Canada takes in ~250K immigrants annually; should we take more?

[Miu]

Originally Posted by ue

^ Weird. What kind of immigrants is Japan accepting, anyways? Surprised Germany is as high as it is too.

Why would Germany surprise you? It's been the Western world's #2 immigrant destination for a long time.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by eternallyme

If there was a moratorium placed on immigration (except for legitimate refugees) and a shutdown or change (requiring full salaries) of the TFW program, how long until we reach full employment with the existing population? That assumes people move where jobs are (i.e. unemployed in Ontario are persuaded to Alberta). The net migration would be slightly negative due to emigration in that time.

Like any market, it would find its equilibrium. Wages would rise, more people might be able to afford to have one breadwinner and birthrates would likely rise. With the current flood, wages are kept depressed, housing prices skyrocket and nobody has time or extra cash to raise kids.

We all know many fields of work require fewer and fewer people due to technology (farming, manufacturing etc). The days when we could provide hordes of unskilled immigrants with reasonably wellpaying jobs is over, so why continue to admit so many? It's a UK-style recipe for disaffected immigrant youth and ghettoization.

[SkydivePilot]

In the poll above, 'Less Immigrants' should be stated as: Fewer Immigrants.

[ue]

Originally Posted by Miu

Why would Germany surprise you? It's been the Western world's #2 immigrant destination for a long time.

Fair point, it's just when I think of large immigrant centres, I don't think of Berlin or Munich, even if they do have large immigrant communities. I think of London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, and New York. It's probably because I'm just more familiar with immigration patterns in the English and French speaking worlds.

[SignalHillHiker]

It's natural to associate immigration with visible diversity - but it's not like that in every country.

A significant percentage of Austria's population is comprised of immigrants - but if all of the people from the former Yugoslavia living there moved elsewhere, there'd be hardly any immigrants left. Croatian is even an official language in part of Austria. If the Turks left with them, there'd really be no immigrants left in Austria at all.

4.2% of the population speaks an ex-Yugoslavia language. 2.3% speaks Turkish. The next highest are the Hungarians at 0.2%.

[RyLucky]

Originally Posted by SkydivePilot

In the poll above, 'Less Immigrants' should be stated as: Fewer Immigrants.

Thank you!

Or, alternatively you could have said "less immigration"

[theman23]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

markham has a much stronger asian connection from my understanding, lots of second generation immigrants living there still.

Most of them because they can't afford to move out of their parent's place.

[theman23]

Originally Posted by BretttheRiderFan

Being a lawyer in a different legal jurisdiction isn't exactly the same transition as being a doctor and working with fellow human beings though.

Being a physician is not the same in India as it is in Canada. Not all parts of the world practice evidence based medicine to the degree we do in Canada. Not even the USA.

Not to mention that sometimes the evidence is different in certain parts of the world. And MRI for a back pain would be even more useless in India than it would be in Canada.

[big W]

Originally Posted by Spocket

I know that. You missed the point.

I went to see a doctor at a large hospital here in China due to an inflammation in my knee. Scientific medicine. All the most modern technology. Really quite impressive. And what did the doctor tell me ? Said it was the cold wind that caused my knee to swell up and turn red. In the spring after a long cold winter. This is a guy who knows something about scientific medicine, pharmacology, and modern diagnostic equipment. And he still managed to tell me what the average medieval European barber would have told me. That was neither the first time I got such a nonsense diagnosis from people who really should know better and I'm definitely not the only Westerner to have had such an experience. A lot of Westerners find themselves self-diagnosing and self-medicating to a certain degree because they don't want to spend money on useless pills that they already know do absolutely nothing or get a diagnosis from a doctor that sounds like it was ripped directly out of some 'herbalist's' handbook.

So does that man have value as a potential immigrant ? Yes but not because he can come over and begin working as a doctor. He would need to have his previous mix of science and superstition run through a sieve and then have the precipitate vastly expanded upon. He's got a good amount of knowledge but it's mixed with nonsense that he was trained to believe is actually medically sound.

The question becomes whether or not we as Canadians should support him until he becomes a qualified doctor up to Canadian standards. My answer is no for the simple reason that we already have enough manual laborers (which is what he would more or less wind up being until he got his degree) and if we decide instead to pay for it ourselves then why aren't we doing that with our own citizens first ?

I think you've got the wrong impression here. I'm not against immigration at all. Quite the contrary, I'm all for as much as we can support. That's the key though...as much as we can support. It's harder than most people realize to get the people we want and Canada consistently fails to reach its immigration targets because we can't find people with the skills we need.

