You're right. I don't live in Canada anymore, but even my moderate and liberal friends in Canada regularly complain about immigrants. That sentiment feels very new to me, though. I think Canada did have a positive view of immigrants for a long time.
We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.
This analysis[1] from the Cato Institute found the opposite: “immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits”.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...
$150.7B yearly cost even after accounting for the tax revenue they supposedly bring.
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?
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'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.
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.
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.
But that probably won’t work in the long term.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
Everything old is new again, in this case slavery.
What century is this, the 17th? I thought we graduated from hauling tons of slaves across oceans.
> 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.
For context for non Canadians, youth unemployment is at a decades high while we continue to increase immigration specifically for low income jobs.
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.
What's the difference against between people from Eastern Europe and those "other parts of the world" ?
You're implying a big difference, but I can't put my finger on what it might be.
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 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.
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
...because of immigration? Birth rates have been far below replacement for decades now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_C...
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?
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...
This
Obviously that's an extreme example, but other cultural differences will affect you as well.
[1] https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/11/03/violence-at-hindu-tem...
- Anonymous Roman Citizen, 412 AD
Also, I live in Germany half of the year, and there most of my neighbors don’t speak any English, and my neighborhood is fine. I don’t see the problem you are describing with your example.
If that’s your “extreme” example, I am curious what your day-to-day ones would be.
Perhaps it’s uncharitable but I am having a hard time seeing how this doesn’t alias to simple racism.
I think most would agree that it is easier to form connections with those who are more similar to oneself. Call it racism or tribalism if you want, but that's reality.
Why? You literally say on your very next sentence that it’s not - that diversity must be destroyed through integration and a melting pot.
Diversity and immigration always has a cost and that’s the destruction of your existing culture in part. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But you can’t overdo it.
And getting pissed at the people that don’t integrate is barking up the wrong tree. They never agreed to that and they should be left alone to live their lives.
We should go after the people that allowed this to happen.
Have some sense of perspective and you'll be less likely to turn into an old bitter man, shaking his fist at clouds.
To me it's pretty obvious not all cultures are good to mix with.
Which isn’t terribly far fetched - apparently some gladiators were basically sports stars, with death.
The answer to bad ideas is not to isolate them. It's to outcompete them. The battlefield of the modern world is the hearts and minds of it's citizens. If our morality is superior and our ideas are successful, we should just keep doing what we do and let them spread, like a virus.
This reads a lot like "everything is a social construct".
A culture is a property that's shared by the population. The absence of such a shared property is not its presence.
New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage that never existed in the first place and will do damage to themselves and everyone around them by trying.
Are you making the analogy because it sounds poetic, or because it actually makes sense? Humans are not plants, and they're not grown or raised to be killed for someone else's benefit.
If you insist on the analogy anyway: livestock are homogeneous just fine. Also you seem to be forgetting that weeds and invasive species are also things that can destroy ecosystems.
> New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage
That's what a melting pot is. It creates something new. You seem to be struggling to understand what people are actually arguing for or against.
This sounds like a propaganda position. We hear it in the US too. It's a typical Republican strategy to take an area where they can't formulate a coherent economic or policy agenda, and turn it into a social issue. Instead of stealing our jobs, the immigrants are now stealing our cats.
I think it is ok to just say “we don’t want poor immigrants. We want immigrants with something to offer.”
We actually have the opposite problem, to some degree. Acquiring more skilled talent from abroad has depressed skilled labour compensation here. And acquiring people from abroad with $$ to invest in the property market has led to ridiculously high housing price inflation.
Here's an official government source which says that ~40% of immigrants in 2023 are not in the "middle-income range or above", i.e. they are low-income. [1] The same source says that 75k out of the 450k admitted were refugees.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
In the US most immigration sentiment is around illegal immigrants and fear of crime. In Canada, up until COVID there was basically no ill sentiment towards immigrants because no illegal immigrants and not really much immigrant crime.
COVID flipped the job markets and economy, so people turned their eyes to skilled immigrants. Most Americans are frankly not that skilled as workers, have lower educational attainment than Canadians, it's a more rural, spread out population, etc. Plus the illegal immigration is still a bigger gripe, so they never turned as much on skilled immigrants during the downfall. Canada turned sharply and many who moved there and followed all the rules feel the anger of the population towards them is way higher than they expected (or feel they deserve).
A lot of people claim the immigrants don't want to integrate, but it's largely untrue. These are usually some of the most Westernized out of their peer groups from India already, to even consider immigrating to Canada / US. They also tend to be wealthier to afford the tuition to do so. That makes people happy when the economy is good, but it sucks when jobs are scarce.
Your understanding is outdated
What is "integration" mean to you?
Canada got their share of Chinese immigrants with $$$. That's how real estate in Vancouver ended up being inacessible for younger Canadians.
The real true difference is that the economy and job market flipped, and now there are layoffs, fierce job competition, and inflation. That type of environment makes people generally jealous and angry at others, and so there is a new focus on immigrants (when they probably haven't changed themselves much, I mean why would they?)
It was not the norm that 60% of all immigration was from a single country...
Additionally immigration has objectively increased at a time of large unemployment which used to not be allowed until the current government lifted the restriction on 6% unemployment.
You can have a mixture of opinions but we gotta stick to the facts first
Here's the stats for you:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-581-x/2023001/sec2-en...
Asian origin (all of Asia including China and India) has been the dominant origin for immigration to Canada since 2006, and it has only changed from ~40% to ~50% since then.
India alone accounted for 27% of immigrants admitted to Canada on a temporary basis in 2022: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
Now we can stick to the facts? Will you accept the facts or no?
Kind of the whole issue, isn't it?
They came here for better life. Nothing is wrong with that. Country can use it to its advantage or fuck it up.
Most of that’s left of that is place names and weird foods in some areas.
Although that's what they teach us in Canadian schools, in my experience it's the opposite. Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.
There are some remarkably insular subcultures within the US like Latinos, Hasidic Jews, the Chinese (in some places), Amish and variants, Indians in certain towns like Edison, Black people in certain cities, to a degree that exists nowhere in Canada (and no, Brampton doesn't compare).
Subcultures in general are just not a thing in Canada, it's very much a monoculture.
I know you are making mostly an anecdotal claim, but if you compare Seattle and Vancouver, and more aptly, their suburbs Bellevue and Richmond, I think the American side is more assimilated simply because we don’t have the percentages of Chinese that the Vancouver area has.