What do you have to lie about if you immigrated to Canada?

Every year about 250,000 permanent residents come to Canada. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

New immigrants come to seek old things: better life, more money, something better for themselves and their children.

Most of them are not rich. They saved some money, they are qualified to come and live in Canada, but most of them still facing on of the biggest problems: finding a job.

For me it was never a problem to find a job in my old country, but when I came to Canada and became immigrant, everything changed. Nobody needed me there.

To make things worse we moved to a small town south of Hamilton and there a middle aged immigrant woman with a thick European accent that betrayed you right away, without local experience and local education was completely out of place...

The worst thing was that nobody told me anything. I was walking around trying to find a job in all wrong places, places that would never in a million years hire me because they have a lot of qualified people with Canadian experience, who is eager to take the position: just pick and choose. But they never told me that and I continued to walk around, to send my resume, trying to get noticed, to get an interview.

And they would invite you , polite listen to you and very politely tell you that they will call you next week as soon as they would make a decision. And you sit and wait and they never call, because they never intended to call anyway.

That faceless politeness was more damaging than real rudeness.

It took me quite a while before I realised how everything worked, what unemployment meant to a reluctant immigrant, to any immigrant for that matter.

I was not better or worse than anybody else. It's just every employer tried to hire the best and I definitely did not fall into that category.

I needed a lot to learn. Well, if I was alone without a family, I would have left for sure and went to a big city, like Toronto, to get more chance and more experience, but I had to consider my family so I had to stay. I tought it would be better, I was wrong...

We bought a house, kids were going to school. I spent 10 long years in a small town of Brant county, without a job or education, reluctantly. Of course I was busy, helping my kids, my husband's business. Helping, helping, helping... Nothing to myself.

Finally I got some job at Tim Horton's. I had to lie about my education. I did not put on my resume that I was a University graduate, you do not need that to serve coffee and donuts, that's for sure. I learned that in order to get any small job, you have to go down, you have to forget a lot of stuff that you know in order to earn some money. You have to lie.

Now I am in Toronto. With my present employer I did not have to lie about my education.

May be because I work for a company, that was created by my compatriots, who needed me with all my education and more. But sometimes I think: what if I tried to get the same job but in a similar Canadian company, were all my bosses were Canadian born people, would I've been hired, especially if I did not lie about my education? Probably not.