An open society, Canada’s best response to immigration
vancouversun.com
vancouversun.com
Just talking about my experience, but after living in other 3 countries, the openness of Canadians to immigrants and the culture that they bring in is astonishing. This is probably why everyone I know that immigrated to Canada had respect for the country from the start. Cannot say the same for most other countries.
I feel like the fast (at least in immigration terms) response that the Canadian government gives speeds up the integration and lowers worry about future uncertainty.
(In 2018, just over half of immigration to Canada was via points system, with 28% and 14% family reunification and refugees respectively. [0])
The points based system isn't a panacea. As a Canadian, I see it as a tradeoff: I dislike the fact that it makes access to Canada easier for the wealthy and privileged, but it's transparent and predictable and (hopefully) aligned with the skills that help immigrants succeed.
I'm no expert, but there are other differences you could look at. For example, having family in your community is a strong predictor of economic success for immigrants, so if you really care about successful integration, you might want to prioritize family reunification. It feels like the Canadian and US discourse on this have started to diverge. ("chain migration"?)
In any case, a complicated topic. [1] I certainly don't know what system is best. But I feel it's a bit reductive to only focus on the point-based aspect.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ca... [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
It seems pretty rare in Canada and even then those incidents were within the last few years when the overton window moved all over the west. Multiple accounts of immigrants from Asian countries who lived in Toronto 30 years+ never experienced any outward racism get told to go back to their country recently. It's pretty surreal.
Also theory of my Canadian friends is that all the anger Canadians might have is taken out at the hockey ice rink!
In the end hatred comes from ignorance, big cities are better because people interact and realize humans from somewhere else are in fact still humans.
It can be pretty rough in places. People seem to forget that Trailer Park Boys and Letterkenny are set in Canada. The Wolverine's (X-Men) backstory involves cage fighting in Northern Alberta -- which is absolutely truth-in-television, cuz I live in AB and damn near every oil worker is waiting for their MMA career to take off.
This carries over to immigration -- there is a lot of eye rolling and subtle dislike of the temporary foreign workers ("TFWs"). My in-laws in rural AB have, uh, strong thoughts about foreigners. Quebec is a notable difference too, as they have a reputation for not being fond of non-European, non-Francophone folks in their borders.
So far they are quite successful in the first and not so successful in the second. But on paper they excel at both.
If you want to see this strategy fail try to move to some small town outside of the top 5 and see how well that integration works in practice.
The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail. Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the world because of the sparseness of the country, and yet our telecoms are the most profitable in the world. Same for our banks.
No, Canada's real problem is its lack of self-confidence... we still coddle our banks and telecoms, regulating to protect them against foreign competition while failing to enforce competition laws that would prevent anti-competitive behaviour within the country. We seem to be afraid of competing globally on a level playing field even though this would make us better.
It's a very frustrating place to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you have anything remotely resembling a libertarian bent.
With Telcos it’s not that different too; if the large one as in those who actually have infrastructure fail it can lead to a catastrophic cascade failure when you can’t call an ambulance not to mention can’t do business because your phones or internet are down you are screwed.
Telcos are like roads it might seem really easy to set new ones up but if you remove all the existing infrastructure that was setup over a century you end up with a lot of short routes that lead up to nowhere.
For example, the idea that banks should maintain appropriate reserves and refrain from taking on certain kinds of risks doesn’t imply that banks should be the arbiters of who is allowed to send and receive digital payments. The movement away from cash to digital has handed them extraordinary power over all economic activity in the country.
Telcos have responded to attempts to shake up the industry by acting in non-competitive ways, the primary reason why NONE of the new entrants from the last wireless spectrum auction still exist as independent entities, and why no foreign telcos have any interest in investing in the space. We don’t enforce our own competition laws, leading to a small group of extraordinarily profitable companies at the expense of the rest of the economy.
https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-by-country/
Brazil and Russia are not first world European countries. Germany, France and the UK are and have a very small fraction of Canada's landmass.
