Immigration Surges Past One Million — Canada Needs a Real Count and Real Plans

2023/04/24 Leave a comment

Annual levels plan needs to include temporary workers and international students rather than these being solely demand-driven. And better and more disaggregated data would be welcome although we have enough to understand the general trends:

Canada revved up its immigration machine last year to make up for the pandemic slowdown and recorded a new high of 437,500 new permanent resident arrivals. And the federal government plans to keep going, increasing permanent immigration targets to half a million by 2025 – 75 percent higher than the 2017 target level.

While public opinion remains broadly supportive of greater immigration, the impact on housing, health care, and broader community capacity has entered the debate. And to fully assess the effects, especially on housing, we need to look beyond headline immigration numbers. International arrivals for permanent and temporary visa holders not already in Canada need to be added to the equation. Precisely counting these groups is not an easy task due to data gaps and inconsistencies, but for 2022, we estimate the real total of arrivals last year was more than one million people.

The expansion of two-step immigration selection that prioritizes applicants with Canadian work experience and post-secondary education, allowed many applicants, such as temporary foreign workers and students, to receive approvals from within Canada. However, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) does not publish the data on their country of residence, making it difficult to understand the role of approvals for those already residing in Canada. According to IRCC data, this trend of applications from within Canada spiked during COVID. They made up fully 75 percent of 406,045 permanent residency approvals in 2021, but only 45 percent last year. This means the number of permanent residency approvals for people outside Canada – who create incremental housing demand – more than doubled between 2021 and 2022 to about 241,500.

Among those new arrivals are non-permanent residents. This category is growing rapidly, faster than new permanent residents, and is the most volatile element in population estimates. Non-permanent residents need to hold a valid permit to live in Canada and include temporary foreign workers, international students, refugee claimants and now a surging number of Ukrainians under a new authorization for emergency travel program.

In total, there were 1.3 million new temporary visas issued (excluding extensions and tourists) in 2022, a 45-percent increase from 2021. According to country of residence data, the number of new permit holders (e.g. temporary foreign workers and international students) whose place of residence was outside Canada grew by 83 percent from 2021 to more than 855,000 in 2022.

Combining permanent and temporary entry from outside Canada in 2022, the estimated total arrivals was more than one million (see Figure).

A new element of the temporary resident increase was the policy response to the invasion of Ukraine. Eligible Ukrainians can come to Canada for up to three years under the emergency authorization, and Ukrainians already in Canada can extend their visas. There is also a surge in Ukrainians arriving through other programs.  In 2022, only 29 percent (140,094 individuals) of the 478,357 approved applications arrived (another 66,000 have landed so far in 2023 through April 2). The continuing flow will substantially increase international arrival and non-permanent resident numbers in 2023 as Canada keeps receiving and processing applications.

Although some residents may leave Canada and some new arrivals are absorbed into existing extended family households, the available data points to an overall net increase in the number of arrivals as well as in demand for housing: the latest CMHC Rental Market Survey shows the national vacancy rate fell from 3.1 percent to 1.9 percent from October 2021 to October 2022.

Current trends indicate a larger influx of international arrivals (far outpacing temporary visa departures) in 2023 and further increases in housing demand. This would push the rental vacancy rate to near zero and worsen housing supply shortages.

Even if the Ukraine War ends swiftly and the labour market starts to cool down, requiring fewer temporary foreign workers, Canada still needs to address its housing crunch in both the short- and long-term.

In the short-term, prefabrication and modular construction, like those that non-profits have constructed for veterans may be needed.

Meanwhile, another concern is Canada’s data quality. Complex, confusing and even conflicting published data due to over- and under-estimates of temporary immigration figures hampers accurate and timely population and housing forecasts. First, one individual can have more than one visa in a calendar year, and leave prior to the visa expiry. As well, in another COVID response, the immigration department has allowed non-permanent residents with expired visas to remain in Canada while their application for visa renewal or permanent residency is under review. To obtain population estimates, however, Statistics Canada still assumes non-permanent resident visa holders left the country the month following visa expiry. Accurate data is needed for accurate analysis of resources and capacity planning to serve new arrivals. And evidence shows that there have been long term data gaps in tracking temporary residents.

