I'm interested that you used the word "absurd" - how come? Historically nothing sets up a country better for future success than lots of immigrants - if it's paired with government policy that doesn't discourage growth...
Second, Canada had absolutely terrible business development investment. There is no capital to make use of the increase in population and as a result the GDP per capita is going negative every quarter.
Now that the quality of life in Canada is dropping, highly skilled Canadians are trying to get out as fast as they can making the Canadian market even less competitive.
I don't think this combination of variables has been present in previous population booms (post WW2). I think we are in new territory here being pushed aggressively by a few companies trying to find even cheaper labor than what was possible.
Net migration per 1,000 people (2023) figures[2] are: Australia 6.4, Canada 5.4, New Zealand 4.8
So Australia's immigrant population is also growing 20% faster than Canadas. (albeit emmigrant numbers included so perhaps I'm oversimplifying - I'm not familiar with Oz - but New Zealand has significant outflows).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
Canada welcomed 471,550 new permanent residents in 2023 and had an increase of roughly 550,000 temporary residents. That's a net influx of over 1M people for a country of over 40M. Most of Europe takes in about 1% of population in immigration not 2.5%. Australia targeted 195,000 permanent places and a total of 548,000 places across permanent and temporary programs. For a country of 26M that's 2.1% which is still extremely large but well below 2.5%.
Also even if we use your numbers, Canada mostly accelerated immigration in 2023 and 2024 but already by 2021 our immigration percentage was up to 23% according to our census so your numbers are badly out of date for measuring recent immigration. In terms of reaching 30% with a net influx of over 1M immigrants a year over those two years, Canada could be as high as 27% immigrant now. Which even if it is lower than the raw total in Australia I'm sure we can acknowledge is a very rapid change that puts major strain on services.
I do try to write clearly, but I think you've replied thoughtlessly.
Yeah that sounds like a significant difference.
I know nothing about Canada's immigration issues, but I did listen to a conservative podcast[1] the other day and at 20:30 it mentioned the 2023 numbers for Canada were:
• 1.27M immigrants
• 471k settling
• 804k temporary residents
So unless our sources are careful how they measure immigration there's a lot of scope for misunderstanding.
No idea why your number is 550k and the podcast mentions 804k.
> I'm 100% convinced your source has badly incorrect data for Canada.
The 249,000 number is sourced from a file provided by the World Bank. It isn't obvious where the World Bank get their number from. Don't ask me!!! Yeah, it looks wrong, but I don't care enough about the topic to go into it further.
Either way from the foreign born population percentages it is very clear that Australia and New Zealand have been accepting lots of immigrants for years and Canada would need to have much larger immigration numbers to get close to catching up.
If you are interested in the effects of immigration on Canada, then keep an eye on Australia and New Zealand to see how it is affecting them.
> For a country of 26M that's 2.1% which is still extremely large but well below 2.5%.
You are comparing chickens to bandicoots. Either compare residents or compare totals including temporary. You are being epically misleading to compare between the two.
From your own numbers, resident immigrant growth is ~1% for Canada (471k/40M) and 2.1% for Australia... I would guess New Zealand is around the 2% mark. I have little idea about temp numbers, but they are not zero.
I've personally just been looking at having a student guest rent a room at my place for $250 per week - students don't create as much pressure on housing. Permanent immigrants definitely do.
You seem to me to be trying to misinform.
When people talk about the problems of immigration they are not generally talking about temporary students and temporary workers. Might as well as add tourists on too - they are a contentious issue where I live.
I mostly care about immigration numbers, but you are using temp numbers. Yeah, Canada's temp numbers are whacko and that is discussed in the podcast: the temp student numbers surely can't be sustainable for Canada in the long term.
[1] https://thehub.ca/2024-03-29/this-government-is-oblivious-th...
Also I think you're just willfully misinterpreting me at this point because the 2.1% number for Australia included temporary residents. The number for Australia based on only new permanent residents is 195,000/26M = 0.75%
Your first post used the word "immigrants" and talked about the home building rates and the health care sector. Most people don't expect temporary immigrants to have a large impact on health care costs. So I think my initial misunderstanding of you is sensible. I would guess most people mean permanent immigrants when using the word "immigrants" - however I don't know your background...
