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Comment by xtreme | Hacker News Reader

Canada's Express Entry system for skilled immigrants gives you more points if you attended college in Canada. Giving priority to people who have already integrated into the society makes perfect sense to me.

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At the same time that kinda cripples the ability to hire highly-skilled foreigners, isn't it? It's artificially limiting the pool of viable candidates.

Just imagine a PhD (or even a Master's degree holder) from Europe, a leader in their field. With this system they are at a huge disadvantage and so are companies that would like to hire them.

As someone mentioned this system will just lead to straight to masters degrees. Those "body shop" outsourcing companies just need their candidates to attend any (does online count?) US-based masters degree and then business as usual.

Having a Masters from "some" university doesn't make anyone highly skilled.

Canada is points-based. These guys you have in mind lose on one category and win on another category. That's why points-based systems work. You get to say "Speaking French in my country is as valuable as if you held a Masters degree from here". There are so many bases to add up to the value that anyone with that skill would almost certainly make it.

You can give priority to people who have integrated into the society in several other, more obvious ways. In this case, they are making the explicit argument that they want "more skilled" workers, and using a US-based degree as the criteria. If they had a points system, and a Masters degree would get you X points, and every year spent in US would give you additional Y points, then this would make sense.

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