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  #41  
Old Posted Nov 23, 2017, 6:54 PM
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Originally Posted by whatnext View Post
I don't necessarily want lower immigration per se, but if that's a consequence of more diversity I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Do you really think raising the quota based on any sound science as opposed to Justin saying "hey we're the immigration party, open the gates"? For several years now studies have shown Canada isn't providing many immigrants with great opportunities. Automation is only going to make this worse. I don't know how it is in your area, but in YVR I'd guess 90% of can drivers are recent arrivals from the Indian subcontinent. What happens to those jobs if adoption of Uber's self driving cars take off? And why are they stuck driving cabs if we have a much vaunted points system to attract skilled workers?
The number is based on the recommendations of the immigration bureaucracy, based on its analysis of requirements, and adjusted by the government for "political" reasons. That has been the process for decades now. Whether that bureaucratic process is adequate is, like the total number of immigrants admitted annually, something on which views can reasonably differ. In the James Bissett op-ed I posted a few days ago, he said that only about 15 to 17 per cent of the annual flow consists of immigrants selected because they have skills, education and experience ( I don't know where he got that number).
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  #42  
Old Posted Nov 23, 2017, 7:40 PM
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Originally Posted by kwoldtimer View Post
The number is based on the recommendations of the immigration bureaucracy, based on its analysis of requirements, and adjusted by the government for "political" reasons. That has been the process for decades now. Whether that bureaucratic process is adequate is, like the total number of immigrants admitted annually, something on which views can reasonably differ. In the James Bissett op-ed I posted a few days ago, he said that only about 15 to 17 per cent of the annual flow consists of immigrants selected because they have skills, education and experience ( I don't know where he got that number).
If it really is 15-17%, that's way too low.

Even if bureaucrats crunch the numbers before the politicians meddle, that doesn't mean the model they're using isn't outdated. Ever wonder why Japan, with a falling population is such a hotbed of technical innovation? Maybe because they don't just import cheap labour to solve a perceived problem. Canadian productivity lags because employers know they can rely on the gov't to provide a steady stream of cheap bodies, thus they don't innovate or spend on machinery.
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  #43  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 3:54 AM
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Originally Posted by whatnext View Post
If it really is 15-17%, that's way too low.

Even if bureaucrats crunch the numbers before the politicians meddle, that doesn't mean the model they're using isn't outdated. Ever wonder why Japan, with a falling population is such a hotbed of technical innovation? Maybe because they don't just import cheap labour to solve a perceived problem. Canadian productivity lags because employers know they can rely on the gov't to provide a steady stream of cheap bodies, thus they don't innovate or spend on machinery.
Government should just raise minimum wage to $100/hour. Then Canada will become a hotbed of innovation like Japan, and immigrants would not have the ability to stifle all the innovation what will be going on, no matter how many of them there are. You can have your cake and eat it too.
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  #44  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 5:02 AM
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I am not touching this thread with a ten foot pole xD
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  #45  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 6:22 AM
saffronleaf saffronleaf is offline
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Originally Posted by Capsicum View Post
True that the US has caps per country to make sure that the immigrants are evenly spread between countries of origin.

However, the actual stats are that the immigration is not really much more spread out between source countries than for Canada. Immigration from the largest source, Mexico, outnumbers the next several countries on the list. In Canada, while the largest three sources are all Asian (Philippines, India, China, in various order that have switched around in the last decade or so) for the past few years (plus the Syrians within the last two years), no immigrant source country makes up more than 10%.

Plus, the US has a larger share of family reunification immigrants than Canada, so if anything that would tend to concentrate immigrants among source countries (since you get families sponsoring those from the same country).
The point regarding Mexico is true but the policy overall has made it more challenging for Indians and Chinese to get a green card. The waiting line for someone applying for an employment based green card from India is something like 15 years. China is predictably second, at around 10 years.

Canada and Australia don't impose such caps and accordingly have a higher percentage of Indians and Chinese as immigrants.
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  #46  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 6:30 AM
saffronleaf saffronleaf is offline
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Originally Posted by whatnext View Post
In order to ensure we are getting truly diverse immigrants we should also institute a per country cap (in addition to our points based system).
I can empathize with the desire to diversify the immigrant pool, but I think doing it on a per-country basis is a rather blunt and coarse way of going about it.

