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If you think you’re hearing a lot of French, Irish, Korean and German accents when you buy coffee and restaurant food these days in Metro Vancouver, it’s because you are.

There has been a sharp rise in the number of young foreign nationals obtaining working-holiday jobs in the Canadian hospitality industry under the federal government’s “international experience” visa program.

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The number of young workers coming to Canada on temporary visas from France, Chile, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Taiwan and several other countries has jumped more than 10-fold since the early 2000s.

The popular visas, especially the holiday-worker visas, brought 52,000 new young workers to Canada in 2016 alone, mostly to major cities.

“I’m one of the lucky people who got an experience visa. Many of my Japanese colleagues want to become permanent residents of Canada,” said Mire Takeda, 23, who works at Kitsilano’s Beyond Bread.