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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, Canada is actually doing better than the US in assimilating and lifting immigrants into prosperity these days, because it has a more modern immigration system (having avoided legislative gridlock and populist backlashes, for the most part) coupled with birthright citizenship. Consequently, Canada has a larger proportion of immigrants than the US. It also slightly beats the US on most measures of human development.

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Canada is terrible at assimilating immigrants, the only reason we have less poverty is because our immigration laws are much tougher than the US' and we take in mostly richer immigrants.

As I mentioned below, Canada admits more immigrants per capita than the US does, and far more refugees (it surpasses the US in absolute numbers, not even per capita).

That doesn't mean we're not more selective. Numbers per capita say nothing about the selection process, especially when it's far lower in terms of sheer numbers.

The refugees we do take in (28k per year is nothing) get a decent amount of support mainly because most of our immigrants are relatively rich Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, etc...

New U.S. immigrants are about as educated as new Canadian immigrants: https://www.cato.org/blog/new-us-immigrants-are-educated-new...

In fact, new U.S. immigrants are a bit more likely to have advanced degrees.

More likely to have advanced degrees but less educated overall.

The US takes in more outliers due to high-paying jobs in SV and on Wall Street, Canada takes in richer immigrants on average. Your own charts reflect that.

Edit - look at Figure 3. 40% of immigrants to Canada have a bachelors or advanced degree. Versus only 29% of US immigrants.

And that doesn't even take into account the fact that many immigrants to Canada come here to go to university (paying more than double what local students pay).

You're ignoring all the untalented, unskilled immigrants the U.S. admits, that aren't refugees, which is what drives down U.S. numbers.

How much immigration in Canada is undocumented/illegal (depending on your political persuasion)?

Almost none. It exists but not in any large numbers because illegal immigrants can't work, get bank accounts, drivers licenses, go to schools, etc...

If you're a business owner and hire illegal immigrants, you risk up to 2 years jail time personally and a $50k fine. So almost no one takes that risk.

The few that are here illegally generally come legally, overstay and have family to harbour them.

And keep in mind I'm in an industry that, in the US, is known for employing illegal immigrants (restaurants). In 17 years, I've never seen one nor heard of anyone hiring them. I'm sure it happens in a few ethnic enclaves but it's definitely not typical.

I read a statistic somewhere that California alone has more than 10x as many illegal immigrants as all of Canada.

Of course I should also add, we do of course allow more legal immigration per capita than the US, many irregular border crossers are granted temporary status while their cases are processed and in general our bureaucracy seems less insane than the US'.

I'm skeptical that Canada does better at assimilating, just based on first hand empirical evidence I've seen in Vancouver and Toronto. I would agree that Canada is doing better at lifting people out of poverty currently.

Canada doesn’t do better at lifting people out of poverty. They’re just more selective in who they let in and don’t have a huge second world country at their southern border.

Canada's immigration rate is 5.3 per year per 1000 residents (200K per year, population 37.59M). The US immigration rate is 3.6 per year per 1000 residents (1.18M per year, population 327.2M). And in absolute (not per capita!) terms, Canada resettles more refugees than the US [1]. The US is in fact more selective (probably owing to decades of legislative gridlock leaving us with an outdated bureaucratic nightmare of an immigration system nobody on either the left or the right likes).

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/19/canada-now-...

200k per year isn't that much. And yes Canada is more selective. Per capita numbers (especially when absolute numbers are that low) say nothing about how selective we are.

From the same source you just shared there's a graph of refugee resettlements.

Canada only is ahead of the US as of 2018. Historically Canada hasn't even been close.

Imagine two countries of 100,000 people. The first lets in 1,000 people per year, all of postgrad degrees. The second lets in 500 per year selected from a lottery.

Which is more selective?

I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that Canada has less selective immigration. The Canadian system is merit based and has a relatively low rate of illegal immigration. The US has 50 million hispanic Americans (about 13 million more people than the entirety of Canada). Almost all of their ancestors were not in this country 70 years ago. And many of their ancestors came to this country illegally and, thus, faced no sort of selective filter whatsoever.

> and don’t have a huge second world country at their southern border.

Some might dispute that claim.

Please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site in its intended spirit, we'd be grateful.

Edit: I misread the comment. Sorry!

Please don't post flamebait to HN. We've had to ask you this before. We ban accounts that do it. I don't want to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.

Hey dang, I agree with your warnings down thread. I let the person I was responding to get to me and I should have conducted myself better. Sorry. I’m having a hard time figuring out what the issue is with this particular comment, though.

I went back to look for the obvious flamebait which I saw in there, and realized that it was I who had misread your comment. Argh! I'm sorry.

Moderation is guesswork done in haste, because that's the only way to get through the mountain of content that piles up every day. But it's really bad to get scoldings wrong.

In case you're curious, I read your comment as from a Canadian perspective, referring to the U.S. as a second-world country as a snarky swipe. Most likely I was primed to do this because I'm Canadian and have sometimes heard people talk that way. But clearly you were making an economic argument with that statement, not taking a nationalistic swipe, so there was no need for a moderation reply. Now that I read more closely, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21495051 was the comment that actually did the thing I read into yours, so I'll post a moderation reply there.

No worries. I definitely need to work on my tone when I get riled up (as evidenced by my remarks down thread; European chauvinism regarding the US is a pet peeve of mine), so the larger point still stands.

Thanks again for what you do on here. HN is my favorite place to exchange ideas.

Appreciated. And given your username I hope you saw the toaster threads!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432144

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164014

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