COVID shutdowns and the Ukraine war illustrate how dramatic changes in the number of new arrivals can occur with lasting economic and demographic consequence. Using the correct metric in a timely manner is, therefore, critical. We need disaggregated data on permit issuances and arrivals by country of residence as well as data on the total unique count of temporary residents to make sure we know how many people are here.

Henry Lotin is an economist and principal of Integrative Trade and Economics and a retired Canadian diplomat, and Parisa Mahboubi is a Senior Policy Analyst at the C.D. Howe Institute.

Source: Immigration Surges Past One Million — Canada Needs a Real Count and Real Plans

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With falling births, pensions will suffer, taxes will rise – but the alternative is worse

2023/04/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Birth rates are falling throughout the world. Some countries are losing population now, and the global population is projected to decline some time later in the century.

Many people are alarmed by this: people in China, Russia, Western Europe and even Canada, where the population growth rate would be close to zero were it not for substantial immigration. They want to reverse the trend, to raise birth rates.

They are wrong. Low birth rates and falling populations do, to be sure, create significant problems that we must face. Retirement, health care and other end-of-life costs will soar. The French government is proposing an increase in the retirement age, an unpopular decision that will likely spread to other countries. We will also likely need higher tax rates.

But the alternative – high birth rates and growing populations – would be much worse. We should welcome the falling birth rates. Here is why.

If the human race is to survive – indeed, if any species is to survive – its growth rate will be zero. Why? Because if the growth rate is positive, eventually there will be standing room only, an obvious impossibility unless we venture into the science fiction realm of space colonies. How long until we get to that point? It depends on the rate of growth, but with any positive rate we will eventually get there. In 1964, demographer Ansley Coale estimated that with an annual human growth rate of 2 per cent, standing room only would occur in just 650 years.

On the other hand, if the growth rate is negative, eventually the population will disappear.

Therefore, in the long run, if our species is to survive, our growth rate will be zero. Not zero every year, or even every century, but over the long haul. Any positive rates will have to be balanced by negative rates.

How to get to zero population growth? Easy. The birth rate has to equal the death rate.

Given that we want long, healthy lives for ourselves and for those we love, we must have low birth rates to balance that out.

With high birth rates, we will not be able to maintain low death rates. The proponents of higher birth rates don’t mean to put it this way, but they are actually prescribing an early death sentence for us.

What about the problems created by low birth rates?

The essence of the age-distribution problem is that we will have fewer working people to support more retired people. With falling populations, the incentive for investment will likely also fall. It will be harder to bring new technologies to market, and it will be harder to maintain a full-employment level of overall production.

We will thus need to find ways that working people can be more productive, that they can create more goods, services and income, so that they can provide more adequately for their own old age, and also afford higher tax rates to provide the funds for health care and other services for the elderly.

Many measures facing stiff resistance, such as the French government’s raising of the retirement age, will have to be part of the response – all of these changes are difficult and some of them are deeply unpopular. But they will turn out to be less unpopular than the early death needed to balance out high birth rates.

There is reason to be optimistic about this, however. Over the decades we have seen remarkable increases in productivity, and governments have a lot of tools to encourage this to continue. We will face many problems that public policy must address and mitigate, if not completely avoid.

In any case, the current population puts so much pressure on our limited natural resources and on our ecology that the geological, biological and chemical basis of our civilization may collapse. We could deal with these issues more effectively if there were fewer of us. That births in many countries are below replacement level means that we may be moving naturally to a more sustainable size.

What the optimum population size should be is debatable. What is not debatable, at least in my opinion, is that we very much want low birth rates.

