35 | This Week | Thursday, February 24,2022 durhamregion.com 33 Division Street, Bowmanville 905-623-8772 30 Taunton Rd E, Oshawa 905-725-5100 1549 Dundas St E, Whitby 905-430-7864 1053 Simcoe St N, Oshawa 905-435-0185 Bistro 4 King Ave E, Newcastle 905-987-7777 In 2019, Canada welcomed about 870 new permanent residents every day. But when we closed our borders in March 2020, immigration ground to a screeching halt. Thousands of families were unable to reunite. Refugees were prevented from reaching safety. Hundreds of thousands of people who had waited years to make a new life in Canada found their hopes stymied. But nobody talks about that, apart from the people affected. Instead, Canadians have found religion on immigration because after decades of stagnant real wages, employers are finally being forced to give their workers a raise, a phenomenon the business press decries as a "perfect storm" attributable in large part to reduced immigration. Now that workers are demanding their due, employers are pining for fresh meat willing to work for less. The labour shortage narrative reveals how we have instrumentalized immigrants by reducing them to mere labour units. We seem to have forgotten the other benefits of immigration: myriad forms of renewal and fresh thinking that newcomers infuse into Canadian society. Our fixation on immigrants as labour signifies an underlying devaluation of immigrants as humans, which ironically boomerangs right back into the labour market. Business councils across the land bemoan the shortage of invisible immigrant labour -- from delivery drivers to programmers -- but our most urgent labour shortage is in health care. Yet despite a "catastrophic" surgical backlog, Ontario prevents approximately 13,000 foreign-trained doctors from practising, including 3,500 who are qualified to practise immediately. We clamour for immigrants to help Amazon ship parcels that much faster, but cannot contemplate employing experienced immigrant respirologists, even during a full-blown health crisis. These accomplished immigrants don't fit our standard immigration narrative of work hard, watch your pennies, and maybe attain middle-class comforts one day. This narrative assumes immigrants always come with nothing. It can handle the beautiful refugee to riches story of Tareq Hadad, but cannot accommodate an immigrant cardiologist passing Canadian exams and entering the workforce at the top as a highly respected, highly paid public service professional we look up to and depend on. Post pandemic, we must rehumanize our preconceptions about who immigrants are and what they can contribute. The biggest hindrance to immigrants contributing more lies not with them, but with Canadian society, which COVID shows is not yet ready to accept the full array of benefits and advantages that immigrants have to offer. Daniel Bernhard is CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. A PARADIGM SHIFT ON IMMIGRATION, NEWCOMERS OPINION: OUR CHANGED WORLD 'WE MUST REHUMANIZE OUR PRECONCEPTIONS ABOUT WHO IMMIGRANTS ARE AND WHAT THEY CAN CONTRIBUTE,' SAYS BERNHARD DANIEL BERNHARD Column