Express Entry is a system used by the Canadian government to manage permanent residence (PR) applications of immigration-ready skilled workers in order to fill labor gaps through economic programs. Express Entry has been used to create and score a pool of skilled and qualified applicants, from which “draws” are made to issue PR invitations. Launched on January 1, 2015, the program was designed to facilitate express immigration of skilled workers to Canada "who are most likely to succeed economically." The system was intended to be more efficient than prior systems, with a goal of 80% of applications processed in 6 months or less.
Things started relatively slow for Express Entry, with about 30,000 invitations issued each year in the system’s first two years. But in each year from 2017 through 2019, the annual number was between 80,000 and 90,000, and then there was another big jump-up in 2020 and 2021 to about 110,000 invitations per year. A linear regression analysis performed in late 2021 would have predicted that the total number of invitations issued in 2022 would be even more than that - around 150,000. Instead, as of the last draw on August 3, the total for 2022 is a little over 14,000. At the current rate, that number might grow to 25,000 by the end of the year.
What happened in 2022? There are a lot of theories, but no official explanation.
One reason, which I’ve heard from two different immigration attorneys here, is “COVID”. To say that the pandemic has caused major disruptions to almost every immigration system in the world, including in Canada, is certainly plausible. I’ve been told that Immigration officials here were reassigned to work on COVID policies and their implementation at the start of the pandemic, reducing the manpower available to process immigration applications. And between March 2020 and July 2021, the Canadian border was closed, which on its face would seem to reduce the burden on Immigration, but must have caused enormous disorganization of status quo processes. I’ve also heard that Immigration, like every organization in the world right now it seems, is short-staffed and unable to hire adequately for its needs. All of these reasons make sense; yet, they don’t seem aligned with the timing of the drop-off in Express Entry invitations in late 2021.
Another reason that I’ve heard is “Ukraine”, and although the scope associated with the war in Ukraine feels smaller - specifically, the increase in the number of refugees being processed by Canadian immigration since the onset of the war - the timing lines up more directly with the drop-off in Express Entry invitations. And the scope really isn’t that small: between March and August 2022, 475,000 Ukrainians applied for temporary residency in Canada, and to date, 195,000 applications have been approved.
Pandemic and war aside, a closer look at the data suggests that something is happening at a policy level. There are three economic programs that are eligible for Express Entry - Federal Skilled Trades, Canadian Experience Class, and Provincial Nominees - and some of the Express Entry draws are program-specific while others are based on score only and include all applicants in all three programs. Federal Skilled Trades is specific types of workers in industries such as construction, manufacturing, and food service; applicants in this program have been invited in low numbers and at low frequency under Express Entry (their last invitation was in August 2020). Canadian Experience Class is for managerial, professional, and technical workers who have at least one year of Canadian work experience. Applicants in this program have been invited in much higher numbers, typically with a draw every month, including in an extraordinary draw in February 2021 that included over 27,000 invitations - essentially everyone in the pool who had the requisite work experience and passed their language test. However, the last CEC draw was in September 2021. After that, the next 22 draws were limited to the third program, Provincial Nominees.
Provincial Nominees meet all the requirements of CEC, plus they have a nomination from their province based on its strategic priorities (in BC, nominations are reserved for health care workers, early childhood educators, tech workers, and entrepreneurs). The fact that only Provincial Nominees have been invited for the past year indicates that last fall, someone in Immigration said, “We only have the resources to process the workers we need most urgently - everyone else has to wait.” CEC applicants are already in Canada, contributing to the economy and the tax base - so from the government’s perspective, it might be just a matter of prioritizing who they least can afford to lose. Again, there has been no official announcement that Express Entry for FST and CEC has been temporarily suspended - but it certainly looks that way for now.
In the meantime, the overall Express Entry pool has increased by 40% in the past year, and not just because of the low volume of invitations: the number of new Express Entry applicants is growing. Although Canada does not publicly disclose the number of new applicants explicitly, it does publish the number of applicants in the pool just prior to each draw. By taking the difference between the current pool size and the previous one, adjusted by the number of applicants invited in the last draw, we can estimate the number of new applicants added to the pool during that time period (note that the real number could be even higher as some older applications may expire during each time period as well). Between January and July of this year, there were about 9,000 invitations and the overall pool increased by about 30,000 - so there were at least 39,000 new applicants during this time. On average, there have been 8,000 new applicants per month over the past 12 months.
As one of the 240,000 applicants who is currently waiting in the Express Entry pool, all of this could be a little discouraging. But there are two rays of light. One is the 2022 Canada Immigration Levels Plan, which calls for admitting 140,000, 162,000, and 205,000 new permanent residents under Express Entry in 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively. Although the plan targets for 2022 and 2023 are lower than in the 2021 Plan, and although the actual numbers in 2019, 2020, and 2021 were significantly lower than the previous plan targets, the current targets are encouraging. Even if the actual number for 2022 ended up being only 50% of the target, it would still mean that Canada might issue 50,000 more invitations this year.
The other ray of light is that in June, Canada announced that it is working on a new immigration program that would help temporary foreign workers and international students who are already in Canada to transition to permanent resident status more quickly. More details about this new fast-track immigration program are expected to be rolled out this fall - but based on the limited details so far, it seems likely that I would qualify.