John Isbister is a professor of economics at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Source: With falling births, pensions will suffer, taxes will rise – but the alternative is worse

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Why GDP per capita is becoming the indicator to watch

2023/04/21 Leave a comment

Indeed:

Canada has been the worst performing advanced economy in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development since 1976. Governments of all partisan stripes have tried and failed to reverse the trend. If nothing changes, the OECD projects, our economic growth per capita will continue to stagnate for decades to come. This article is part of an occasional series called Per Capita, which examines how and why policy interventions have come up short – and how fresh approaches to economic growth are urgently needed.

A growing cohort of analysts are tempering their enthusiasm for Canada’s recent economic performance for a simple reason: Strong population growth is bulking up the numbers.

Last week, the Bank of Canada projected that real gross domestic product would increase by 1.4 per cent this year, up from a previous forecast of 1 per cent, and by 1.3 per cent in 2024. The central bank said a key factor in its 2023 upgrade was the surge in population, which is expanding the pool of labour and consumers.

Canada’s population rose by just more than one million people in 2022, an annual increase of 2.7 per cent that was the largest since the late 1950s. This is part of a deliberate plan from the federal government to boost population through higher immigration.

For that reason, some economists say they’re paying more attention to growth in real GDP per capita – or economic output per person, adjusted for inflation – than they used to. And on that front, Canada’s economic performance is decidedly weaker: Per capita output in 2022 was roughly the same as in 2017.

The near-term outlook doesn’t show much upside. Even if population growth cooled to 2019 levels, per-capita GDP would still decline for the next two years, based on the Bank of Canada’s projections for output.

“I don’t see that the federal government is focused on per capita GDP, they’re just focused on GDP,” said David Williams, vice-president of policy at the Business Council of British Columbia.

“If you crank up population growth, sure, the economy gets bigger. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not facing stagnating living standards for the majority of Canadians.”

GDP per capita is often used as a proxy for living standards. The metric is positively correlated with life expectancy and well-being – residents of more productive countries tend to live longer and report being happier.

It is not a perfect measure of prosperity. Per capita output in Canada is around three-quarters of that in the U.S., according to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, although Canada enjoys an average life expectancy at birth that is roughly five years longer. However, the U.S. is an outlier in life expectancy among wealthier countries.

Canada’s productivity struggles are hardly new and have been debated for decades. Benjamin Reitzes, a macro strategist at Bank of Montreal, recently noted that the average annual growth in real GDP over the past 10 years was 1.8 per cent, but only 0.6 per cent after adjustments were made for population gains.

Ottawa is aware of this issue – and the potential for decades of mediocrity. In the 2022 budget, the federal government mentioned an OECD forecast that predicts Canada will have the weakest per capita growth among its member countries from 2020 to 2060. “The stakes are high. Most Canadian businesses have not invested at the same rate as their U.S. counterparts,” read the budget.

While Ottawa has acknowledged this productivity issue, some economists are calling on governments to focus more on per capita growth and how to bolster it. (The 2023 federal budget did not repeat its mention of the OECD projection.)

“No per capita growth means Canadian living standards are stagnant,” Mr. Reitzes wrote in a recent note to clients. “Historically, policy makers haven’t paid much attention to the per capita metric. Hopefully, that changes soon.”

The federal government is ramping up immigration levels in the coming years, targeting the intake of 500,000 permanent residents annually by 2025. Most of Canada’s population growth last year was driven by temporary residents, including workers and international students.

Ottawa has frequently said that raising immigration levels is necessary to fill jobs and boost economic growth. However, some of its recent policy decisions have made it easier to fill low-wage roles in lower-productivity sectors with temporary foreign workers.

“We’ve normally tried to target the best and brightest,” said Mr. Williams. “But it seems that there’s been a shift in Ottawa toward saying, ‘Hey, let’s fill these very-low-wage, entry-level jobs.’ And that’s a concern.”

Source:Why GDP per capita is becoming the indicator to watch

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Theo Argitis: Why economists – not politicians – are raising alarms around immigration

2023/04/20 Leave a comment

More questioning of increasing levels of immigration and their impact on housing and productivity, along with legitimate worry regarding ongoing support for high levels:
One of the most encouraging national polls in recent weeks was a survey done by Nanos Research for Bloomberg News that showed large flows of international migration into Canada continue to be widely supported by the public.
This is a relief. I’ve been worried, and not because I’m an immigrant.

