Most immigrants end up choosing to live in one of Canada’s major cities. In fact, more than half of all immigrants and recent immigrants to Canada currently live in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, according to Statistics Canada.
However, there may be better opportunities for these immigrants elsewhere. Perhaps a film director or a tech worker may be suited to Toronto, but a petroleum engineer may not.
Since 2018, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has been working on a research project alongside the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) at Stanford University that may pave the way for this tool, dubbed GeoMatch, to come to fruition.
According to their website, GeoMatch uses machine learning capabilities to make its predictions. It considers factors such as previous immigrants’ work history, education as well as personal characteristics. It then finds patterns in the data by focusing on how these factors were related to economic success in different locations.
GeoMatch may then be able to predict an immigrant’s likelihood of success in various locations across Canada.
“Research suggests that an immigrant’s initial arrival location plays a key role in shaping their economic success. Yet immigrants currently lack access to personalized information that would help them identify optimal destinations,” said a report published by the IPL.
The report reiterates that the approach is motivated by data that show an immigrant’s first landing location is influential in their outcomes.
Immigrants may, of course, choose not to use the tool. However, it is worth mentioning that GeoMatch takes into consideration not just “data-driven predictions” but immigrants’ location preferences as well.
