THE NEWS
Mexico is the third-largest source for foreign workers in Canada, after the United States and the Philippines, the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration reported on Wednesday.
As of December 2012, the number of Mexicans working in Canada added up to 23,683, a figure surpassed only by the number of Filipinos (47,470) and U.S. citizens (39,886).
In 1973, Canada created the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to cover its lack of engineers, but the program was later opened up to the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. Forty years ago, Mexico and Canada created the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), which began with a group of 203 workers but has now grown to 19,000, according to information released by the Mexican Foreign Relations Secretariat.
On top of working on 1,600 farms across the country, Mexican workers in Canada also find seasonal employment in fast food chains and other restaurants, in the construction sector and at universities.
The Canadian government’s 2009 decision to require Mexicans to have visas before entering the country caused the number of Mexican workers in the country to drop by 1,229 to 21,082 by the following year, though the numbers have since resumed their upward trend.
The visa decision, however, has hurt Mexican tourism to Canada, which now seems barely over half the number of tourists it had in 2008.
Jorge Morfin Stoopen, director of the Canadian Tourism Commission, said that it will be very difficult for Canada to recover the numbers of Mexican tourists it had before 2009, but added that the tourists the country receives nowadays are generally richer.
“It’s true that we’ve lost a very important market, but now the travelers that continue to go to Canada are more sophisticated, have better manners and are more independent economically, and so they spend more and stay for longer,” Morfin Stoopen said.
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