Hopeful immigrants to Canada are learning French after other paths to permanent residency prove difficult

Johann Loewenstein went to France for three months to study a language he hoped would make him more likely to gain Canadian permanent residence.Yader Guzman/The Globe and Mail

Johann Loewenstein spent three months this spring in Grenoble, France, learning the country’s native language in a Hail Mary attempt to become a permanent resident of Canada.

Mr. Loewenstein, 21, then a first-year student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., had moved to Canada from Colombia in 2019, later completing an aerospace engineering program at Centennial College in Toronto and working for one year as a mechanical technician, all with the hopes of settling here.

That work and educational experience meant he was eligible for the Canadian Experience Class program, one of the pathways to apply for permanent residency – but he wasn’t a shoo-in for it.

The program is part of a broader economic immigration program called Express Entry, for which applicants are scored on a range of categories, including age, education and language competency. Prospective immigrants are ranked, and the government invites a set number of those with the top scores to apply to become permanent residents.

After creating his profile, which put him into the pool of candidates, Mr. Loewenstein waited for a year while continuing his studies, but the invitation never came, and his immigration profile expired. The lowest-accepted score is publicly reported each month when invitations are sent, and in 2023 the lowest cut-off was 496, well above Mr. Loewenstein’s score. He could try again, but he didn’t think his score would improve enough to qualify.

Then, at the end of May, 2023, Canada created new categories under Express Entry to target specific applicants – some for people in certain occupations, including health care and skilled trades, and another for immigrants with proficiency in French. Mr. Loewenstein noticed that some people accepted from the French-language pool had scores below his.

“If I’ll learn French, my chances to become a Canadian permanent resident are way higher,” he said. “If I put myself in France, maybe I learned something. I speak Spanish already. Maybe it’s easier for me, and it kind of was. I learned a lot more than I did before.”

The idea behind the French program, according to the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, was to attract francophone immigrants who could alleviate labour shortages in francophone communities outside Quebec. (The province of Quebec runs its own immigration programs separate from the federal government.)

Since the category was rolled out, 26,100 people have been invited to apply for permanent residency through this pathway, representing nearly a quarter of all Express Entry invitations.

Not all of them are francophone, however. In the past four years, the scores that make the cut for general pool candidates have increased from the mid-400s to the low-500s, making it more difficult than ever to become a permanent resident. Therefore, the French-language category, with an average score of 416 since last June, has prompted non-francophones like Mr. Loewenstein to learn French to increase their odds.

Alliance Française, an international non-profit agency that administers the French-language tests – mainly used for immigration purposes – reported the same number of test registrations in the first six months of 2024 as the entire year before.

But regardless of whether it’s francophones or people new to the language seeking the pathway, some experts have raised concerns that when Canada prioritizes French, prospective immigrants in other streams with higher scores who would contribute more to the country’s economy are bypassed.

They argue that the points system is meant to predict a candidate’s earnings in Canada, and French-speaking immigrants with lower scores have lower human capital – the economic value of a worker’s experience and skills.

“If you look at the data, French language skills outside of Quebec and New Brunswick are not very predictive of earnings, in large part because they’re not used,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo who was involved in the original construction of the points system.

“So the point is, we are no longer using skilled immigration system. We are using something else that’s not about prioritizing skill.”

Quebec has its own process for immigration and French-language proficiency. The increasingly popular federal French stream was meant to fill labour gaps in francophone areas outside Quebec.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

While learning French well enough to gain permanent residency is no easy task, for some prospective immigrants it’s worth doing everything they can to try.

Learning French was Mr. Lowenstein’s last hope because, according to the government’s policies, in one year his work experience would be too old to be eligible – and without it, he’d have no chance.

So when he found himself unable to re-enter Canada in January because his temporary resident visa had expired, he made a bold decision. Rather than having his university studies disrupted while he waited for the renewal, he deferred for a semester and flew to France instead. There, he joined a rowing club so he could be surrounded by native speakers.

He spent three months conversing with his new friends to absorb as much French as possible. When he returned to Canada for the summer semester at Queen’s, he took one of the two French exams – d’Evaluation de Francais, or TEF – that are offered for the French-proficiency category. (The other is Le Test de Connaissance du Français, or TCF.)

Applicants to the French-language category must, at minimum, get a score of seven in all four language abilities: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Mr. Lowenstein scored six in most of them, but he is confident that he can improve through more study before his work experience becomes invalid.

Samuel Coeytaux, the director of the Ottawa branch of Alliance Française, said his organization has seen a significant increase in the number of people taking the TEF and TCF exams across Canada this year. The organization administered 3,681 exams last year but had already reached that total in the first six months of 2024.

Some clients registering for the exam, he said, don’t have a background in French – “people from countries not deemed francophone, like India, China and other countries in Latin America as well” – but they study the structure of the test and prepare well.

He added, however, that it’s hard to achieve a score of seven, and those who do usually already have a strong foundation in French. A score of seven in all abilities indicates that the person can carry on a spontaneous conversation with a native French speaker or watch TV in French with minimal difficulty.