We also obviously need to be careful when using annualised numbers. For example plenty of the students that come to New Zealand come to learn English over say two months (as I have just been learning since I'm looking at renting a room out to a student or worker).
6 student visas for two months consecutively has the same yearly impact on resources as 1 permanent immigrant. Adding tourist visa numbers to immigrant numbers would be similarly misleading for the same reason. Perhaps we need numbers for a snapshot of all visitors? The information is available to our immigration departments - they know how many people are currently in the country at any point in time.
If the 550k number is a sample at a point of time during the student year then it can be compared as an annualised number - but I can't know the context of your number without knowing your source. If it is a number of VISAs then the number needs to be annualised to work out impact on resources.
I completely agree that temporary immigration has an impact on resources and residents.
I believe that temporary immigration is nowhere near the impact that permanent immigration has on resources - especially in the long term where retired immigrants DO massively affect the health system costs. Temporary immigrants are mostly healthy and sick ones should be covered by travel insurance?
The podcast mentions one long term impact for Canada: that temporary immigrants can have a baby and Canada gives the baby citizenship.
In New Zealand we have massive numbers of tourists over our summer which has a heavy impact on our resources (including housing due to AirBnB). But tourists do pay their way and don't have a long tail of costs (retirement etcetera).
If we wanted to compare temporary residents, then I can include tourists during the tourism season, and suddenly you will find that the numbers for New Zealand are ridiculously high! However I have no idea what it's like for Canada. Our tourism season has a heavy impact - but mostly on tourist locations - less so on our metro areas (although I see personally see the impact of cruise ships on the suburb of Lyttelton in Christchurch).
I recall the podcast seemed to say that your problem with temporary immigrants was a sudden change and that the numbers likely would revert to something more sensible.
I'm sure we can agree that all 3 countries have economic issues with immigration.
New Zealand has been making new houses especially in Auckland and Christchurch. I believe Canada has been falling behind there. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38430062
And most developed countries are fucked for demographics in the future: permanent immigration is a short term solution but I reckon we are just punting the problem to the future. As a middle aged guy I can see the problem slowly building and I have been doing what I can to prepare!
Since immigration can be a sensitive topic, I want to be clear that I like immigrants and I have close friends and family by marriage that were not born in New Zealand.
All the best. I am hoping to visit Canada in the next 5 years to go skiing. Thank you for the conversation - I comment on HN to learn and I have learnt a few things! Cheers
My point is that picking a number at a point in time doesn't say much about the housing pressure - as the zero net tourists example shows.
Without knowing more about the number of temporary immigrants throughout the year (e.g. total number in Canada per month), the number of temporary immigrants as a yearly value is not much use (just as net zero tourists is not much use). Kinda depends on how quickly the temporary immigrants roll over.
Interestingly enough NZ and Australia have sharply reduced the number of working visas. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/513642/immigration-chan...
Also, I noticed an article implying that Canada is much more successful at getting wealthy immigrants:
Immigration lawyers [in NZ] are worried by a dramatic drop in the number of millionaires receiving so-called golden visas. "If you have investors looking at options they're going to go for an easier option, they're going to go for Canada", he said.Well, exactly. Bringing in large amounts of immigration to support an economy that that largely revolves around property transactions will contribute to an increase in property prices but will drag down GDP per capita and drive up infrastructure costs. This is NZ.
Ummm citations needed urgently. I would point out, immigration policy vs anyone without a passport is welcome are two complete scenarios that the only thing in common is that outsiders are coming in.
Unchecked immigration policy as a good thing is a myth. People from clashing cultures dont mix naturally. Only results are natural ghetos and cultural clashes.
Allowing undocumented people in without any due diligence, only advertises that undesirables from other countries can escape, or being dumped by more crafty foreign leaders.
The immigration as a positive is strictly related to being the cause for brain-drain effect. You want intelligent hardworking people in, not just anyone.
Also its better if people you are attracting are of similar heritage with similar values and culture. As those people assimilate to host cultures within a generation or two.
The european countries don't really have distinctive minorities from their neighbors. The inter-eu immigrants withing generation or two basically become a host country citizens.
I would point to Sweden and their current problems, also to the change of mind of the pro-unchecked immigration politicians. Who now are openly and publicly stating they were wrong.
Context for others: Sweden has no language, income, employment, or skills requirement <https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...> for obtaining citizenship.
In completely unrelated news, Arabic is now the second most spoken language in Sweden <https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_po...>.
Neither does the US. Like the US, it has a requirement of having lived in the country with residency for 5 years. In the US those 5 years are after getting a Green Card (permanent residency), not after getting the original dual intent visa that allowed for the Green Card.
The Swedish residence requirements seem par for the course[1], if more straightforward than for the US.
[1]: https://visaguide.world/europe/sweden-visa/residence-permit/
If we want society to continue updating its morals, why not update the morals about immigration as well?
Well… I wonder how that happened since it certainly wasn’t the case until the period between the mid/late 19th century and the 1940. I guess we’ll never know.
And regarding the house prices... last year they built around 200k new homes (all types, including condos) for >1M new Canadians.
It became a trend in china's rich circles to invest in canadian housing market as way to hide money from ccp and to flex your wealth.
Chinese new money are prone to trends, and at scale it can have terrible results for city like Vancouver - quick google - "Chinese homebuyers accounted for nearly one-third of Vancouver's real estate market during 2015"
That might be mixing up cause and effect…
Are immigrants fungible?
Define "success?" Mass immigration to America from continental Europe eventually culminated in the 20th century in the dismantling of the American constitution and the republic the founders created. The resulting country is also completely ungovernable.
Generations of cheap immigrant labor ultimately created a materially rich society (for some people), but whether it has been a "success" is quite debatable.
Another way to look at it: By any reasonable measure — and for all its indisputable problems — the U.S. is clearly the most successful large, multi-ethnic society in all of human history. Sure, it's always a work in progress. But let's consider the movie, not just the freeze-frame.
When people can vote with their feet, it says something that net migration to the U.S. seems to dwarf that to, say, China [1] or India [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China
[2] https://www.indiaspend.com/governance/millions-of-indians-se...
Looking at migrants is a misleading indicator of preference, because the choice to emigrate is an aberrational one. Just 7-8% of people in south or east Asia would emigrate if they had the choice: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi....
Let's not forget that (European) immigrants were mostly wanted, so as to provide needed workers. Even the Chinese immigrants of the 19th century were wanted to help build railroads and the like. Racist anti-immigrant factions such as the Know-Nothings and the KKK never really gained the power needed even to try to stop immigration (with the notable exception of the Asian exclusion acts in the late-19th and early-20th centuries).
Scores of millions of Americans, including your servant, are descended from those European and Asian immigrants. Again, the "movie" is that over generations, those people became fully assimilated into American society and values.
As for "accommodating" the immigrants, that brings to mind Heinlein's dictum: Never argue with the weather. It's questionable whether the "British" America of, say, 1787, or even 1868, could have effectively prevented immigration.
We also shouldn't lose sight of the millions of involuntary "immigrants" who were brought here in chains from Africa.
Sure. I’m talking about the long-term effects of that deliberate policy choice.
> Again, the "movie" is that over generations, those people became fully assimilated into American society and values.
Quite a bit of evidence shows that core cultural values, such as levels of social trust and attitudes towards the nature of government, are durable across generations: https://cis.org/Richwine/Still-More-Evidence-Cultural-Persis.... Scandinavian Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans to this day exhibit differing levels of social trust that mirrors those of their cousins back in Europe. The waves of immigrants didn’t “fully assimilate” into American society, they changed it into something entirely different.
An overlooked aspect of Donald Trump—who is barely a third generation American—is that he was the last nail in the coffin of British America. British American culture is no longer prevalent enough to sustain even one political party. The Trump GOP has dropped the distinctly British American idea of limited government and replaced it with a cult of personality that can appeal to immigrant Germans, Italians, and increasingly Latin Americans. If Trump acts like a Latin American dictator it’s because that’s what it takes to get all those people from disparate cultural backgrounds into a coalition that can get close to 50%.
People notice this shift, but because we have this mistaken notion that “white people” are a single group, we overlook what it means. It gets framed as the “death of the Reagan GOP.” It is, but more accurately it’s the death of the British American GOP.
Interesting. Does that take into account the mixing of cultures as the generations go by? My own immigrant ancestors came to this country in the 19th- and early-20th centuries — from four different countries in northern- and southern Europe; two different religions; and arguably three distinct subcultures. My own kids have three more countries stirred into the mix from my wife's side — and her outlook and attitudes have influenced mine in the decades we've been together. Then there's the influence of the different places I've lived and worked. I can't imagine I'm unique.
> more accurately it’s the death of the British American GOP.
Which "British America[]"? The New Englanders like the Puritans, and later the Adamses? The mid-Atlantic Quakers? The Virginians? The Cavalier enslavers who came from their Carribean sugar plantations to grow cotton? Very different subcultures. (And if you want to talk about "top-down," consider the southern American subcultures.)
And which British American GOP — the now-extinct liberal northeasterners and -Midwesterners? The hard-core racist Southerners who were right-wing "Democrats" until the Nixon-Reagan-Atwater "Southern strategy" coaxed them to the GOP? The California Reaganites of Proposition 13?
> If Trump acts like a Latin American dictator it’s because that’s what it takes to get all those people from disparate cultural backgrounds into a coalition that can get close to 50%.
My guess is that Trump appeals to a certain fearful, hero-worshipping, authoritarian mindset that's widely distributed among the human population, and whose adherents have far greater ability to communicate and organize than ever before. We see that mindset today in the followers of Putin, Orbán, Kim, Maduro, etc., as well as those of Trump. (For that matter, the fascist Oswald Mosley was a Brit.)
It’s using GSS data, which doesn’t identify ancestry in that level of granularity. But I suspect mixing changes the host culture significantly. My wife is of almost completely British American descent. I’m of completely Bangladeshi descent. But because in my culture married couples assimilate into the husband’s family, the kids are being raised with a strong dose of Bangladeshi traditionalism.
> Which "British America[]"? The New Englanders like the Puritans, and later the Adamses? The mid-Atlantic Quakers? The Virginians? The Cavalier enslavers who came from their Carribean sugar plantations to grow cotton? Very different subcultures.
The British America that was the confluence of those British sub-cultures—the things they agreed on and their distinctive conflicts. In particular, participatory self-government reflecting both Puritan small towns and Jeffersonian agrarianism has been supplanted by mass government.
The widespread American attitudes towards government is now similar to those in Bangladesh, which was shaped by half a millennium of Mughal and then British rule. The government is the administrator of a fractious and foreign population. “Democracy” is reduced to merely “voting.”
> My guess is that Trump appeals to a certain fearful, hero-worshipping, authoritarian mindset that's widely distributed among the human population, and whose adherents have far greater ability to communicate and organize than ever before.
That’s close to the same point that I’m making. Every society has conservatives and liberals—these are rooted in psychological traits. Specific conservative or liberal ideologies, however, are rooted in culture. When you change the country’s cultural mix, you change what kinds of political ideologies you need to carry a viable coalition. And when you fragment the culture, politics becomes much more about unifying around things that speak to gut-level reactions across cultures.
The small-government conservatism that would be popular in Rhode Island can’t win Florida. You need to cobble together a coalition of Mexicans in Arizona, Scots-Irish in West Virginia, Cubans and Puerto Ricans in Florida, Germans in Ohio, etc. And Trump is the manifestation of that.
But your kids aren't watching Bangladeshi TV, are they? And I'm guessing they don't run around with mostly-Bangladeshi friends.
You might be surprised how your kids are being influenced by your wife — and her family. I've read over the years that culture is transmitted primarily by the mother; that certainly fits what I've observed casually.
And let's not forget that at some point most kids tend to rebel — especially against authoritarian fathers (and then maybe later revert to what they remember from childhood).
> In particular, participatory self-government reflecting both Puritan small towns and Jeffersonian agrarianism has been supplanted by mass government.
Alexander Hamilton and his fellow Federalists would like a word. Jeffersonian thinking was certainly present at the Founding but was by no means dominant.
Sure, most people don't emigrate. That doesn't mean it's misleading that the U.S. is the migration destination of choice.
Really? The U.S. is notably less top-down than many other places that either of us could name. And nostalgia for an imagined bygone "British" past is unproductive.