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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Canada has made a concerted effort in recent years to accelerate immigration and increase their population. I believe their population recently went up by a million in 1 year for the first time ever for example. For a smallish country, that's a massive leap.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65047436

On an individual level, I'm sure most immigrants are fine people. But there's a social cost to rapidly increasing the population too much, too fast without also increasing the amount of housing and other resources to take care of people and integrate them culturally into a country.

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Immigration is great if you have integration programs and systems in place deal with it. Canadian immigration has been rapid AND unstructured. Justin Trudeau is fond of saying we're the words first "postnational" country - we have "no national identity" - I'm a 6th generation Canadian and that idea boggles my mind.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-exp...

Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants? The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations:

  In Saskatchewan, First Nations leaders are sounding the alarm on a “crisis” of on-reserve violence.

> Is the excess violent crime committed by recent immigrants?

Important to this discussion is that I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes. I'm just pointing out that a rapid growth necessarily stretches social resources everywhere which might have an effect on crime overall.

If you have loads of new people and housing costs are X% higher because of that for instance, I'm sure that fact alone can have some impact on people who are on the edge of deciding that crime might be worth it because they can't earn an acceptable quality of life otherwise.

> The article says that the spike in violence has even affected First Nations:

These aren't like some isolated monastic communities with literally zero interaction with the outside world, are they? Unless these communities are completely isolated with literally zero interaction with the outside world, it seems logical to think that a lack of social resources and negative effects in the rest of Canada at least indirectly impacts them as well.

> I'm not necessarily saying that recent immigrants are committing a disproportionate share of crimes

I see. The reason I thought that is that you wrote that immigrants haven’t been culturally integrated which seemed in this context as if you meant that they were the perpetrators.

Do you know if areas with more immigration have seen a larger increase in violence? Indirect effects through housing should be correlated with that.

1) I'm an American who is not super familiar with Canadian crime statistics.

2) I'd welcome reading any links on what you said, albeit with a healthy bit of skepticism as bad statistical interpretations are very common in this domain.

I'm in similar shoes. I was just curious to understand the Canadian situation better.

I am not an expert on immigration, nor on crime. From what I have heard, in the US, immigrants have a lower crime rate than US-born citizens. This 2018 review article says that this negative relationship is weak:

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-crimin...

I don't know what research was done in the 5 years since.

It's such an uncomfortable topic that this right wing news article doesn't even hint at that as a possibility. Canada's Most Wanted list seems to support your theory, though.

https://www.boloprogram.org/

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