Source: Theo Argitis: Why economists – not politicians – are raising alarms around immigration

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Immigrant families’ babies are healthier in poor neighbourhoods: study

2023/04/19 Leave a comment

Interesting findings, on the “healthy immigrant” effect and how that declines over time (a perverse form of integration):

In Ontario’s poorest neighbourhoods, newborns of non-refugee immigrant mothers face a lower risk of serious illness and death than those born to Canadian-born mothers, according to a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday.

Both immigration status and living in a low-income neighbourhood are associated with worse outcomes for newborns, write researchers from the University of Toronto, two Toronto hospitals, the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

However, while previous research has looked at the risk of adverse outcomes for newborns in low- versus high-income neighbourhoods, the study’s authors said it has overlooked the comparative risks for babies born to immigrant and non-immigrant parents living in similar low-income neighbourhoods.

“Efforts should be aimed at improving the overall health and well-being of all females residing in low-income areas, and at determining if the risk of adverse birth outcomes can be equitably reduced among immigrant and non-immigrant groups,” wrote co-author Jennifer Jairam.

To compare the risk of severe neonatal illness and death in immigrant- and non-immigrant-born infants, researchers looked at data on all live, in-hospital births of single babies from 20 to 42 weeks’ gestation between 2002 and 2019 in Ontario.

Ontario, they wrote, is the landing place for about 53 per cent of all female immigrants who enter Canada.

They measured severe neonatal illness or disease by looking at breathing support, intravenous fluid use, birth before 32 weeks’ gestation, very low birth weight and respiratory distress.

During the study period, there were 414,241 single babies born to 312,124 mothers aged 15 years and older living in low-income urban neighbourhoods. Of all the live births during this period, 148,050 were to mothers who had immigrated to Canada, and 266,191 to Canadian-born mothers. Most of the mothers who immigrated to Canada came from South Asia and the East Asia and Pacific regions and had lived in Ontario for less than 10 years.

Jairam and her team found the risk of severe neonatal illness and death for newborns of mothers who had immigrated to Canada was significantly lower than for newborns of Canadian-born mothers, at 49.7 per 1,000 live births compared with 65.6 per 1,000 live births.

However, they said that risk varied depending on the country of origin, with a higher risk of severe neonatal illness and death in newborns of immigrants from Jamaica and Ghana, and in those who had lived for a greater length of time in Ontario.

THE ‘HEALTHY IMMIGRANT EFFECT’

Rather than suggesting immigrant mothers and their newborns receive better care in Ontario than Canadian-born mothers and babies, the authors believe their findings might be explained by the “healthy immigrant” effect.

“Immigrant females who are healthier and more resilient may be most capable of migration; the immigration policy of a host country may preferentially select healthy immigrants,” wrote Dr. Joel Ray, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and one of the study’s co-authors, adding that, paradoxically, immigrants face greater barriers to health care access.

According to the researchers, the “healthy immigrant” effect wanes relative to the length of time an immigrant spends living in a new country.

Another explanation the researchers suggested is some immigrants have greater net income, educational achievement and health literacy than the average for a low-income neighbourhood.

Either way, Jairam, Ray and their co-authors said the study underscores the importance of paying attention to trends at the neighbourhood level so pregnant parents and babies in low-income communities can hope for better health outcomes.

Source: Immigrant families’ babies are healthier in poor neighbourhoods: study

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A new look at immigrants’ outsize contribution to innovation in the US

2023/04/18 Leave a comment

Yet another study:

The United States has long touted itself as a nation built by immigrants. Yet there has never been a precise measure of immigrants’ contribution to the country’s economic and technological progress. Around the time that President Donald Trump was moving to curb employment visas for skilled foreigners, economist Rebecca Diamond and a team of researchers set out to examine this unresolved question.

