Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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RIM and ATI? One got acquired and continues to thrive, the other one is busy circling the drain - but both were innovative, significant employers, and remain so, on the scale of eBay and Yahoo. Both companies were founded by immigrants (Chinese for ATI, Greek/Turkish for RIM).

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.

You mentioned Toronto, do you think the immigration policy has had a gigantic boon for the country, or for Toronto? I'm really just curious.

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.

I've personally lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, and London (yeah, one of those is not like the others), and I've been to many other cities both urban, and rural. The immigration boon is nearly universal across the board in all the places I have been. I've worked in 3 industries in Canada - traditional mechanical engineering, software, and astrophysics. Immigrants are extremely dominant in all three, and many of the top names are first or second-generation. I think, for the most part, Canada's immigration policy has turned out remarkably well, and needs to be commended for rather deftly avoiding the common pitfall that plagues a lot of countries: integrating immigrants into the middle class, instead of letting them fall into minority ghettos.

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.

When did the US switch to "family reunification" (even for extremely distant relatives) as the primary form of immigration, and why?

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