To me it makes more sense to offer free university tuition in selected fields to all Canadian citizens so that we have room at the bottom to accept those with few if any skills (providing they meet other requirements)

Another thing you need to think about is how post-secondary education operates in different countries. In East Asia it's really hit and miss but for most kids, high school is actually the most difficult time of their lives. University is the downward slope. Sometimes it's a testament to how grueling high school is for these kids (and it is. It basically robs them of some of their most important years) and at other times it's a testament to how useless a lot of their post-secondary institutions are. Unfortunately, the latter possibility is usually the case. That was what I was trying to impress upon you in my previous post. If they didn't get their degree in a fully developed nation then there's a good chance that you have no use for whatever skills their degree claims they've been trained in.

As I said earlier, when they make the application for immigration, we do security, health checks etc. What we should also do is have them apply for acceptance into their professional field so this doctor would have to apply to become a member of the college of physicians before he comes to Canada and in the mean time we would have to check his credentials, and part of getting into the college of physicians is writing an exam.

[flar]

I say fewer. We have too many people already.

[rbt]

Far more and younger than me.

I want a bidding war between people for taking care of me when I'm old. Not to have to pay a large premium (see Japan) for basic care.

I'm horribly selfish; open the gates to the 25 and under crowd. I'll even support tax increases to pay for free education (particularly medical school) to anyone with a 3.5GPA, including the new `bedside manner` course and the more advanced `dealing with crotchety old people` course.

[1overcosc]

More. I'd like to significantly gut the TFW program and replace the TFW's with immigrants. I'd much rather we fill in our labour shortages with people who are actually going to stay here and become Canadian than people who will leave after two years and never come back.

I also want to see the acceleration of the multiculturalization of this country. Right now amazing things are happening from this country's ethnic mix. We're literally incorporating the whole damn world into our culture. Youth are reading manga and eating schawarma. It makes for a richer experience for us, broadens our horizons.

Anglo-Canada's greatest strength is that we've created a culture and a society that naturally lends itself to multiculturalism, and that is enriched by it instead of damaged or threatened.

Many other countries in the world are culturally closed and immigration just creates problems--just look at all the crap that's happening in Western Europe with their immigrants, for example.

[Surrealplaces]

I'm good with where the levels are now. To me the number doesn't matter so much as what type of immigrants come to Canada, I don't want to see immigration into Canada just for the sake of it. As long as they are a benefit to Canada, it doesn't matter the number.

[eternallyme]

Anyway, I say fewer for now most likely:

1) Eliminate TFW's, and strongly encourage unemployed Canadians from other regions with high unemployment and little potential to fill those jobs, with grants for relocation, spousal/family job assistance in those regions and other expenses if necessary. Make it a strong incentive to move to work instead of staying on EI. And if regions/provinces have a hard time, they need to find good ways to create jobs and send business.

2) Once those are filled, then evaluate the unemployment rate. Determine where immigrants are necessary, and give those necessary employees - and their immediate families - from other countries incentives to permanently relocate to those regions as well.

3) Legitimate refugees should be an exception and should be the same as it is now.

[Procrastinational]

In the short term (next 30 years) we'll probably need more just to offset the baby boomer cohort retiring.
However, past that, immigration is going to become less relevant as the countries that people are emigrating from see their birthrates drop and populations inevitably begin to decline. This might be right near the end of the century in certain countries, but eventually it will happen.

I don't get why we aren't making a long term commitment to try and get fertility rates to rise. It won't happen quickly, and it may be challenging, but all the more reason to start now. Thinking very long term (past 2100 potentially), we need to start figuring out how we can get to a long term equilibrium of replacement level fertility and low immigration levels. INFINITE GROWTH IS A FARCE. Eventually growth must stop, and I think stabilizing is more manageable than declining.


All that aside, I have no issue with higher immigration in the short to medium term, as long as it's done right.

-I think our prioritizing skilled immigrants has worked very well. Much better than the States for instance, where they have been swamped by low skilled workers.

-No TFW's. There isn't much pressure to integrate into Canadian culture if you don't think you'll be staying for good.

-Even higher priority for fluent English and French speakers. I don't see any reason not to have relatively minimal restrictions on immigration from Australia, France, New Zealand, The States, Belgium, UK etc.

-Over the next few years, I think we could be doing a better job recruiting young, educated immigrants from some of the stagnant economies in the EU... 50%+ unemployment amongst youth in places like Spain is a pretty compelling reason to leave if you've just finished schooling and see little opportunity.

-I get the whole economic investment opportunity of bringing in wealthy immigrants, but personally I'd rather see someone with a solid work ethic willing to make an honest living to better the prospects for their children take that place than that of someone who is already very well-off in their home country... This sentiment probably comes from seeing all the N's on the back of Aston Martins and Ferraris in Richmond... I might be a little jealous


I know we no longer have country quotas, but I personally think that capping immigrants from any single country to no more than 5% of total immigration would be a huge boon to multiculturalism in this country, as well as integration (you'd pretty much be forced to learn English or French as it would be the only language more than 5 or 10% had in common). As opposed to having say a third from India and a third from China.

