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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1]

The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.

I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure.

[1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...

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>The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in.

And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.

> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.

This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.

The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over.

In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

>> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.

>This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children.

But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?

If you look at the chart, you'll see there is a substantial global negative correlation between income and fertility. High income countries have low fertility. Everywhere.

The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?

>The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?

I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.

Applying pressure through substantial incentives is probably the better way of expressing it. I guess incentivizing someone enough is the same as forcing them but I digress. Why substantially incentivize locals to have children, when there's strong worldwide negative correlation between income/development and child birth? Why are local children inherently better than immigrants? To the extent that the society functions well and immigrants integrate into the broader country, what difference does it make?

I would further argue that "bringing in immigrants" isn't the "easy way out" or even likely the "cheap way out" but rather probably more challenging. Creating a society that deals well with the gaijin isn't easy.

I see no evidence that free daycare or longer parental leave actually incentivize adults to have children. The birth rate in Finland is 1.49 and falling rapidly, Sweden and Norway are 1.8ish. Iceland is 1.75. Germany is 1.57. Spain is 1.34. These places have incredibly generous programs and are well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Finland's mat leave is 4.2 months and pat leave is 2.2 months and offers public daycare centers. If that's not long enough or free enough to boost their brith rate over 1.49 I'm not sure what you'd suggest.

Yes, mat/pat leave is great, and should exist. So should free daycare. However, I don't see any evidence that'll move the needle. If anything, it appears that pushes the birth rate further down being correlated broadly with increased development.

eh... sounds typical right wing comment. Japan has low immigration rates, yet they are not having any more babies. So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants), Italy (lax about immigration), or even Albania (has outflow of people).

It is a world wide issue in all western countries, and it is independent of net 'in or out' immigration. The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.

Even if you stopped immigration, people would not be making more babies, as countries that don't have net immigration still don't make more babies. Baby making seems independent with net immigration rates.

>So is Hungary (most restrictive country in EU for immigrants)

Hungary incentivizes its native population to have larger families, a policy of Victor Orban's, and has seen consistent growth in its fertility rate since ~2010. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the way it should be tackled.

> The more developed a country becomes, the less babies it makes.

America and the UK's birth rates nose-dived in the mid-60's and hasn't recovered since. I'm failing to draw a connection to these countries being drastically more developed by the end of the 60s than they were at the start of them.

Right, in the long term it would be beneficial, but the infrastructure takes time to build up. Most immigrants understandably crowd in either Vancouver, Toronto or a couple of other big cities because that's where the opportunities are. Not sure where you live, but the food and rent have gone up dramatically in these cities. Forget about being able to afford buying a house or an apartment even if you've been responsibly saving up. The commute before covid was killer. I don't understand this off-hand dismissal of concerns because I don't have citations.

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