I keeping it open and letting the natural ebbs and flows in immigration patterns do the work is the best way, but if you must impose caps then regional caps are more reasonable (e.g., South Asia, East Asia, Latin America). Otherwise, the penalty on India and China is particularly severe. India, for example, has 29 states with 22 different official languages, has the largest populations of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Bahaii and the 3rd largest Muslim population. It contains more people than the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. It's about as diverse, too. Yet it will have the same number of visas as Kuwait or Nicaragua, both of which are countries located in regions (the Arabian Peninsula or Central America) that are less diverse than India or China.

That also balances it with the other desire to bring qualified immigrants.

Last edited by saffronleaf; Nov 24, 2017 at 6:41 AM.
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  #47  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 6:31 AM
saffronleaf saffronleaf is offline
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Originally Posted by mistercorporate View Post
The number of immigrants would go down but diversity would be affected positively. Many of us would like diversity in source countries. Just bringing in Chinese, Indians and Philippinos will turn every major city into a carbon copy of Vancouver in a couple decades. Boring!
What about virtually every single locality outside of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Montreal? All rather homogeneous in ethnic makeup. Boring!
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  #48  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 6:33 AM
saffronleaf saffronleaf is offline
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
You seriously think we couldn't find 300,000 good people every year to move to Canada, out of a global population of almost 8 billion, simply because we tweaked the countries of origin we want to source them from?
Depending on the nature of the "tweak", it's certainly possible. Not all countries have the same demographic attributes or preferences.
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  #49  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 6:39 AM
saffronleaf saffronleaf is offline
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
Hopefully mousquet won't make anybody cry on here!
Ahh, what would a mousquet post be without his cheerleader Acajack egging him on?
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  #50  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 3:39 PM
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Originally Posted by saffronleaf View Post
Ahh, what would a mousquet post be without his cheerleader Acajack egging him on?
I just find his posts (and the bien-pensant reactions to them) funny.
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  #51  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 4:58 PM
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Originally Posted by saffronleaf View Post
The point regarding Mexico is true but the policy overall has made it more challenging for Indians and Chinese to get a green card. The waiting line for someone applying for an employment based green card from India is something like 15 years. China is predictably second, at around 10 years.

Canada and Australia don't impose such caps and accordingly have a higher percentage of Indians and Chinese as immigrants.
If the caps are meant to increase diversity, I can't see that it makes that much of a difference between the US and Canada. In the US, when people think of a typical immigrant they think a Latin American, in Canada, an Asian. In both countries, Europeans from Europe or Africans are not really the face of the typical immigrant.

Looking at the list of top ten US immigrant source countries (in 2015):

Mexico,
China,
India,
Philippines,
Cuba,
Dominican Republic,
Vietnam,
Iraq,
El Salvador,
Pakistan

Looking at the list for Canada (in 2015):

Philippines,
India,
China,
Iran,
Pakistan,
Syria,
US,
France,
UK,
Nigeria.

The 2016 list for Canada has similar countries, with the order switched around for some, and with Eritrea rather than Nigeria as number 10.

Maybe it's just me but I don't really perceive that great of a diversity difference among countries on the list, at least if that's what the cap was meant to do.

The US has more countries from the New World, Canada from the Old World. The major difference I see is the US has more Latin American (which Canada lacks) which makes sense geographically and Canada has still a few developed western countries on the list, probably a testament to the points system favoring them. Both countries have an Asian and Middle eastern presence. In both cases, the continent of Africa is underrepresented if at all.

Just for comparison, here is the UK in 2015, top senders by country of birth (don't know anything about their policy, whether it's more or less selective than North America and whether or not they have caps):

Poland,
India,
Pakistan,
Ireland,
Germany,
Romania,
Nigeria,
Bangladesh,
South Africa,
Italy,

It's more European-centered, but still includes Asian and African nations.

Quote:
Originally Posted by saffronleaf View Post
I can empathize with the desire to diversify the immigrant pool, but I think doing it on a per-country basis is a rather blunt and coarse way of going about it.

