Thinking of Moving to Canada? Its Points System Might Not Pick You

Every so often a famous person announces, with feeling, that if the country does not go the way they prefer, they will move to Canada. It is a familiar genre. The announcer is usually standing in front of a microphone, looking noble, and the audience understands that it is a figure of speech.

I would like to take the sentence literally for once, because the literal version is a lot more interesting than the rhetorical one. Suppose you did want to move to Canada. How would Canada decide whether to let you in? And what would you find when you got to the application, other than a very polite form?

You would find a points system, a scoring grid that rewards youth, education, language and work experience, and that would rank you against every other applicant in the world. You would find that a country of exceptional kindness, a country whose reputation for gentleness is the envy of the world, is also a country that selects its newcomers with a spreadsheet. And you would find that Australia and the United Kingdom do much the same thing. Which should end, once and for all, the claim that choosing immigrants on the basis of what a country needs is some kind of American cruelty.

A note before we start: this post compares systems for a policy argument. It is not advice for anyone's own immigration situation. Rules change often, and the official sources, Canada's immigration ministry, Australia's Department of Home Affairs and the British government's visa pages, are the only places to check a current requirement.

The claim

Here is the argument, stated so you can test it. A country may select immigrants by its own criteria, and the countries most admired by the people who criticize American immigration policy do exactly that, more strictly than the United States does.

I will make the case in steps: first the systems themselves, then the table, then the American mix, then what each approach suits, and then the objection.

Canada: Express Entry and the Comprehensive Ranking System

Canada was a pioneer. It introduced a points system for selecting skilled immigrants in 1967, a hundred-point grid in the immigration regulations of that year, and it has been refining it ever since. The modern form is Express Entry, launched on January 1, 2015.

Here is how it works in outline. A person interested in a skilled-worker route first creates an online profile, describing education, work history, language ability, age and so on. The profile enters a pool. The government then scores every profile using the Comprehensive Ranking System, a points formula with a maximum of 1,200. The points come from several groups of factors. The core ones are age, level of education, proficiency in English or French, and Canadian work experience. Additional points come from things like a spouse's qualifications, a sibling in Canada, strong French and a provincial nomination.

The government then holds periodic draws. It announces a cutoff score, issues invitations to apply to the candidates above it, and leaves the rest in the pool. The cutoff moves from draw to draw. Candidates who are not invited may wait, improve their score by retaking a language test or gaining experience, or give up.

Notice what the scoring rewards. Points for age are highest for applicants in their twenties and decline as an applicant gets older. Points for language require formal testing in English or French. Points for education reward degrees, and points for Canadian work experience reward people who have already been in the country on a temporary permit. In other words, Canada is picking people who are young, educated, fluent and already part of the workforce. It is a system designed to produce a particular kind of immigrant, for a particular purpose: economic contribution over a long working life.

There are other doors into Canada, including family sponsorship and refugee resettlement, and Canada is generous in all of them. The system is not a wall. But its largest economic channel is selective by design, and it is a mathematical form of selection in which a candidate can read the rules, calculate his own score and find out in advance whether he is likely to be invited.

Australia: the points test

Australia has long used a points-tested skilled migration program. Its structure is similar to Canada's in spirit. An applicant lodges an expression of interest, which is scored on factors including age, English-language ability, skilled employment experience and educational qualifications. For the main independent skilled visa, the commonly cited pass mark is 65 points, and an applicant must also have an occupation on an official list of skills in demand. Scoring higher than the pass mark improves the chance of being invited, because invitations are issued in rounds according to the demand for places.

Australia, like Canada, treats geography as part of the picture, giving extra points or separate pathways for people who agree to live in regional areas. Like Canada, it ties the selection to labor-market need: the occupation list changes with the economy.

The United Kingdom: the points-based system of 2021

Britain used a points-based approach in the 2000s, but the version people usually mean now began with the Skilled Worker route, which opened on December 1, 2020, and which from January 1, 2021 applied to EU citizens too, once free movement ended after the country left the European Union. Under the Skilled Worker route, an applicant needs 70 points. Fifty are mandatory: a job offer from a sponsor approved by the Home Office, a job at an appropriate skill level, and a minimum standard of English. The remaining twenty can be earned by other means, such as meeting a salary threshold, working in an occupation with a recognized shortage, or holding a relevant doctorate.

The British version differs from the Canadian one in a way worth noticing: it requires a job offer. The employer is the gatekeeper first, and the points system sits behind him. The rules have been adjusted several times since 2021, generally in a stricter direction, and anyone reading about the current thresholds should check the government's own pages.

The American mix

Now compare the American system, which is rarely described accurately in the debate, partly because it is a layering of different policies passed in different decades and not one design.

The foundation is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, as amended in 1965 and again in 1990. Four channels carry most of the legal flow.

• Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens: spouses, minor children and parents of adult citizens. This category has no numerical cap.
• Family preference categories: adult children and siblings of citizens, and spouses and children of green-card holders. These are capped by a formula, with a statutory floor of 226,000 a year, and are subject to a limit on any single country's share of the total.
• Employment-based preferences: about 140,000 a year in the 1990 law's framework, divided among several tiers by skill, along with the temporary visas, such as the H-1B for specialty occupations, which has an annual cap of 85,000 in the regular and advanced-degree categories.
• The Diversity Visa lottery: 55,000 a year, awarded by random selection among applicants from countries with low recent rates of immigration to the United States.

