Then let buyers and sellers of labour find each other in the market.

That's if you think even these criteria are worth the bother. The unsettling fact for immigration selectivists is that, for all its elaborate rules and screening procedures, the points system doesn't seem to make much of a difference. The proportion of highly-educated professionals admitted to Canada has been falling, not rising, in recent years -- exactly in line with similar trends observed in the United States, which has no such test.

Defenders of the system might object that this is only because so few immigrants are actually required to pass the test, owing to the the numbers of family members and refugees admitted. Indeed, of 230,000 immigrants entering the country in 1994, just 14 per cent were selected using the points system. But that only makes all the more striking the consistent ability of immigrants, as a group, to outperform the native-born population, across a wide range of economic and social indicators: earnings, unemployment rates, you name it.

That's something, indeed, the committee might have taken closer to heart.

For all its concern with ensuring that immigrants should "contribute to Canada's prosperity" and promoting their "active participation in Canadian society," that seems already to be happening, even without the department's intervention. While nearly half of current immigrants speak neither English nor French on arrival, census figures show that within three years that proportion has halved and within eight years it has halved again. Inter- marriage rates are at an all-time high. Ethnic ghettos are rare. Asian and African immigrants seem particularly eager to assimilate, applying for citizenship, for example, an average of five years of arrival, compared to the 15 years typical of immigrants from "traditional" sources.

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