I keeping it open and letting the natural ebbs and flows in immigration patterns do the work is the best way, but if you must impose caps then regional caps are more reasonable (e.g., South Asia, East Asia, Latin America). Otherwise, the penalty on India and China is particularly severe. India, for example, has 29 states with 22 different official languages, has the largest populations of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, Bahaii and the 3rd largest Muslim population. It contains more people than the entirety of the Western Hemisphere. It's about as diverse, too. Yet it will have the same number of visas as Kuwait or Nicaragua, both of which are countries located in regions (the Arabian Peninsula or Central America) that are less diverse than India or China.

That also balances it with the other desire to bring qualified immigrants.
True and on your point about if countries and regions differ greatly in size, like Asia outnumbering all the other continents population-wise and individually, India and China outnumbering the people on many other continents, then how should diversity be spaced out?

Should Iceland, with around 330, 000 people, a third of a million get the same quota as a country like India, with over a billion and thus, thousands of times more populous?

Add on top of that, that the desire or incentive of immigrants to move from all the various countries is not equal (eg. developed parts of the world like Europe have not sent large numbers for a while). Africa probably has a lot of potential emigrants but only recently has it surpassed Europe in proportion of immigrants received by Canada (or the US).

Last edited by Capsicum; Nov 24, 2017 at 5:18 PM.
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  #52  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 5:08 PM
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Originally Posted by caltrane74 View Post
We need more Asians in Canada. But I would prefer some Cambodians, Malaysians, and South Chinese.

Phils and Thais also cool.
Actually, historically most Chinese immigration did come from the south of China (Cantonese-speaking areas near Hong Kong).

It's probably the case for Canada that it actually has a relatively large proportion from it (since the Hong Kong emigration wave was especially proportionally large to Vancouver and Toronto, versus to cities in most other western countries).
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  #53  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 5:12 PM
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Originally Posted by whatnext View Post
I don't necessarily want lower immigration per se, but if that's a consequence of more diversity I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Do you really think raising the quota based on any sound science as opposed to Justin saying "hey we're the immigration party, open the gates"? For several years now studies have shown Canada isn't providing many immigrants with great opportunities. Automation is only going to make this worse. I don't know how it is in your area, but in YVR I'd guess 90% of can drivers are recent arrivals from the Indian subcontinent. What happens to those jobs if adoption of Uber's self driving cars take off? And why are they stuck driving cabs if we have a much vaunted points system to attract skilled workers?
Is Canada having more of a problem of giving immigrants opportunities compared to other countries?

I'd imagine if automation is putting newcomers out of their jobs disproportionately, you'd hear about it more everywhere in the developed world.

And yet in places like the US, you don't hear that much about immigrants lacking job opportunities. In American discourse, the concern is not about unemployment or underemployment of immigrants but the native-born.
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  #54  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 5:14 PM
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Originally Posted by Capsicum View Post
Actually, historically most Chinese immigration did come from the south of China (Cantonese-speaking areas near Hong Kong).

It's probably the case for Canada that it actually has a relatively large proportion from it (since the Hong Kong emigration wave was especially proportionally large to Vancouver and Toronto, versus to cities in most other western countries).
Yeah, that's why when I was a kid the Chinese community in most of Canada's cities was very predominantly Cantonese speaking.

Maybe 10 or 20 years ago we started to see a shift and the community has become much more Mandarin speaking now.
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  #55  
Old Posted Nov 24, 2017, 5:31 PM
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One thing that I was thinking about was the fact that the Philippines is not much more of a large immigrant sending country to the US than to Canada.

Even though Canada has little geopolitical connection or history with the Philippines while the US does as it was under US control for a considerable time (after Spain lost it in the Spanish-American war). The Philippines was under American rule from the latest 1890s to after WWII ended, a significant amount of time, that seems to not be common knowledge for many North Americans.

Usually it seems that occupation, and colonial history leads to a large population of immigrants from the occupied country to the country of the occupier (eg. British and Indians, French and Algerians from their colonies, US and Mexico, Cuba etc. in the Mexican-American and Spanish-American war).

But not in the case of the Philippines and the US (even though much of the time of the Asian exclusion acts was around the time the Philippines was under US rule, there was no exceptionally proportionally large diaspora after independence like Algeria for France or India for Britain).
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  #56  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2017, 5:09 AM
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Originally Posted by lio45 View Post
Geographical proximity is a factor. Cultural proximity is a factor as well.

East Asians still mostly end up in the closest places (West Coast of Canada and the U.S., Singapore, Australia...) when they relocate for opportunities.