To find the answer, the researchers looked at the output of nearly 880,000 Americans who patented inventions between 1990 and 2016. They found that immigrants made an outsize contribution to innovation in the U.S. While they comprised 16 percent of inventors, immigrants were behind 23 percent of the patents issued over these years.

It wasn’t just a matter of quantity: The share of patents immigrants produced was slightly higher when weighted by the number of citations each patent received over the next three years, a key measure of their quality and utility. Moreover, immigrants were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted in that period, as measured by the stock market’s reaction to new patents.

“The high-skilled immigrants we have in the U.S. are incredibly productive and innovative, and they’re disproportionately contributing to innovation in our society,” says Diamond, a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

Past research has indirectly pointed to the sizable role immigrants play in American innovation. Studies have shown that immigrants represent nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and more than a quarter of the nation’s Nobel Prize winners. But this study, described in a recent working paper, is the first time economists have used patents to directly measure the output of foreign-born innovators living in the U.S.

The data was clear: “The average immigrant is substantially more productive than the average U.S.-born inventor,” write Diamond and her colleagues, Shai Bernstein of Harvard Business School; Timothy McQuade of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business; Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, a former predoctoral fellow at SIEPR and now a Stanford PhD student; and Beatriz Pousada, a PhD student at Stanford and SIEPR Dissertation Fellowship recipient in 2022-23.

The researchers took a unique approach to their work. They started with a database of 300 million adults who had lived in the country between 1990 and 2016 and then used Social Security numbers to identify those who had immigrated after age 19. (The first five digits of a Social Security number encode the date it was issued; U.S.-born citizens typically receive their numbers at birth or in childhood.) Using names and address history, they matched individuals in the database to those listed as inventors with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. (When patents had multiple authors, each got credit for a proportional share.)

The researchers found that immigrants generate patents across a broad swath of sectors, including computers, electronics, chemicals, and medicine. They also discovered that, while all inventors reach peak productivity in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants decline from that peak at a slower rate than U.S.-born inventors over the rest of their careers, a disparity that remains unexplained.

The immigrant innovation gap

Diamond believes there are several potential reasons for the innovation gap between immigrant and native-born inventors. One is brain drain: “There’s likely a pretty strong positive selection in terms of the types of people from every country that end up as high-skilled professionals with U.S. visas,” she says.

Another factor is cross-border collaboration: The researchers observed that foreign-born inventors are more likely to work with inventors based in other countries and cite foreign technologies in their patents. “Different pools of knowledge get imported by immigration, and diversity in background is good for innovation,” Diamond says.

Diamond and her team also found evidence that immigrant inventors are more likely to live in innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley or Boston, and to work on patents in cutting-edge technology sectors. Still, the researchers estimate that these two factors explain just 30 percent of the gap in patent output.

Immigrant inventors’ contributions go beyond their own work — they also make their native-born collaborators more productive, the researchers discovered. To arrive at this finding, Diamond and her team identified inventors who died before they turned 60 and examined the output of people who had co-authored a patent with that individual before their early death. Compared to a control group of inventors that did not lose a collaborator, surviving inventors produced 10 percent fewer patents after the death of their co-author. The effect was larger for inventors whose deceased co-author was an immigrant — their productivity declined by 17 percent. This gap persisted even after the researchers controlled for a number of factors, such as the productivity of the deceased inventors.

“At the end of the day, we weren’t really able to explain the gap,” Diamond says. “It seems there’s something special about being an immigrant. Their knowledge has these huge external effects on who they work with, and what they know impacts what their collaborators can produce in the future.”

Diamond believes these findings have direct implications for policymakers who want to maintain the nation’s role as a technological trailblazer. “Understanding the forces that make the U.S. one of the most innovative and productive countries in the world is important,” she says. “The U.S. has done an amazing job of attracting the best and the brightest immigrants. Any policy that would revamp the visa process might want to consider how big a deal immigrants are in our innovation output.”

