Immigration is a hot-button topic these days, but for the agencies on the front lines that work with newcomers to Canada, it’s a constant challenge — everyone looking for a home here has differing needs that can vary with the hour and the day.

On the surface, Kleber Gabriel is a model of the economic migrant the country’s immigration system prioritizes — a professional with an international degree in marketing from the U.K. and fluent in English. Still, he arrived in Canada from Sao Paulo, Brazil, five years ago, requesting humanitarian assistance in his immigration application.

“I’m black, I’m gay, and there are some obstacles and Brazil is not ready.” There had been issues with bullying and the two adopted children Gabriel shares with his partner, so they decided to start over in a country with a kinder reputation.

It was only after he arrived that Gabriel came up against the biggest obstacle most newcomers encounter when moving here — employment. Like so many newcomers, he discovered prospective employers often didn’t recognize his credentials. The job market seemed overwhelming. He needed help.

Rodel Imbarlina-Ramos is the executive director of the Peel Newcomer Strategy Group, a project of United Way of Canada. His group has studied the challenges facing immigrants to Canada in the GTA region and have discovered that at the top of the list are two issues they found were inextricably linked: employment and mental health.

More than half of the newcomers arriving here are economic migrants, he says, and the biggest problem, even for those selected for their education, skills and language fluency, is a “lack of social capital.”

One of the dominant stories about newcomers to Canada a decade or so ago was the professional — a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer — driving a cab or delivering pizza or working behind the counter at Tim Hortons. This only partly mythical figure has faded in recent years, but the issue of credentials and certification hasn’t gone away.

“I think that the narrative and where we are as a regional society with respect to immigrant employment, we’ve moved on,” says Imbarlina-Ramos. “But underemployment of newcomers is a huge issue — when you have those examples of the doctors driving a cab, that’s a tangible example of underemployment, or not working to one’s capacity.”

The solution of frontline newcomer assistance agencies, many supported by United Way in the GTA, is to create networks of their own to help create the ones that newcomers often lack.

Assil al Naser arrived in Canada last December. She’d left Syria in 2014 but had travelled through Europe, the U.S. and Turkey before deciding to join family here. Having navigated the refugee system in so many places gave her the confidence to try to handle the paperwork for Canada’s immigration system on her own, but despite this she still found herself making mistakes.

She had overlooked a brochure she’d been handed upon arrival at Pearson airport, detailing the services of Red Cross First Contact, a United Way-funded agency, thinking it was offering shelter services she didn’t need. It wasn’t until months later that she ended up applying for and getting a job there, helping newcomers navigate the system that even someone with her experience had found frustrating.

First Contact sets clients up with everything they need, from shelter to legal aid to employment services, as part of a network of agencies that specialize in services for immigrants. Most of all, though, she says they try to provide stability during what’s often a difficult time for both individuals and families.

“Most of the time we have to do everything from shelter to employment services. We also have a place for children, computers, phones, but mainly when they come here we try to make them comfortable, let them know they won’t stay on the street tonight.”

For Gabriel, help at a crucial moment came in the form of a mentoring service offered by Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC), another United Way-funded agency. The federal Government has invested in pre-arrival programs on the ground for immigrants coming to Canada, but they’re just in larger sources of economic migrants, such as India and China.

Information about programs for newcomers can be found online, but they’re either hard to find or overlooked in the rush to prepare for moving family and possessions across borders or oceans. ACCES Employment is the sort of agency formed to help newcomers navigate the job market and create the social capital sorely needed by people like Gabriel, who had to leave his own behind with so much else.

He ended up in TRIEC’s mentoring program, working with executive director Margaret Eaton, who gave him advice that turned out to be priceless at a difficult moment.

“You have to go through the hiring and recruitment process, but whatever experience you had before, it doesn’t count as much. Your education isn’t recognized as much. I found it difficult to deal with this new reality. I had this perception of myself as being a high achiever, and then suddenly I was in this position of, ‘No, you don’t have enough.’ And eventually I realized that there must be something wrong, something that I don’t understand,” says Gabriel.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“You’re thinking that there must be something wrong with you, you go into survival mode and start thinking you’re going to take any job you can find, you’re going to forget everything you’ve accomplished before because this is a question of providing for my family. I can’t be dealing with the vanity of whatever I’ve studied or whatever degree I had before.”

Eaton told him that he shouldn’t force himself to settle for the first job that presents itself, to not go into “survival mode” in a panic over supporting his family. With a job and a home in Mississauga, he even returned to school, studying psychology at the University of Toronto. He’s even entertaining the idea of starting his own businesses one day, just as he had in Brazil.

“This is our home now, and I was open for new experiences,” he says. “I think if you move to a new country and you’re starting life over, it’s important to be open-hearted and open for adaptation.”