The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010

"In Nigeria, he helped design the athletes village for Abuja's All-Africa Games. But three years after moving to Canada in 2007 with a pregnant wife and big dreams, Yisola Taiwo has yet to land his first architecture job. His wife, Bunmi Sofoluwe-Taiwo, still hasn't been able to find work after leaving her career with the Lagos government.

“Last year was terrible,” Mr. Taiwo said. An internship ended; he spent more than a year on employment insurance and working for no pay at a Toronto architecture firm. In May, he started a two-month contract at the Diebold Company of Canada, working with architectural drawings to design building security systems in Mississauga. It's not a bad gig, but he longs for something in his field. The Toronto region has long boasted about its role as Canada's diversity hub. But Toronto is doing a worse job of integrating immigrants than it was two decades ago, and it's costing the economy estimated billions of dollars a year, according to a report being released Thursday by the city's Board of Trade.

About 45 per cent of Canada's newcomers come to Toronto. The city is also one of the first places in the country to depend entirely on immigration for its net labour-force growth. But Torontonian immigrants today are earning proportionately less than their counterparts did in the 1980s: 63 cents on the dollar for men, compared with 85 cents in 1980.

Economists estimate the Toronto region is losing as much as $2.25-billion annually because people are unable to get jobs in keeping with their training and qualifications - or because they find these jobs, but aren't getting paid as much as they could be. In a first for the Board of Trade, the business-friendly think tank has come out with a report calling on mayoral candidates to address what it sees as an increasingly urgent economic disconnect. Board president Carol Wilding and United Way head Frances Lankin say it's a subject the city's mayoral candidates need to raise in a race that, so far, has been largely about transit, taxes and customer service."