Source: A new look at immigrants’ outsize contribution to innovation in the US

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The new Canada-U.S. border deal will cost Canadian taxpayers at least this much

2023/04/17 Leave a comment

The formal analysis (more solid than the one on self-administered citizenship oaths):

Closing the Canada-U.S. border to asylum seekers is projected to cost Canadian taxpayers at least $60 million over 10 years. But that analysis doesn’t include costs for the Mounties to beef up “challenging” enforcement efforts.

In March, Ottawa and Washington expanded a bilateral agreement to turn back irregular migrants trying to cross into the other country for protection, but a cost-benefit analysis has only been recently published in the Canada Gazette.

“It will be challenging for the RCMP to consistently enforce the Regulations given the size and terrain of Canada’s landscape, challenges posed by Indigenous and private lands, as well as the limitations of existing border technology (e.g. sensors, cameras),” said the public notice about the amended Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).

“Responding to reports of border crossings and intercepting irregular migrants between the ports is resource intensive and risks diverting policing resources.”

The RCMP is responsible for patrolling unofficial border crossings. It will be funded for broader initiatives to replace and modernize ISR equipment (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) and to form a new project team to determine technological and other needs.

But the notice said these expenditures are not treated as incremental, hence not included in the analysis.

“It is acknowledged that investment in these new resources will likely help support … the broader objective of a reduction in irregular migration following implementation of the regulatory amendments,” it said.

The estimated $61.5-million cost in today’s dollar value only covers transition costs, upfront capital costs, and ongoing processing, operations and enforcement costs for the immigration department and Canada Border Service Agency. It includes:

  • $560,000 this year only for communications products, IT costs, updates to program delivery instructions, other administrative materials, and training costs;
  • $1.28 million over the next decade to purchase vehicles to transport migrants, and for acquisition and installation costs for office equipment and renovations to create additional processing spaces such as interview rooms due to more dispersed arrival points for asylum claimants across the border; and
  • $59.61 million over 10 years for ongoing processing, operations and enforcement costs for tasks such as eligibility determinations, investigations, intelligence, reviews, infrastructure oversight, litigation and vehicle maintenance.

As a result of evolving migration routes, officials say there will be additional policing costs in border communities and in popular destination cities to respond to calls, conduct investigations related to irregular migration, and to respond to suspected cases of human smuggling.

The public notice says there will also be potential costs or risks for asylum claimants who choose to game the system.

“Claimants may face increased danger, such as involvement with human smugglers and may be at risk for physical, mental or financial abuse. They may also face risks from exposure to extreme weather conditions if they cross at remote locations or fail to secure access to shelter,” it said.

“This could increase the health and security risks of living in dangerous natural habitats, as well as a possible lack of access to food, water, health care and other basic services.”

Since 2017, Canada has seen a surge of irregular migrants via the U.S., which reached almost 40,000 asylum seekers last year. More than 90 per cent of them came through the world-famous Roxham Road in Quebec, which put pressure on the country’s asylum system and local housing and community services.

Restricting access to asylum throughout the entire border will improve border integrity and support the standardized treatment of all arrivals, regardless of where migrants cross, said the notice, which also cautions against any promised outcomes on the level of irregular migration.

“The impact on asylum volumes is dependent on many factors, including the ability to effectively address border crossings as new irregular routes emerge and the risk that individuals will continue to evade application of the STCA,” it said.

“As such, the extent to which volumes may be reduced is largely unknown and the magnitude of this impact cannot be estimated; therefore, for cost-benefit analysis purposes, the benefits of a reduction in asylum claimants are not quantified or monetized.”

It also noted that no public consultations were undertaken for the changes to the bilateral pact because it would have created a surge of migrants trying to sneak into the country before the new rule took effect.