Aishwarya Kohli started to learn French in 2022, after she had a baby. She and her family are moving to Toronto this fall from Kentwood, Mich., where she's been living on an H1B visa.Kristen Norman/The Globe and Mail

Aishwarya Kohli knows well how much effort it can take for someone to learn French without any background in the language. She was born in India and is living in Michigan with her husband and baby on an H1B visa, which most skilled professionals obtain to work in the United States. However, the H1B visa is tied to employment – and a worker risks losing residency if they become unemployed. Seeking more stability, Ms. Kohli looked to move to Canada.

After spending 14 months learning French, she passed the TEF test last September, and her family – now with permanent resident status – is moving to Toronto this fall.

Ms. Kohli believes the French-language route was the only option for her because she had maxed out points on age, knowledge of English and years of work experience – she had three – and still ended up with a score 10 to 20 points lower than what she needed to be invited.

She started learning French after having her baby in 2022, practising by speaking with a native speaker she found online, and following a rigorous self-study plan.

Each day, she would get up at 3 a.m. and study until 8 a.m., in between feeding her baby – and then study again in the afternoon after her work day as a business manager in the education sector. Ms. Kohli said her family sacrificed visiting friends and other outings for a whole year while she spent as much time as possible studying.

“It takes a lot of tolls on your health, your mental health, your physical health, but you have to be very motivated and consistent because if you really want to do it, that is the only key to spending some time with the language,” Ms. Kohli said. “Just stay focused and it’s going to happen.”

In addition to the time cost, intensively learning French can be expensive. Charmaine Yu, a Philippine freelancer working in graphic design, learned French in 18 months and immigrated to Canada in May. She spent $1,452 on Alliance Française classes, going four times a week for nine months in her home country. The classes have different costs in every country, and that same number of classes would come to more than $7,000 in Canada.

“I think the hardest part is taking the test for me, and maybe the financial investment, but the actual learning I enjoy it,” Ms. Yu said, adding that she took the test twice to get the necessary scores, each time costing her $300.

New citizens take part in an oath ceremony at a Cirque Du Soleil tent in Toronto this past July. Pamphlets given to them, such as the lyrics sheet for O Canada, emphasize the bilingual nature of the country.Sarah Palmer/The Globe and Mail

Some economists have criticized prioritizing French-language skills for immigrant selection, saying it affects Canada’s ability to attract top talent.

University of Waterloo’s Prof. Skuterud points out that giving priority to French-language speakers with lower scores means that a large number of applicants with scores above 500 – who have the potential of making higher incomes but don’t speak French – aren’t invited to apply.

“This is the trade-off we have: computer science students at the University of Waterloo are getting frustrated and saying I’m going somewhere else,” Prof. Skuterud said. “This is a huge problem if what you care about is productivity, which is what everybody is talking about now.”

It comes down to the society’s priority whether it’s for labour market success or letting in immigrants that will assimilate into Francophone culture, said Philip Oreopoulos, an economics professor at the University of Toronto.

Prof. Oreopoulos agrees that the new category doesn’t maximize chances for immigrants’ productivity. “I don’t think outside of Quebec, favouring more points for knowing French would lead to better labour market success than, say, favouring graduate education,” he said.

Jeffrey MacDonald, a communications adviser at the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, points out that supporting francophone immigration is part of an obligation Canada made in its Official Languages Act. And, he added in an e-mail, the new French-language category “will contribute to stronger and more prosperous Francophone communities for generations to come.”

But despite Ottawa’s aim to support francophone communities outside Quebec, immigrant consultants in New Brunswick, the country’s only officially bilingual province, have seen few francophone clients immigrate through the pathway since its introduction.

Kehinde Akinsanya, an immigration consultant in Fredericton, said the main programs that his clients use are the Francophone Mobility program, which has been in place since 2016 and allows a Canadian employer to make a job offer to a French-speaking person, and a provincial immigration pathway that seeks French-speaking immigrants.

The new French-proficiency category is instead more popular for French-speaking immigrants who live outside of New Brunswick, such as those in Ontario and British Columbia, said Lori-Ann Cyr, an immigration consultant in Edmundston, N.B. She says some people choose these other provinces because they want their kids to be bilingual, “so they want to go in a place where there’s not a lot of French, because they want to learn English.”

Arina Zhuk, 42, who immigrated to Canada from Russia in February after applying through the French-language proficiency category, is one of the people who isn’t using French now that she’s in Toronto, and to her that’s a shame. Ms. Zhuk learned French as a hobby when she was a teenager and spent two months refreshing her French skills to pass the TEF exam.

As a former film and production manager in Russia, she spent months looking for jobs in the media field in Toronto after she landed. About 15 of the first 150 jobs she applied for were bilingual, but she didn’t get any of them. She finally started working in a post-production company a month ago, but she isn’t using any of her French.

“Why would they invite French-speaking people, and then don’t put them to use? I would love to find a job where I could speak French.”

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