then those countries should be receiving the benefits of immigrant-entrepreneurs and now be hotbeds of innovation because of it. it doesn't seem like that's happening.
There are considerable innovations coming out of that country - the fact that it's not a hotbed for internet startups seems hardly relevant in the big picture. Businesses are being created by immigrants, who are creating wealth and employment in their respective communities. The fact that this in general has nothing to do with dotcoms is really a detail. Canada continues to be extremely competitive in traditional engineering disciplines, and is world-leading in many fields of science, not least of which is molecular engineering. The University of Toronto, after all, still holds the patent on insulin.
Next time you see a video of the International Space Station, with its bleeding-edge, unprecedented robotic arm, see if you can zoom and see which nation's flag is on it. Or dig into the US's collection of scientific and communications satellites and see how much of their R&D actually occurs in Canada.
I hope people on HN realize that the word "innovation" applies to all manners of fields. So often I feel like this community has blinders on, and very narrowly define "innovation" as "things that occur in my field".
The benefit may indeed be non-zero, but it doesn't seem that the benefit is signficant.
Google is a juggernaut that I won't touch simply because they're such an outlier, even in the get-big-fast world of dotcoms.
And let's be honest, in terms of job-creating power, this "innovative" industry of software is a drop in the bucket: http://jobs.lovetoknow.com/Largest_American_Employers - the employers with the largest employment impact are not the ones we would traditionally consider "innovative".
For reference, Google has about 30K employees world-wide.
In any case, we can argue about semantics and labor theory all day. Why don't you go to Toronto some time, climb the CN Tower, hang out in Chinatown, take the TTC to Bathurst, Eglington, Pape, and tell me that Canadian immigration policy hasn't been a gigantic boon for the country.
I'm a Canadian expat in the US right now, and the difference is startling. Canada has done a remarkable job of integrating its immigrant population into the middle class - the US likes to imagine itself as a melting pot, but for the most part ethnic diversity in this country is still separated along enormous socioeconomic lines - lines that are significantly blurrier in Canada. The fact that Canadian immigrants are first-class members of society from day one I believe is key to this difference. As is the fact that a "straight to permanent residence" policy sets the bar higher. The US is letting in enormous numbers of refugees and family reunification individual - people of questionable worth to society - with "straight to PR" tracks, but still bars the door to working professionals and highly educated academics with decade-long "indentured H-1B servitude". You tell me if that policy makes sense.
As a young Albertan, still living and breathing here, I question how well the 'cultural mosaic' has stood the test of time. Granted, I do see some good like you mentioned, but looking at some of the recent economic impact data (I'm not an expert in this field and have merely googled and wikapedia'd for my research) it does look like there are systemic struggles that have developed over the last 25 years and that good you mentioned, is fewer and far between. It's a really interesting point of discussion though, so thank you.
It's not perfect - I'm sure if you look at the data you will still see an income gap between native-born Canadians and recent immigrants, but having lived on both sides of the border I have to say America's problems are at least an order of magnitude worse than ours. The socioeconomic stratification of immigrants in the US means that several ethnicities are automatically assumed to be poor and uneducated - an assumption that largely doesn't hold water in Canada. With the sad exception of the aboriginal population, there is no real ethnic group in Canada that's as systemically impoverished and and marginalized as the blacks and latinos are in the USA. Sure, we have ghettos, but by and large they're not defined along racial and ethnic lines. The wide gaps between races in the US really does encourage a very pervasive undercurrent of racism that's largely impolite to mention in company, but easily felt. I simply do not get the same vibe in Canada, and that's a very good thing.
Having never lived in AB though, I'm interested in hearing your perspectives on it - I know the racial/ethnic balance there is not quite the same as Vancouver or Toronto, so maybe the scene is different. I can tell you that in the extremely industrial town of London, Ontario, the economic stratification between immigrants and non-immigrants can be more easily felt, but even then for the most part the poverty that pervades that city is blind to race.