In Canada, one cannot lump all immigrants together even those from the same part of the world. Canada used to be pretty strict on immigration only allowing highly skilled individuals from all over the world. But in the last decade this has changed to just importing as many bodies as possible. I won't go into the reasons for this change but it has dramatically altered the character of the country in this time.
We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.
Canada is in a demographic crisis: The birthrate is too low, the population is aging and the country can’t afford to provide people with all of the social benefits AND have no laborers paying in to the benefit system. Importing lots of young labor rebalances the demographics and bolsters funding of benefits, at the expense of a housing crisis and social tensions. The alternative is to deeply cut benefits, which is political suicide for any party that dares to try.
How is this largely under-educated, low-skill workforce working menial/minimum wage jobs going to rescue the entitlements system? Canada's Southern neighbor has a similar issue: despite what may be morally correct, it's been a net negative for taxpayers, and the US doesn't have near the number of expensive social programs.
The article is about illegal immigration while the rest of the thread is about legal immigration.
Isn't it clear to everyone that the kind of people the government doesn't want in the country don't bring benefits to the country? And if they cheated on their way into the country, what does it imply about their integrity and their future tendency to cheat on taxes as well?
I can make an opposite claim on immigrants: those wealthy enough to clear the bar of entry, have more incentive to cheat on their future taxes to maintain their lifestyle. Though it sounds like the real issue is probably "getting paid under the table", which happens plenty for citizens and "undesirables" alike.
They're not talking about the low skilled illegal immigrants.
If someone can manage to clear the bar to immigrate in the US they're likely to be way more productive than your average american, so it makes sense that they're creating value for society.
I don't think we have that much of demographic crisis. First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. And secondly, as Boomers, they are a very large generation but will soon be dying off. But more to point, this is nothing new. We have always had immigration to offset low birth rate.
I'm more inclined to believe that the recent importing people en masse has benefited a few large employers of low skilled workers, continue to increase the cost of real-estate which has become more than 50% of our GDP, and artificially pumped up the GDP purely through population increases. Canada might have better off if it wasn't mostly unaffected by the 2008 financial crisis; instead we have been kicking that can down the road for almost two decades.
Canada probably shouldn't have gotten itself into this mess but it's easy to see how it happened and also why it's so hard to change course.
>First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth.
The working age population is the wealth. For example, you can have a country with 90 retired people and 10 working people. The 90 retired people can have $1M or $1B or $1T in their accounts, but it isn't going to matter if they have insufficient products/services to buy. The money just provides a relative ranking of what proportion of product/service is allocated to whom.
This is a fantasy. Those 90 returned people can spend their money anywhere in the world and do. Their relative ranking is multiple larger homes and those 10 working people paying them rent.
Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
At a 90 working, 10 non working people ratio, there isn’t going to be much to export, and hence the local currency isn’t going to buy much elsewhere in the world.
Also, at 90/10, the working people will surely start to wonder why they are paying rent (or tax) and who is going to stop them if they don’t. Same for invaders looking at obtaining the natural resources in Canada.
I picked an extreme ratio to illustrate the why, but in reality, it’s a far more gradual process, where ideally there is no violence, just various renegotiations of expectations.
> Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
> At a 90 working, 10 non working people ratio, there isn’t going to be much to export, and hence the local currency isn’t going to buy much elsewhere in the world.
Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
> It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
I don't see the connection. The land I live on is worth well over a million dollars and increases at an significant rate every year but has no basis in reality other than demand for land outstrips the supply.
> The land I live on is worth well over a million dollars and increases at a significant rate every year but has no basis in reality other than demand for land outstrips the supply.
It’s only worth whatever it is because that land has access to utilities, sources of food, security due to social cohesion and judicial systems, etc. Some of that stuff takes decades to build.
And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
I am not disputing that supply and demand determine price, I am saying demand curves themselves can shift due to demographic changes.
> Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
I assume Canadian real estate is a huge portion of wealth for many Canadians. Maybe not nominal amounts skewed by the richest Canadians with international equities.
There are many many empty homes in Canada -- in some cases entire "luxury" buildings sit mostly empty. These properties are sold even before they are built to international markets before they are even advertised for sale in Canada (if at all).
Land is valuable investment because the government decided many years ago that it can never decrease in value. It's a cycle: Canadian land value increases due to demand, this causes prices to increase, which increases the demand because it's a good investment. You'd be crazy to invest in business or anything else in Canada other than real estate. It's a sure thing and will give you the highest returns. If you a foreigner moving your money out of your country, even a little bit of loss is acceptable. There's no point in even renting out your property; the gains well exceed any reason to deal with that hassle. This is the reality.
The fact that people have to also live in the these investments is actually the problem! It's Bitcoin that people can sometimes live in. Its use as investment is completely divorced from the income of people living here and that is the problem.
> And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
That's like saying Bitcoin should be worth nothing because it's useless as currency. I agree. But the reality is that Bitcoin is worth a lot -- just like property in Canada. It already doesn't reflect all that basic societal stuff because it's almost entirely unrelated to it. It should be but it's not.
Valuable land is a product of labor, even if only due to being within the boundaries of a secure and orderly society.
Armies, judicial systems, etc, plus labor to bring about the goods and services. Plenty of examples of prime land decreasing in price due to the labor around it not being of sufficient quality/quantity.
It might even be that a society decreasing in wealth (real wealth, in the form of ability to create desirable goods and services) will try to inflate the value of land to preserve the purchasing power of those towards the top of the socioeconomic order.