The thing that worries me about mandating immigrants move to the north or smaller towns/cities is that it would be very easy for the local population to be overwhelmed. Say for some reason 100,000 of the immigrants next year are made to move to the Yukon next year. All of a sudden, immigrants make up 75% of the population. My worry is that with the geographic isolation in the north, coupled with huge numbers of immigrants from a single country placed up there, you may end up forming some sort of new nation within Canada with an entirely different culture and language. We already have a strong separatist component in Quebec trying to pull the country apart, we don't really need a Swahili Nunavut, Arabic Yukon, or Polish NWT in the mix as well.

That's not to say we shouldn't be sending immigrants to build up the population up north, we absolutely should (preferably immigrants of diverse backgrounds rather than a single group), but we should also provide incentives for Canadians to move up north as well to balance the population growth.

In a nutshell though, if we don't get our fertility rates to replacement level, we will be screwed at some point... When the population growth slows in developing countries (and as poor countries become wealthy), the immigration taps will inevitably run dry.

[SignalHillHiker]

I support TFWs, but with more regulation. They brought over a load of Irishmen last summer or the summer before last, promised them work, and then laid them off shortly after they arrived. Many of them left jobs in Ireland to come here. It was a shameful way to treat them.

[SignalHillHiker]

I completely disagree with forcing people to move from regions of high unemployment to those with lower unemployment, even within the same province (though it would be attempting to support such an effort). That already takes care of itself for the most part, and if we've learned anything from Resettlement, it's that forced relocation creates more problems than it solves. People's mental health is compromised enough just having to leave voluntarily for work - even that leads to a whole host of negative consequences, from increased depression and drug/alcohol abuse to broken families.

We need more devolution, more power to the provinces. If we, for example, could control our fisheries and immigration, we'd probably be much better off. Our existence has no value to the federal government. It'd be much easier for Ottawa if Halifax was the federation's easternmost city. But it means everything to us, and we'll actually fight for it. Japan is doing brilliant things to save its struggling islands; there's so much more we could be doing here but we're not in control.

[Procrastinational]

Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker

We need more devolution, more power to the provinces.

There's a strange consequence to that, if provinces receive full control over immigration, in that you almost end up with an immigration externality, so long as there is free travel within Canada.

For instance, say the population of Nova Scotia votes to eliminate immigration directly to the province, but then say New Brunswick adopts an open immigration policy and lets in 500,000. You could end up with a large chunk of those immigrants moving to NS after a short amount of time. So regardless of the wishes of NS voters, they end up with little choice in the matter.

I could see some major conflicts arising between provinces over this.

The provinces don't actually end up with that much direct control over their immigration unless they can restrict people from moving, which is impractical.

[SignalHillHiker]

I'm comfortable with that. Once new immigrants are settled and achieve whatever status it is that allows them to move freely throughout Canada - permanent resident, perhaps? - then they're welcome to do so. We definitely cannot restrict that.

But we should have more control over how many and who gets in. We don't need to same types of immigrants.

St. John's, for example, is popular with immigrants from Ireland and the United Kingdom. And they're a natural cultural fit. We should be able to go to them and say, "C'mon over, b'ys!". If they move on to other provinces after that, so be it. At least we had a chance.

We also have "large" (by our standards) communities of newcomers who are Muslim or from sub-Saharan Africa. Consequently, it's very easy for people from those two backgrounds to find a niche here.

• Video Link • Video Link

So if we can go to Turkey, and Pakistan, and Bangladesh ourselves, instead of hoping for whatever trickles down from Canada's federal policies... it'd give us a much better starting point.

This is a great place to live. I expect we should be able to keep at least 30-40% of immigrants who settle here.

[Henbo]

Originally Posted by whatnext

Like any market, it would find its equilibrium. Wages would rise, more people might be able to afford to have one breadwinner and birthrates would likely rise. With the current flood, wages are kept depressed, housing prices skyrocket and nobody has time or extra cash to raise kids.

We all know many fields of work require fewer and fewer people due to technology (farming, manufacturing etc). The days when we could provide hordes of unskilled immigrants with reasonably wellpaying jobs is over, so why continue to admit so many? It's a UK-style recipe for disaffected immigrant youth and ghettoization.

But wouldn't wages rise => companies move away because they can no longer compete => people become unemployed => wages drop back to equilibrium?

We do live in a different era now with high levels of automation, but what if we gave priority to immigrants that want to be entrepreneurs and start a business in Canada, employing Canadians and other immigrants?

I feel like that way would could employ more Canadians than simply shutting our borders to immigrants