For professional licensure here in Ontario: you either have a degree from an accredited university, or you write ten three-hour technical "challenge" examinations. Pass those, and nobody cares where or even if you went to school. To me, that's fair. I don't give a rat's hind end about "definitions" beyond this very functional one, based on knowledge of fundamentals.
We don't bother making all grads write the three ten-hour examinations. Instead we accredit programs at institutions, both locally and internationally. Your program or institution isn't on the list? Based on an interview, you are assessed one or more of those three hour exams. Some people don't think that's fair, but I do. It's certainly more efficient than making everyone write the same exam. Even if you did that, some people would think that the ones who wrote the exam fresh out of school had an unfair advantage over anyone coming in from abroad.
At that point, an immigrant engineer can obtain a provisional license- something that says to employers that they've met the criteria for licensure but lack the 1 year of mentored experience required to grant them a license. That gives employers some comfort, because at least the licensure body has some familiarity with the 2000 or so degree-granting institutions worldwide, and which ones are frauds and which ones actually give legitimate engineering degrees, whereas few if any employers could have a real command of that subject and hence would simply prefer locally-educated folks. Even if an immigrant cannot get a license, they can still get a job as an engineer under an employer who has a Certificate of Authorization (i.e. a patsy engineer willing to take "professional responsibility" for all the professional engineering work done by that firm), or an employer who is working under the so-called "industrial exemption" which still hasn't been repealed here. But in both of those cases, they have no right to the title "engineer", and if they use it they are subject to fines and other enforcement action. So they get called other things: "designer", "project manager", or just have business cards saying "B.A.Sc. mechanical engineering" (which, if factual, cannot be argued with irrespective of how disreputable the degree granting institution may be).
The reality is, we get thousands of immigrants every year who feel they have every right to practice engineering here and call themselves engineers the moment they arrive. Some of them are amongst the very best engineers in the world- and they don't have a problem obtaining a license by and large, though they may not like the process and the time it takes. Some of them couldn't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag, which of course can be said of some local grads. Others are frauds- they have no real degree or knowledge, they are just looking to get a career here through a "Catch Me If You Can" trick.