Canada could have imported as many young educated people as it wanted from Eastern European countries, Russia, former USSR members etc. What happens in reality is they can't get enough points due to some truly moronic rules. Yet somehow we mostly have people from other parts of the world whose main specialty is food delivery.
canada is very protective of its regulated fields. if you didn't graduate in the US or Canada, it's very hard for an immigrant to become a vet/dentist/doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/etc. So these people end up in a rut where they are either delivering food, or stuck in an entry level job forever
From my experience those intelligent people who for whatever reasons can not get back to their original occupation still doing rather well in other fields. I am in Canada since the beginning of 90s. have many immigrant friends, most of them are well off.
Seriously ? People in the West have similar cultural values and customs for one which averts a whole set of social issues for a given nation, denying it and crying "racism" is just silly imo, it's an open secret that a homogeneous nation will be able to align its goals easier than others.
I'm from Middle East and am now a Canadian after many years, I know first hand it took my own family ample time to adapt to Western values. I'm not going arguing which sets of values is better (though some of them in the West _objectively_ are) but highlighting that it's reductive to deny the differences.
I've been on the grumpy end of enough scowling, dour East Slavs to think that's entirely 100% bullshit. So yes, "seriously"
I enjoy going into the (new) local Indian grocery in my town. On the other hand, I found the Russian (as an example) community in Toronto entirely hostile.
Seems like the majority of my son's friends in (small town / rural) high school are South Asian. And you know what? They're kinder better people than half the redneck neighbours I have around here, with their stupid "Stop Woke" signs on their lawns and shitty fake country music and their F150s barreling through stop signs.
What's that? Those are stereotypes? Wow. Shocking. Maybe we shouldn't make generalizations.
I don't share "values" with some amorphous blob of people from "Eastern Europe" just because they happen to have the same colour of skin as me.
Also... India is a commonwealth country and a former British colony, just like Canada... Unlike, I dunno, Bulgaria or Russia or Poland.
If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded???
You would think to combat birthdates you would increase immigration to an appropriate level not 10x it in 5 years.
Secondly immigration has a complicated affect on demographics since the people coming are generally 21 or older which is very clearly different than a birth which starts at 0 years old
I don't think 10x your immigrant population in 2 years is demographically the same as a natural population growth over 10 years.
They result in 2 very different distributions. One having a very large segment of the population in one specific age category. Which also puts a lot of pressure on systems / infrastructure that is relevant to that category.
The idea that a country must import more immigrants because birthrates are not increasing or are below replacement is just "number go up" economics. It's the same trite and annoying arguments that some Bitcoin boosters make (the ones who don't actually understand the underlying technology, there's a parallel there).
Japan, for one example, isn't going to collapse. Or should they import 50M immigrants from across the planet to make sure the numbers in the spreadsheets go up?
Japan has been going through multiple smaller crisis's as a result of their population problems. Because (and this might surprise you): the elderly need specialized care and that specialized care needs to come from somewhere.
That's why Japan has been bringing in nurses and caretakers from abroad en masse. Unless you want to make the argument that past a certain point they should just be left to die, but given that often the people that vote the most were elderly, well...
If anyone has wondered this Canada in the past 10 years should be a fantastic case study. It seems almost embarrassingly clear from the data that these 2 factors have a strong correlation / causation.
I really don't understand the downvotes on this one. This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy that the Liberals implemented in the last decade. In fact, Canada has been a strong proponent of using immigration to pad its lacklustre birth rate for a very long time, and is (or was) often viewed as a success model of how to achieve that while retaining social harmony.
I think that should probably be contrasted with the more aggressive policy of the last few years - that was more so a reaction to COVID related worker shortages.
> This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy
Is it? When and where did Trudeau say this, because European leaders never have as far as I know.
I'm pretty sure that actually left wing politicians always explicitly deny that this is the rationale in the loudest possible terms, because the idea that the left want to import high fertility foreigners who will then outbreed and thus replace the natives is sometimes called "Great Replacement", and the media/political establishment all consider it an unspeakably terrible conspiracy theory only believed by Nazis.
The Liberal immigration policy was created on the basis of consulting done by McKinsey & Company. This group has long been a primary source of policy and ideas for the Liberals.
In 2016 this group put out a document that says this: [1]
"Besides contributing to output today, immigrants provide a needed demographic boost to the current and future labor force in destination countries. Improving the old-age dependency ratio is of critical importance to countries like Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where most public pensions have a pay-as-you-go structure and worsening dependency ratios threaten to make many plans unsustainable. The presence of both first- and second-generation immigrants can help combat such unfavorable demographic trends, particularly because immigrant groups tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born populations in these countries."
Please don't try to graft American politics onto the Canadian political landscape. This is an entirely different context, with quite differing histories and opinions. I honestly can't remember anyone in Canada saying "Great Replacement" in recent memory. Most Canadians are grateful for the quality program that we used to have, and for the issues it's helped us avoid. Please leave such conspiratorial and loaded language to Reddit.
Teenagers and old people. This is no longer possible though. In my area there were hundreds of people (mostly immigrants) lining up at 4am in the hopes of getting a job at a grocery store.
> for low pay
Why not raise the pay? Why is the solution to devalue labor by massively increasing supply? This is what leads to decades of little to no wage growth.
People in high school had after school jobs. Retirees did something on the side for some extra cash to send to their grand-kids. For whatever reason, after "tech" had its moment in the sun (and on Wall Street) the downward wage pressure went to 11. And that's why everyone is so insistent on more immigrants.
Minor correction, you have imported a massive underclass to run your fast food restaurants and other such jobs for far cheaper than a Canadian would be willing to do it for.
We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.