I'd say geographical proximity does matter.
Interestingly, many Canadian cities are a closer flight to Asia than continental US cities, due to being farther north (accounting for the curvature of the Earth).

I spent a little bit of time just out of boredom looking at various American and Canadian cities that are either on the west coast or have some history of Asian descent population, and their proximity to an Asian city, Hong Kong, using this Air Miles Calculator, https://www.airmilescalculator.com, in terms of flight distances and flight times. Of course in earlier times when immigration was by boat, this wouldn't completely apply as its path would very much be unlike planes that can fly over the arctic for a shorter route to save time.

Anchorage, Alaska, to Hong Kong -- 8177 kilometers, 10 hours 7 minutes.
Honolulu to Hong Kong -- 8961 kilometers, 11 hours 2 minutes.
Vancouver to Hong Kong -- 10287 kilometers, 12 hours 36 minutes.
Victoria, BC to Hong Kong -- 10312 kilometers, 12 hours 37 minutes.
Seattle to Hong Kong -- 10461 kilometers, 12 hours 48 minutes.
Edmonton to Hong Kong -- 10466 kilometers, 12 hours 48 minutes.
Calgary to Hong Kong -- 10624 kilometers, 12 hours 59 minutes.
San Francisco to Hong Kong -- 11147 kilometers, 13 hours 36 minutes.
Los Angeles to Hong Kong -- 11684 kilometers, 14 hours 14 minutes.
Toronto to Hong Kong -- 12569 kilometers, 15 hours 17 minutes.
New York to Hong Kong -- 12990 kilometers, 15 hours 46 minutes.

(1)Honolulu is the most Asian American city. 46% are of Asian descent.
(2)Vancouver is the most Asian Canadian city. 43% are of Asian descent.
(3)San Francisco is the most Asian American city in the continental US. 33% are of Asian descent.

Last edited by Capsicum; Dec 31, 2017 at 5:21 AM.
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  #57  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2018, 3:52 AM
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A few different factors:

- After WWII Canada allowed more immigration from many Commonwealth Countries (former parts of the British Empire), including south and eastern Asia. In particular Canada signed treaties with India, Pakistan and Ceylon in 1951 which allowed a higher number of immigrants from those countries. Canada also received a high number of Hong Kong migrants, especially once the city was returned to China in the 1990s.

- The immigration points system which was enacted in Canada gives more weight to immigrants that can speak English or French, are well educated and are economically beneficial to the country and less weight to country of origin. The US immigration system in contrast has historically been and remains more heavily based around having family already in the US that can sponsor new immigrants. This has remained the case even after the US abolished most race/nationality based restrictions and quotas on immigration in the 1960s. This likely made it easier for Asians to immigrate to Canada than the US.

To give an example in 2015, 63% of immigrants to Canada were admitted for economic reasons, 24% for family reunification and 12% as refugees. For the US 14% were admitted due to economic reasons, 65% for family reunification and 14% as refugees (see article here)

- Canada has allowed a much higher degree of immigration relative to our population size than the US, UK or other western countries. Since South and East Asia has a high population a lot of immigrants come from there. As a result we end up with a higher percentage of our population that is from South and East Asia relative to other western countries.

-Last reason is a mix of economic prosperity and location. South and Latin America isn't as well off economically as Canada, the US or Western Europe, so there is less incentive for people to immigrate there. The US also gets a much higher number of Hispanic migrants due to geographic proximity, existing Hispanic communities there and the fact that Spanish is a commonly spoken language in many regions.

Last edited by SF Thomas; Jan 4, 2018 at 4:02 AM.
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  #58  
Old Posted Jan 4, 2018, 7:57 PM
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It's also very upsetting when a city becomes less multicultural as it is bicultural. Vancouver city is overwhelmingly Chinese in the wealthy and politically powerful Westside with all other immigrants on the poor and socially/politically impotent Eastside.

Vancouver is not so much multicultural as it is Asian. The rare times you see a black person you still sort of assume they are US tourists. By calling Vancouver Asian is also a misnomer as there are many Filipinos and people from the Sub-Continent but they are COMPLETELY irrelevant compared to the Chinese socio-economic power and influence. In reality Vancouver is divided into 3 ethnic groups........Chinese, WASP, and everyone else.
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