> The vast majority of the country is within 100km of the US border, and frankly we've massively under-invested in critical infrastructure like high-speed rail.
My point exactly.
> Our telecoms routinely claim that prices are the highest in the world because of the sparseness of the country, and yet our telecoms are the most profitable in the world. Same for our banks.
That is due to monopolistic tendencies and protectionism in Canada.
> No, Canada's real problem is its lack of self-confidence... we still coddle our banks and telecoms, regulating to protect them against foreign competition while failing to enforce competition laws that would prevent anti-competitive behaviour within the country. We seem to be afraid of competing globally on a level playing field even though this would make us better.
Precisely.
> It's a very frustrating place to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you have anything remotely resembling a libertarian bent.
I think it is frustrating for all Entrepreneurs, which is the major reason most of them move South of the border as soon as they reach a certain size (or are acquired).
What are you counting as very small? They have 3-4 times the population of the like of Denmark, Belgium and Portugal. They're comparable with Spain and Poland, which few people would consider very small European countries.
> country that is suffering so much from having to maintain continent size infrastructure
This brings some challenges, but infrastructure doesn't scale 1:1 with the land area of a country, 99% of the infrastructure can be on 1% of the land area and serve most people. It's the urbanization level that matters, not the geography.
People go to Vancouver relatively infrequently. It's a hour and 45 minute ferry ride, but then there's basically an hour on each side getting to the ferry plus waiting in line for the ferry(which can be a very long time if it's busy). It's not something people here do regularly. I fly elsewhere more often than I go to Vancouver.
Also lol to town.
Great place to be if you can swing it, though. Better weather than Seattle/Vancouver.
"nine of 10 recent Chinese immigrants arrive in Metro Vancouver with enough money to immediately buy homes. But only half hold down jobs during their first five years in Canada, while four of 10 report they’re surviving on low incomes."
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-how...
E: Canadian immigration also heavily preferences brain draining talent and wealth from other countries, it's obviously in our self-interest. But it also creates losers, both in the developing countries losing out on talent and wealth, but also existing citizens who has to compete with increasingly inflated human resource pool. Again on paper this should be addressable.
He says he's been getting lots of interesting emails since this piece.
Edit: A little more context: this was in response to some other right-leaning piece (if you read the comments on the article you can see references to that).
https://scholar.harvard.edu/stantcheva/publications/immigrat...
Immigration is great on balance but it doesn't mean there's not legitimate concerns on number, diversity and education level.
> Paris Empirical Political Economy Seminar, a monthly seminar series co-organized by the Department of Economics at Sciences Po and the Paris School of Economics.
which is funny or scary or silly depending your state of mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Czech_Republic_...
Stagnant wage growth in part driven by our immigration system is an economic and social problem.
The underclass of workers on student visas being payed below minimum wage to work at 711 or deliver uber eats is a growing social and economic problem.
Australia should serve as a warning.
New Zealand once took a lot of pacific island immigrants which were needed as labor for the protected auto industry and other labor intensive jobs at the time. What we're left with now is a large underclass of people over-represented in crime, unemployment, obesity, lack of education, etc. In the long term, that wave of immigration has surely hurt the country's economy and the existing people's wellbeing.
There are also investor visas (if you have $400k to drop into the Canadian economy), startup visas (if you can secure funding from a specific set of orgs), and the NAFTA TN visa, which is a rubber stamp visa for US and Mexican workers.
> Since 2017, approximately 150,000 asylum seekers have claimed protection
This is pretty low number. Many countries took millions of refugees.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-resettled-most-refug...
Do you have a source for many countries taking in millions?
1. https://irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-border-...
( and this is just the sw border, not accounting for flights ) 2. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration/fy-20...
For example, although Sweden got praised for accepting lots of refugee applicants, more than half got repatriated in less than a year.
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/australian-immigration-hum...
Note that there is a distinction between refugees (the third column) and total immigration (the second column). Even total immigration never tops 200,000 per year.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia...