Months after closure of Quebec’s Roxham Road, more asylum seekers arriving by air

2023/08/15 Leave a comment

Well, of course they are. But a more regular pathway than Roxham Road and one that reflects increased air travel and visas. The issue, as always, remains hearing and processing times and the extensive appeal processes in case asylum not granted. And to date, fears about the closing of irregular points of arrivals have not been realized:

The closure of a rural southern Quebec road used by thousands of asylum seekers to enter Canada from the United States hasn’t stopped would-be refugees from arriving, federal data shows.

The number of people claiming asylum in Canada dropped sharply after the end of March, when the government negotiated a deal with the United States to turn away asylum seekers at unofficial border crossings like Quebec’s Roxham Road. However, the numbers have been climbing back up in recent months, propelled by an increase in arrivals at Ontario and Quebec airports.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden announced in March that they were closing a long-standing loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which asylum seekers have to apply for refugee status in the first of the two countries they enter. Now the deal applies along the entire shared border, rather than just at official ports of entry — a situation that had led to thousands of people crossing at Roxham Road each month to ensure their claims would be heard in Canada.

In June, RCMP across the country intercepted just 36 people between official border points, compared with 4,994 in January. However, the Canada Border Services Agency processed 4,350 claims in June at airports — almost all of them in Quebec and Ontario — compared to 1,370 in January and 1,360 in June 2022.

While the issue may have faded from the political spotlight since Roxham Road was closed, the head of one group that helps refugees in Montreal says his organization is as busy as ever.

“The numbers that we’re experiencing now are actually higher than we’ve had in March and January and February,” said Abdulla Daoud, executive director of Montreal-based The Refugee Centre. He said his organization gets between 100 and 150 people a day seeking legal services and other help with their claims.

Daoud believes the increase in numbers at airports is due to the “current global state of affairs” that has resulted in what the United Nations Refugee Agency has called the greatest number of displaced people on record — some 110 million.

“This is our global reality and this is how the world is working today,” he said. “We have to start investing in infrastructure to deal with the numbers that we’re getting, because there is no real deterrent that can be applied to stop individuals from coming in.”

Stéphanie Valois, the co-president of Quebec’s immigration lawyers’ association, sees another reason for the increase in airport arrivals. She said the federal government in recent months has “massively” increased its processing of visitor visas in order to address a backlog, resulting in more arrivals and therefore more claims.

In her opinion, the rise in airport arrivals isn’t linked to the closure of Roxham Road because “the asylum seekers coming in at the airport come from different places.” She said people who entered at Roxham Road were generally from countries where it was difficult to get a visitor visa, such as Haiti, Turkey, Colombia and Venezuela. Those arriving at airports are arriving with visas, often from African countries or India, she said.

However, she agrees with Daoud that in the long run, the number of asylum seekers will rise, as more people figure out ways to reach Canada in their quest for safety.

The Canadian Press asked Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for information about changes to its visa processing but did not receive a response by publication time.

Both Daoud and Valois say they are worried about the people who are no longer able to use Roxham Road to get to Canada. Valois noted that the majority of asylum claims in Canada are ultimately accepted, which proves “these aren’t people who come here for a better life,” she said. “They come to escape persecution.”

Both also worry that those who still choose to make the journey will find themselves in unsafe situations, and will resort increasingly to smugglers to get them across the border.

Daoud says his organization has already been seeing more and more people who sneak across the border and hide from authorities for two weeks before making a claim. While the Safe Third Country Agreement now applies to people that cross between ports of entry, it doesn’t apply to those who have already been in the country for at least 14 days.

“We’ve had individuals who are just hiding in random areas, not even in shelters,” Daoud said.

While they won’t share data for “logistical” reasons, the RCMP say there has been an increase in covert border crossings in both the northbound and southbound directions since the new system has been put into place.

“Across the Quebec-U.S. border, there isn’t a day or a night without a police interception of some migrants (either going north or south),” Sgt. Charles Poirier wrote in an email. “For this reason, we’ve adapted our patrols, and we are now pursuing investigations into some smuggling networks.”

He said a recent case in which a woman gave birth in the woods near Potton, Que., after her family became stranded highlights “the new reality that we are now faced with.”

Chief Patrol Agent Robert Garcia of United States Border Patrol wrote this week that agents patrolling a sector of the border that includes Vermont, New Hampshire and eastern New York apprehended more than 5,400 subjects in just over 10 months — more than in the last nine years combined.

Source: Months after closure of Quebec’s Roxham Road, more asylum seekers arriving by air

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Immigration pilot pays off for Thunder Bay and newcomers: Study

2023/08/15 Leave a comment

Of note:

Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP) is estimated to have greatly benefitted Thunder Bay’s economy and newcomers to Canada and the northwestern Ontario city in delivering 321 jobs within a year of being activated, according to a research paper from the Northern Policy Institute.

The paper’s author, Bryanne de Castro Rocha, found that after one year, the RNIP program in the City of Thunder Bay is estimated to have generated a total of $11.6 million in wages in the local economy and offered 229 jobs to its applicants, which in turn generated an additional 92 jobs in the local economy for a total of 321 jobs after one year.

The federal Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot does not directly create jobs, but it does provide an immigration pathway to aid employers in attracting talent to fill vacant positions.

It was created to better distribute and direct immigrants to opportunity beyond the major cities of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Eleven rural and northern communities participated including the City of Thunder Bay.

RNIP is mutually beneficial program by giving smaller communities the opportunity to select which workers have the most desired skills by their local industries and are the most likely to settle and stay in that northern or rural community in the long term.

Thunder Bay’s pilot was designed for an initial run from November 2019 through December 2022. It’s since been extended until August 2024.

And the pilot boundaries were expanded last September beyond the Thunder Bay area to take a greater swath of northwestern Ontario including the Rainy River district communities Atikokan, Fort Frances and Emo, Dryden, Sioux Lookout and up along the north shore of Lake Superior and Lake Nipigon, taking in Greenstone, Marathon, Manitouwadge, Nipigon, Schreiber, Terrace Bay, the Township of Red Rock and Ignace.

This is all good, according to the paper, as immigrants positively contribute to the local economy. They pay taxes that fund public services, spend their money on “goods, housing and transportation,” stimulating the economy, and allow employers to find qualified workers for their businesses,

All this creates a ripple effect in multiple other economic factors, such as the income and spending of other parties.

Source: Immigration pilot pays off for Thunder Bay and newcomers: Study

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Sun editorial: High immigration fuels housing shortage

2023/08/14 Leave a comment

As it appears from Minister Miller’s initial public comments that the government has no intention to revise or freeze current and planned levels, they risk being labelled, correctly, as being pro-immigration ideologues and oblivious to reality.
There is enough concern about the impact of permanent and temporary migration across most of the political spectrum that this presents a major political risk to the Liberals in 2025.
The weakness, or course, is that all the provinces want more immigration save for Quebec and are thus equally complicit to the Liberal government: 
Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller has responded to repeated economic warnings the Trudeau government’s high-intake immigration policies are contributing to Canada’s housing shortage with a turn of phrase that doesn’t address the problem.
He said Friday we need more immigrants to build more housing.

“Without those skilled workers coming from outside Canada, we absolutely cannot build the homes and meet the demand that exists currently today,” Miller said, as reported by Global News.

But if the federal government’s plan to bring in almost 1.5 million immigrants to Canada between now and 2025 is already contributing to the housing shortage and raising the cost of housing, how will bringing in more immigrants solve it?

As TD Bank warned recently: “Continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years. Recent government policies to accelerate construction are unlikely to offer a stop-gap due to the short time period and the natural lags in adjusting supply.”

The National Bank of Canada cautioned: “The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand … As housing affordability pressures continue to mount across the country, we believe Ottawa should consider revising its immigration targets to allow supply to catch up with demand.”

BMO (Bank of Montreal) reported “heightened immigration flows designed to ease labour supply pressure immediately add to the housing demand they are trying to meet … The infrastructure in place and the industry’s ability to build clearly can’t support unchecked levels of demand, so the affordability conundrum continues.”

It’s true there is a shortage of workers in the construction industry and Miller recently announced a plan to encourage skilled trade workers to immigrate to Canada, but the federal government can’t guarantee how many immigrants will end up in the construction trades.

Given the fact most immigrants end up in cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary, the feds should be consulting with provincial and municipal governments about the number of immigrants they can reasonably absorb.

This as opposed to obsessing about reaching a target of almost 1.5 million immigrants by 2025.

Source: EDITORIAL: High immigration fuels housing shortage

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Polish government plans referendum asking if voters want ‘thousands of illegal immigrants’

2023/08/14 Leave a comment

Far from a neutral way to pose a question….:

Poland’s ruling party wants to ask voters in a referendum whether they support accepting “thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa” as part of a European Union relocation plan, the prime minister said Sunday, as his conservative party seeks to hold onto power in an October parliamentary election.

Mateusz Morawiecki announced the referendum question in a new video published on social media. It indicated that his party, Law and Justice, is seeking to use migration in its election campaign, a tactic that helped it take power in 2015.

Poland is hosting more than a million Ukrainian refugees, who are primarily white and Christian, but officials have long made clear that they consider Muslims and others from different cultures to be a threat to the nation’s cultural identity and security.

EU interior ministers in June endorsed a plan to share out responsibility for migrants entering Europe without authorization, the root of one of the bloc’s longest-running political crises.

The Polish government wants to hold the referendum alongside the parliamentary election, scheduled for Oct. 15. Morawiecki said that the question would say: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa under the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”

The video announcing the question includes scenes of burning cars and other street violence in Western Europe. A Black man licks a huge knife in apparent anticipation of committing a crime. Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski then says: “Do you want this to happen in Poland as well? Do you want to cease being masters of your own country?”

Leaders have announced two other questions in recent days. One will ask voters for their views on privatizing state-owned enterprises and the other will ask if they support raising the retirement age, which Law and Justice lowered to 60 for women and 65 for men.

The questions are set up to depict the opposition party, Civic Platform, as a threat to the interests of Poles. The pro-business and pro-EU party, which governed from 2007 to 2015, raised the retirement age during its time in power, favored some privatization and signaled a willingness to accept a few thousand refugees before it lost power.

The video takes aim directly at Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk, a former president of the European Council. “Tusk is the greatest threat to our security, he is the greatest threat to Poland’s security,” Morawiecki says. “Let’s not let Tusk — as an envoy of the Brussels elites — demolish security in Poland.”

Europe’s asylum system collapsed eight years ago after well over a million people entered the bloc — most of them fleeing conflict in Syria — and overwhelmed reception capacities in Greece and Italy, in the process sparking one of the EU’s biggest political crises.

The 27 EU nations have bickered ever since over which countries should take responsibility for people arriving without authorization, and whether other members should be obliged to help them cope.

Initially Poland was neither an entry country nor a destination country for migrants and refugees. It became a front-line state two years ago when migrants began crossing from Belarus, something European authorities view as an effort by the Russian ally to generate turmoil in Poland and other European countries.

Poland responded by building a large wall on its border. It has recently increased its military presence on the border fearing an uptick in migration and other possible instability.

As well as disagreements over migration, Law and Justice has long been in conflict with the EU over a perception by the bloc that the Warsaw government has been eroding democratic norms.

Source: Polish government plans referendum asking if voters want ‘thousands of illegal immigrants’

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Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

2023/08/12 Leave a comment

Not much new but confirms problems. Bit rich of Universities Canada to state that “Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government…” while ignoring the complicity of universities in increasing demand:

Record numbers of international students coming to Canada is making the already inflated cost of housing worse, said Steve Pomeroy, a policy research consultant and senior research fellow at Carleton University’s centre for urban research.

The biggest strain on Canada’s housing market, he said, isn’t only the rising rate of permanent residents, with more than 400,000 permanent residents in 2022, and the Liberal government determined to hit 500,000 a year in the next couple of years. Those coming here seeking temporary residence, either temporary foreign workers or international students, are fuelling rental price increases.

“Temporary foreign workers and students are going to be renters, as opposed to owners,” he said.

Average rents nationally jumped more than 10 per cent last year and are expected to rise again this year, although rents in hotter markets, such as Toronto and Vancouver, are up significantly more.

Data released earlier this year by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) show 807,750 international students with valid student visas studying at Canadian post-secondary institutions as of the end of 2022. At 30-per-cent higher than the 617,315 students in 2021, it’s now at the highest level it’s ever been.

With the exception of 2020, where numbers were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s complement of international students historically saw between six to nine per cent growth annually.

Pomeroy said universities are driving the numbers as a way to generate more revenue, because they can charge international students much higher tuitions.

“In Ontario, university tuition fees are frozen, grants are frozen, but the only variable that universities have to generate new revenues is international students, so they naturally go and chase those,” he said.

More visiting students, he said, create inordinate demand at the very bottom of the rental market, where there’s already a tight market for low-income workers, fixed-income seniors and those who rely on social assistance.

Benjie Rustia, an official with an international immigration and study agency located near the Philippine capital of Manila, said his international-student clients know that coming here means fighting a tight entry-level rental market.

“They are well informed by their relatives or friends in Canada,” he told the National Post.

“Making informed decisions is the basic aspect for the process for international students, and are based on thorough research and understanding.”

Late last month, news of an international student from India found living under an east Toronto bridge brought attention to the problem, and highlighted concerns from advocates that Canada’s affordability crisis is rendering increasing numbers of foreign students homeless.

Most international students coming to Canada flock to Ontario, which in 2022 saw over 411,000 foreign students enrolled in the province’s post-secondary institutions.

British Columbia ranked second with 164,000 students last year, followed by Quebec with 93,000, Alberta with 43,000 and Manitoba with 22,000.

While India’s 319,130 international students rank as Canada’s biggest cohort, followed by China with 100,075, the Philippines is seeing big bumps in the number of their students coming here.

Canada issued 25,295 study permits to Filipino students to study here in 2022, a 76-per-cent increase from the 14,355 visas issued to students from that country in 2021.

As of June 2023, 11,400 permits were issued to students from the Philippines.

Rustia said his clients typically search for schools that offer on-campus residence living or look for schools near where they can stay with friends and relatives already in the area.

News reports on Wednesday described long wait-lists for on-campus housing at Calgary universities, with 740 students waiting for housing at the University of Calgary, and the city’s Mount Royal University establishing a waiting list for their 950 dorm rooms for the first time in the school’s history.

Solving this problem, Pomeroy said, could be done by striking partnerships between schools, governments and developers.

“If the government was smart, it would say ‘OK, we’re causing the problem by giving out these visas to international students, how can we solve this problem,’” he said.

“Let’s work with the universities, let’s work with the private developers for some incentives and stimulus.”

He suggested using existing programs, such as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s rental construction financing initiative — which provides low-cost loans to encourage rental apartment projects — to encourage student-centred rental construction to keep the pressure of local residential rental markets.

“You can wait until folks get displaced and they’re in the homeless shelter and we intervene and provide supportive housing and wraparound services to help them get out of shelters at significantly high cost, or we could build 1,000 units of student housing with no cost to government,” Pomeroy said.

A statement to the National Post from Universities Canada, a post-secondary institution lobby group, agreed the federal government should be doing more to address the issue.

“Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government, and universities remain willing partners in these efforts,” wrote interim president Philip Landon.

“Universities Canada urges the federal government to meet its commitments, as set out in the National Housing Strategy, to reduce homelessness, construct new homes and provide Canadians with access to affordable housing that meets their needs.”

Canada’s universities, he wrote, are doing more to approve and build more on-campus housing, as well as provide resources to help students access off-campus living space, as well as developing “innovative housing models” to relieve local rental market pressures.

Emails to Immigration Minister Marc Miller went unacknowledged.

Tom Kmiec, the Conservative party’s immigration and citizenship critic, said that the current government’s housing and immigration policies are leaving newcomers on the streets.

“More homes were being built in 1972 when Canada’s population was half of what it is today,” he said in a statement.

“The Liberal government has failed to deliver on their housing promises and failed to come anywhere close to building the number of houses we need, leaving Canada short millions of homes and Canadians struggling to afford a place to live.”

Source: Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

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COVID-19 Immigration Effects – June 2023 update

2023/08/12 Leave a comment

Given IRCC delays in issuing citizenship data, have combined the May and June report.

At the half year mark, the government is on target to meet the levels plan for Permanent Residents (however misguided), with 263,000 to date or 57 percent of 465,000. The percentage of Temporary Residents transitioning to Permanent Residents averages about 50 percent for both time periods.

The number of temporary residents continues to grow, with 385,000 compared to 185,000 for the January-June 2002 period for the International Mobility Program and 114,000 compared to 75,000 for the Temporary Foreign Workers program.

The same pattern applies to International students: 242,000 compared to 202,000 for the January-June 2002 period.

For asylum claimants: 53,000 compared to 37,000.

Unlike the above, the number of new citizens has no impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure as they are virtually all here in Canada. Interestingly, this is the only program that has seen a decline in the January-June periods: 177,000 compared to 184,000 although still historically strong.

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Des demandeurs d’asile qui s’adaptent plutôt que de combattre en vain

2023/08/11 Leave a comment

Given ongoing levels of asylum claimants, some suggestions to facilitante their integration at the local level. Silent on the need for faster processing and decisions on asylum claims, however:

Le 20 juillet dernier, dans un article du Devoir (« Un nombre record de demandeurs d’asile passent désormais par les aéroports »), on apprenait que les demandeurs d’asile n’étaient pas moins nombreux à entrer au pays depuis la fermeture du chemin Roxham.

En effet, en suivant la courbe des entrées chaque mois comparativement à l’année précédente, on anticipe que le nombre de demandeurs d’asile admis en 2023 au Canada serait vraisemblablement similaire à celui de 2022. Si la frontière terrestre au sud apparaît plus imperméable, les demandeurs d’asile arrivent dorénavant en plus grand nombre par les airs.

Après quelques mois, le constat se pose donc simplement : la fermeture de chemin Roxham ne semble pas avoir eu d’effet sur le nombre de demandeurs d’asile qui entrent au Canada. Le phénomène d’arrivée des migrants qui touchaient jusqu’à récemment principalement l’Europe et les États-Unis est désormais une réalité chez nous. Si cette tendance a été longtemps ignorée, elle devient maintenant incontournable.

Pour faire face à cette question de manière pragmatique, il faut davantage s’intéresser au continuum de services d’accueil et à leur coordination, une réflexion qui tarde à se faire. Une meilleure cohérence entre les politiques publiques devrait être recherchée afin de s’assurer de l’accueil et de l’intégration de ces migrants, mais aussi de l’atteinte des objectifs nationaux chers au Québec, notamment celui de la francisation et de l’accès égal à des opportunités.

À cet égard, un écueil d’envergure est la collaboration entre les différents ordres de gouvernement. Cette coordination entre les ordres de gouvernement et les organismes qui offrent la majorité des services d’installation et d’intégration doit reposer sur une séparation claire des pouvoirs et responsabilités, un alignement des stratégies ainsi qu’un financement proportionnel au niveau d’engagement de chacune des parties prenantes.

Échelle locale

Également, et la recherche est claire à cet effet, la coordination des services voués aux nouveaux arrivants doit être menée à l’échelle locale pour être optimale. Le gouvernement du Québec, qui est responsable des services d’accueil et d’intégration en vertu de l’entente qu’il a ratifiée avec le gouvernement fédéral en 1991, doit absolument s’appuyer sur les lieux de concertation municipaux ou régionaux qui ont développé l’expertise des défis et sur les ressources disponibles sur le terrain.

Pour l’instant, Québec, qui a transféré des compétences aux villes après l’abolition des conférences régionales des élus il y a presque 10 ans, peine à reconnaître le leadership de celles-ci dans la coordination des services locaux. Ses programmes et financements devraient être alignés sur les stratégies et les priorités locales, plutôt que d’en faire fi.

Les efforts et ressources seraient ainsi mieux alloués. De même, avec la mise en place des agents d’aide à l’intégration (les AAI, comme ils sont désignés par le milieu), Québec dédouble un service existant sans que ces agents aient la capacité d’arriver à la cheville de l’expertise qui s’est développée à travers les années dans les organismes communautaires.

L’arrivée des demandeurs d’asile crée d’ailleurs une pression immense dans les communautés, ses organismes et institutions, particulièrement dans la grande région de Montréal. Ce sont largement eux qui offrent les services d’installation, de francisation, pour l’aide à l’emploi ; ils accueillent les enfants dans les écoles, logent et équipent les familles, etc.

Or, les organismes sur le terrain vous le diront : pour faire connaître leurs services, il leur est souvent impossible d’entrer en contact avec les demandeurs d’asile pris en charge par PRAIDA, le programme québécois chargé des demandeurs d’asile. Ceux-ci finissent par accéder aux services des organismes du milieu, mais pas sans embûches.

Pour s’assurer de la pleine intégration des immigrants, notamment des demandeurs d’asile, et ce, dans l’intérêt de la société québécoise, Québec doit reconnaître le rôle stratégique joué par les communautés locales et s’assurer de les outiller adéquatement.

Responsabilité mondiale

En bref, il faut entrevoir une suite aux discussions concernant l’accueil des demandeurs d’asile, et ce, à tous les ordres de gouvernement. Il n’est pas étonnant que les décideurs aient bien voulu croire (du moins en apparence) que la fermeture du chemin Roxham aurait tout réglé : l’arrivée des migrants en Europe et aux États-Unis a largement polarisé les débats politiques depuis quelques années. La réalité canadienne demeure toutefois que le nombre de demandeurs d’asile qui passent ses frontières est minime par rapport à ce qui a été observé ailleurs.

À juste titre, la ministre de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration, Christine Fréchette, rappelait cet hiver que les demandeurs d’asile étaient avant tout des humains, exhortant ainsi à un peu d’humanité dans le débat public.

Les demandeurs d’asile sont admis officiellement au Canada comme réfugiés dans environ 50 % des cas après un processus administratif permettant d’évaluer leur demande. C’est donc dire que dans une large proportion, on juge qu’effectivement, leur sécurité et même leur vie sont menacées dans leur pays d’origine.

Établir ses pénates ici relève pour eux d’un exploit suivant un parcours difficile, et une chance inespérée de vivre en paix. Si ces migrants quittent leur terre natale, c’est qu’elle leur est devenue hostile pour de nombreuses raisons : groupes armés, conflits, persécution pour des motifs politiques et religieux, ainsi que les changements climatiques… Et bien sûr, les pays occidentaux ont aussi leur rôle à jouer, en amont, pour atténuer ces crises mondiales.

Source: Des demandeurs d’asile qui s’adaptent plutôt que de combattre en vain

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David Rosenberg: Why immigration could be good for housing affordability in the long run

2023/08/11 Leave a comment

Not to be facetious, but in the long run we are dead! Time lags matter and it is clear that current immigration policies, with some specific exceptions, are not helping address Canada’s chronic productivity gap:

We have been vocal critics of Ottawa’s aggressive immigration policy from the perspective of creating further strains on a national housing market that is already stretched to the limit from an affordability standpoint due to a lack of supply. Creating a nation of renters because of a persistent multi-year housing bubble exacerbated by the immigration-fuelled boom in demand for residential real estate, is surely going to exert negative and unstable effects on the economic fabric and society as a whole.

It would be nice if the federal government began to focus its attention toward putting more emphasis on importing construction workers and skilled tradespeople, that much is for sure. After all, real residential investment is at -18.7 per cent year over year, and negative for seven quarters in a row — and all the while, Canada’s population and housing needs have been rising inexorably.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) estimates that Canada needs an additional 3.5 million units by 2030 to restore affordability — so the federal government would be well advised to ask immigrant applicants whether they know how to work with hammers and nails. The country also has a deficiency of health-care workers that should be more adequately addressed in this aggressive immigration policy, but we shall save that file for another day.

Before going down the rabbit hole of lamenting the excess demand effects on housing from the record levels of immigration that have boosted population growth to two per cent at an annual rate, far above historical norms and, outside of Iceland, at the very high end of the range in the industrialized world, the beneficial impact on Canada’s growth potential from the supply side must be addressed.

And that is because one way to deal with the housing affordability crisis in Canada is to find ways to boost national income — income being the denominator in the classic homeowner affordability ratio. From that perspective, this immigration policy could very well end up carrying with it more benefits than costs, and counterintuitively prove to be a development that could redress the inherent imbalances in the national housing market.

Immigration does add to home price inflation on the demand side by elevating housing prices over the near-term. But on the supply side, it is disinflationary by filling in labour shortages and increasing productivity — which then helps provide a positive underpinning for real incomes. And it is the prospect that real income growth rises on a secular basis that is at the root of a positive “take” one can adopt on this aspect of immigration.

While difficult to quantify the net effect of the supply and demand contributions of immigration, the comprehensive models we designed show that supply effects outweigh demand — so if you take a holistic, or what is called a “general equilibrium,” view of this demographic shock, increasing immigration can indeed be disinflationary. Again, this is positive for real incomes — and this could be a real key towards helping resolve the affordability challenge.

Our models show that when net international immigration flows are accounted for, the downward inflation impact is highly statistically significant. That is very encouraging — and why the Bank of Canada has taken a very even-handed approach to this issue, with Governor Tiff Macklem commenting on the supply-side benefits of an ambitious immigration stance.

What is fascinating is that immigration, if done right, can also be a factor that reverses the structural decay in Canadian labour productivity — which has been negative year over year for the past nine quarters. High-skilled immigrants from the “economic category” of Canada’s immigration program are a solution to this problem. In fact, what seems to go under-reported is that immigration in Canada is now focused on this “economic category” — in other words, more than half of recent immigrants are “elected based upon their potential economic contribution to meet labour market needs.”

A public policy focus to improve productivity and thus decrease inflation and bolster real incomes should involve a concentration in immigration on sectors like health care and construction — to help fill in labour shortages.

Bottom line: Ensuring that we have a sensible immigration policy in Canada means using it as a tool to redress, not compound, the housing affordability crisis and a distorting real estate price bubble that just keeps getting bigger.

But the good news in all this is that immigrants in Canada do get integrated into the labour market rather quickly.

The employment rate among landed immigrants and non-permanent residents (64.6 per cent — it was 61.6 per cent in Dec 2022) has been higher than those born in Canada (62.4 per cent) every month since May 2021. The gap is now at a historic high of 2.2 percentage points.

The change in the employment rate has also been much faster for immigrants and non-permanent residents than for those born in Canada, meaning they contribute toward a backdrop of rising incomes in nominal terms.

Statistics Canada has found in its own research that the “median wage of economic immigrant principal applicants surpasses that of the Canadian population one year after admission.” Immigrants pull their economic weight, in other words, and the historical record shows a trend toward labour market involvement and to improved productivity. In fact, research published by Statistics Canada found a positive relationship between the immigrant share in the business sector and growth in labour productivity, with productivity expanding by 1.9 per cent for every 10-percentage-point increase in the share of immigrants at a firm.

While we and others have been focused on the very short-term effects of the immediate demand rush the immigration policy is having on housing, perhaps we all need to take a longer-term view of the supply-side income benefits and how that can help ease the affordability problem plaguing the younger cohorts of society.

That said, it is clear that in the here and now, ensuring that the immigrants flowing into the “economic category” have experience in the building trade sector would also go a long way towards providing relief for a housing market that is clearly short of the supply needed to realign home prices to more normal levels relative to incomes.

David Rosenberg is founder and president of independent research firm Rosenberg Research & Associates Inc. To receive more of David Rosenberg’s insights and analysis, you can sign up for a complimentary, one-month trial on the Rosenberg Research website. Atakan Bakiskan is a junior economist at Rosenberg Research.

Source: David Rosenberg: Why immigration could be good for housing affordability in the long run

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Griffith: Canada badly needs an immigration reset 

2023/08/10 Leave a comment

My latest, hoping to provoke a more concrete discussion on what a reset needs and what it would mean:

The government has largely ignored the impact of high levels of immigration on housing availability and affordability, health care and infrastructure. Belated recognition that current policies are not working to the benefit of all Canadians may be the reason behind the appointment of a new minister of Immigration, Marc Miller, and the reassignment of  the former minister of Immigration, Sean Fraser, to housing and infrastructure.

Minister Fraser arguably will have to deal with some of the mess he and the government created with the large increases in both permanent and temporary residents, pushing up housing costs and burdening existing infrastructure. Minister Miller will likely be more attuned to concerns about immigration given that he is from Quebec and thus more familiar with immigration critiques regarding the demographic impact on Quebec.

Moreover, the nature of conversations has changed. When, some two years ago I wrote an article for Policy Options entitled Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast, there were few voices questioning the government’s planned expansion of immigration. Now, there are almost weekly commentaries and reports, ranging from the banks to economists, the International Monetary Fund and others, noting deteriorating productivity, housing availability and affordability, stress on health care and infrastructure. Even the major boosters of increased immigration have shifted their messaging to “growing well” or even calling for a pause in increases.

While immigration is not solely responsible for the increase in housing costs, the link is being seen and could lead to newcomers being the scapegoats for poor policy decisions. The significant drop in support for the Liberal government may reflect this very personal issue to Canadians.

While at Immigration, Fraser was able to increase levels easily, whereas as housing and infrastructure minister, he will be confronted with the real time lags, making it impossible to show concrete results before the 2025 election. So it’s not a matter of “better communications” but rather of complex delivery with a wide range of government and private sector actors.

Miller, depending on his mandate letter, has an opportunity to reset or at least adjust  immigration policies and programs to take account of recent commentary and realities. He will not be able to ignore these issues even if his initial comments confirm planned increases. The annual plan on the number of immigrants this fall provides an opportunity for a reset should the government choose to do so.

Given that a complete pivot to a more evidence-based approach is unlikely, here are some modest suggestions that make sense from an immigration and economic perspective that may be politically sellable.

To start with, the plan should be broadened to include plans for temporary residents levels rather than just permanent residents levels, given that some 60 per cent of all new residents are temporary workers and students, many of whom transition to permanent residency.

Given time lags in building housing, increasing the capacity of the health-care system and addressing infrastructure gaps, the government should freeze 2023 levels of 465,000 for the next few years. More ambitiously, the government could reduce future levels to the lower 2024 range of 410,000.

The current open-ended levels on temporary residents (students and workers) should be replaced by hard ranges based on 2023 levels for similar reasons. Furthermore, the government needs to consider seriously the introduction of a cap-and-trade system for temporary residents to reduce the numbers over time to address weak productivity, as the University of Waterloo’s Mikal Skuterud has suggested.

Lastly, the government needs to take steps to further broaden the plan to include the impacts of immigration on housing, health care and infrastructure, including measures to address these impacts, rather than as a discrete program.

Miller’s mandate letter will indicate the extent to which this is possible. But these changes would not necessarily be perceived as divisive or xenophobic given that the impacts on housing, health care and infrastructure affect everyone, immigrants and Canadian-born alike. Failure to pivot to a more comprehensive approach that incorporates these considerations into immigration programs will not only worsen the quality of lives of Canadians but may prove politically damaging to a government long-in-the-tooth and losing popular support.

Source: Griffith: Canada badly needs an immigration reset

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Veal: Amid Canada’s housing crisis, immigration needs to be slower, more focused 

2023/08/10 Leave a comment

Yet more questioning:

High expected immigration is the main reason that Canada’s total output will likely increase by 1.5 per cent annually in 2023 and 2024, according to the headline numbers from the International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook. That would be the highest in the Group of Seven.

But that document also includes the predicted changes in output per person. That is a better measure of the change in the average standard of living, as it adjusts for Canada’s high population growth. The 2023 and 2024 predictions for the country are –0.6 and 0.1, a cumulative decrease over the two years. That’s the worst performance in the G7.

Part of this has to do with the lack of investment to complement the inflow of people. The most obvious symptom is Canada’s housing crisis.

The writer, Max Frisch, famously commented on European guest worker immigration: “We wanted workers, but people came.” People need homes, and Canada doesn’t have enough of them – even for its resident population. The high prices from the resultant high demand weigh heavily on the economy. While we wait for housing progress, this country needs slower and more focused immigration.

Immigration in general can be good for the economy. The fact that per capita GDP is expected to decline amid heavy immigration doesn’t mean that those already in Canada will on average be worse off; a good part of the reduction in that metric is due to low-income migrants bringing down the average.

Many of us already here will likely be made better off through the contributions of the newcomers. This is particularly clear in the caring and agricultural sectors. And in the long-term, while it is less clear at higher levels, immigration may bring important macroeconomic advantages. Immigrants can bring new ideas and entrepreneurship.

Moreover, Desjardins economist Randall Bartlett finds that these very high rates of immigration are the only way to prevent large increases in the proportion of the population that is 65 and over. Permanent immigrant families will also help share the national debt, especially as they experience increases in productivity and income.

But, as experts such as Mr. Bartlett have pointed out, high immigration is only sustainable if something can be done about housing, and this is not easy.

In the short term, the housing crisis cannot be solved – it can only be mitigated. Building new housing takes time. In the meantime, reducing immigration temporarily to prepandemic levels would help. Those levels would still provide ample room for home construction workers if necessary, as well as other high-skilled workers in strategic areas.

In principle, the current permanent immigration target could still be met with the reductions coming from the temporary side. For example, the student visa program could be limited with allocations used to incentivize educational institutions and their municipalities to do more on housing.

In the medium term, a solution requires more than doubling the inflow of housing units – Herculean even without the headwind of higher interest rates. It is no coincidence that federal cabinet minister Sean Fraser was recently shuffled from the immigration portfolio to housing.

But it is a three-levels-of-government problem, and municipalities do not face the same urgency from the aging population. In communities where most voters own rather than rent housing, the net political pressures may be against permitting increases in housing supply that might dampen housing prices.

Broader resistance to increased immigration will almost surely come. The brunt of unaffordable rents is borne by those with lower incomes. These are largely the same individuals who may be losing out on the higher wages, the greater flexibility in work arrangements, and the benefits of productivity-increasing capital and training that employers might turn to were there not the alternative options of hiring recent immigrants or accessing the Temporary Foreign Worker program.

But none of this is the fault of those who move here, and nothing changes the ultimate economic benefits of immigration. Canada must cherish immigrants, helping them settle as much as possible – but we need some breathing space to be able to do so properly.

Michael Veall is a professor of economics at McMaster University.

Source: Amid Canada’s housing crisis, immigration needs to be slower, more focused

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