Humanitarian admissions run on a separate track. The president sets an annual refugee ceiling after consulting Congress, under the Refugee Act of 1980, and asylum, which is claimed on arrival or within the country, has no numerical cap at all.

The largest single share of permanent residence goes through the family channels. That is a choice, and a defensible one, but it is a very different selection principle from Canada's. In Canada, the question is "what can you do for the country's economy?" In the United States, the biggest question is "who do you know who is already here?" And in the lottery, the question is "were you lucky?" The three questions have almost nothing to do with one another. You can see the larger argument about the first question in our post on What an American Points System Would Look Like Written Into Law, and the argument about the third in Why a Green Card Lottery Makes No Sense for a Serious Country.

The comparison

Here are the systems side by side.

Read across the first row, and you notice that the three countries the critics most admire are the three that run scoring systems, and the one they criticize runs a hybrid in which the largest category is family and one category is a lottery. If selection is un-American, then it is also un-Canadian, un-Australian and un-British. The claim cannot survive the comparison.

Which approach suits which goal

Now to the useful part. The point of a comparison is not to say one system is "right." It is to match the tool to the goal, and every country has to decide what it is optimizing.

1. If the goal is economic growth and fiscal contribution, a points system or an employer-sponsored model is the sharpest tool. It selects for age, skills and language, which are the best predictors of a newcomer quickly filling a job and paying into the system. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom designed theirs for this purpose.
2. If the goal is family unity, a family-based system is the right tool, and it is worth saying plainly that family is a conservative value. A country that wants to keep families together will have a large family stream. The question is whether it should extend to adult siblings and extended chains, a debate explored in The Case for Nuclear-Family Immigration Over Extended Family Chains.
3. If the goal is humanitarian, a refugee and asylum system is the right tool, and it should be run on its own terms, with its own legal standards and its own numbers, not asked to double as an economic program.
4. If the goal is diversity of origin, a lottery is a tool that does that, and it does nothing else. It is the one American channel that selects for no skill, no family tie and no need. A serious country should ask whether that is worth 55,000 places a year.

The American difficulty is not that it has a family channel or a humanitarian channel. It is that it has all of them at once, with no single statement of what the country is trying to achieve, and with an employment channel so small and so backlogged that the temporary-visa programs have grown to fill the gap. A country that cannot say what it is selecting for cannot say whether it is succeeding.

The strongest objection

An honest defender of the current American approach would say the following. One: the United States has never defined itself by what immigrants can do for it. It defined itself by an idea, and the idea is open to anyone. Two: a points system is a crude instrument that rewards degrees and English tests and misses the dishwasher who becomes a restaurateur. Three: the American family-based system produced some of the most entrepreneurial immigrant communities in history. Four: Canada's per-capita numbers are higher than America's, so the comparison flatters Canada's generosity, not its restraint.

Those are serious points. Point two especially: a scoring system can miss the person with grit and no diploma, and the history of American immigration is full of such people. Point four is also fair: Canada admits a large number relative to its size, and selection is not the same as restriction. Selective and generous can go together.

But note what the objection concedes. It does not claim that selection is wrong. It claims that the American selection principle is better than the Canadian one, which is a debate about which criteria to use, and that is exactly the debate we should be having. Nobody who makes it can also say that choosing among applicants is un-American. And I'd add one more answer to point one: the idea of a nation open to anyone is not the same as a law that admits anyone. The Constitution gives Congress the power "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization," and a rule means criteria. A country that has one is exercising the same power Canada's Parliament uses, and the American people, through Congress, are entitled to decide what the rule should select for.

The punch line

So the next time somebody says that choosing immigrants by skills, language and age is cold-hearted, ask which country they plan to move to. If the answer is Canada, they are volunteering to be scored. If the answer is Australia, they are volunteering for a test. If the answer is Britain, they had better have a sponsor.

I mean this as a joke with a point. The people who admire these systems are not hypocrites, because the systems are not cruel. They are what a sensible country does when it takes seriously the question of whom to admit and why. That is all the conservative position has ever asked for: that America be allowed to have a rule, to say what the rule is for, and to apply it evenly. For more on the policy, see Should the H-1B Lottery Give Way to Picking the Highest-Paid Offers First.

The case in brief

1. Canada's Express Entry (2015) scores candidates with the Comprehensive Ranking System, maximum 1,200, rewarding age, education, language and Canadian work, and invites those above a cutoff.
2. Australia runs a points-tested skilled program, and the United Kingdom's 2021 Skilled Worker route requires 70 points, including a job offer from an approved sponsor.
3. The American mix is mostly family categories, a capped employment channel, a 55,000-place lottery and separate humanitarian tracks, with no single stated goal.
4. Each approach suits a goal: points for economic contribution, family categories for family unity, refugee rules for protection, and a lottery for nothing but chance.
5. Selection is not un-American, because the countries critics admire select more tightly, and the Constitution gives Congress the power to write the rule.

What you can do: pick one of the four goals above and write to your House member asking which of the current American channels is meant to serve it, using the my representatives page to find the office.