Source: The new Canada-U.S. border deal will cost Canadian taxpayers at least this much

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Paradkar: Dear immigrants: Coming to Canada? Here’s what you’re really in for

2023/04/15 Leave a comment

While a bit overboard, all too accurate given the various changes to ease business restrictions on temporary worker permits and limits on employment time for international students:

Hello, new immigrants. Most of you are likely coming to Canada in search of a better life and better opportunities than in the lands you leave behind. The good news is that many of you will find a job. Some of you will even be well-paid. But more than a few will find your dreams of stability and comfort seriously challenged.

For those who take on the vast majority of jobs Ontario is looking to fill — in restaurants and in bars, in truck transportation, construction, nursing homes — you’ll first have to survive the savageries of capitalism and xenophobia.

As Canada opens its doors to half a million immigrants annually — about half of whom will land in Ontario — we say welcome, today’s newcomers. But do you know what you’re in for?

Canada has historically benefitted from immigration. Many immigrants, particularly higher skilled ones, have also benefitted by coming here. But this round of gate-opening reveals the truth about Canada’s economic immigration policy. It’s designed in the interest of a stronger economy, which serves, first and foremost, not the majority of immigrants, who will be channelled into unskilled, often temporary jobs, but those at the top.

What Canada wants, but is not saying out loud, is a servant class; a vast army of workers prepared to accept the low-paid jobs no one else wants. And given how the economy is structured along with our poor preparedness to receive these newcomers, it’s clear we want to keep them in that position.

The current immigration push continues a centuries-old tradition of worker exploitation in the Americas. When European settler attempts to enslave Indigenous populations failed for various reasons, indentured servants arrived in the 1600s to care for the vast lands the earliest settlers had got, bought or stole.

Then came chattel slavery, itself created because the elite capitalists realized free labour by commodifying humans kidnapped from afar was more profitable than cheap wage labour.

When, some 200 years later, Britain abolished slavery in most of its colonies in the 1830s, this continent experienced a “labour shortage,” like the one today. That led to Britain importing indentured or bonded labour from colonies such as India, particularly on its plantation islands.

Then, as today, “labour shortage” didn’t mean there was a lack of human bodies to do jobs that build societies. Nor did it mean there was a lack of skills to do them. Then, as today, it meant something about the shifting dynamics of demand and supply.

A higher demand for labour shifts power toward workers, who agitate for better wages and working conditions. Flooding the market with a supply of workers swings that shift in power back to the owning class.

Today’s immigration push comes with baked-in economic disenfranchisement. Temporary work in precarious jobs leaves workers vulnerable to abusive working conditions.

Much like the West Indian Domestic Scheme of the 1950s and ’60s, when Canada sought Black Caribbeans to be domestic workers, the floodgates are opening today through initiatives such as the Temporary Youth Worker Program and the Federal Skilled Trades program, and via colleges and universities, which are taking increasing numbers of international students.

According to Statistics Canada, a vast majority of Ontario’s job vacancies right now — 60 per cent — require a high school graduation or less, many needing less than one year of experience.

The Federal Skilled Trades program doesn’t require candidates to have secondary education but it will prioritize those with a certificate or diploma or degree. That means many economic migrants will be overqualified for the jobs being asked of them, but they will come, perhaps hoping they’re at least getting a foot in the door.

Once in, however, these immigrants will have been slotted into the jobs Canadians won’t do for the wages being offered.

The overt racists and xenophobes also grease the wheels of this exploitative system.

If employers see labour as robotic capital-making units, xenophobes, easily made insecure by “outsiders,” keep immigrants bracing for attacks on their very existence, leaving them grateful for the crumbs, told their deplorable circumstances are a result of their not working hard enough or their supposed inferiority.

The economy is structurally built to see full employment — everyone having a job — as a problem.

A seventh straight month of job gains and near-record-low unemployment of five per cent is leading economists to predict that the Bank of Canada might well raise already high interest rates in coming months to “cool the economy” and inflation.

In this way of thinking, rising wages for, say, an average grocery worker in Canada, who earned $18.97 per hour in 2022 is a threat to the economy. But grocery magnate Galen Weston earning $5,679 an hour is not.

This thinking is why employers freely blamed programs such as Canada Emergency Response Benefit — that offered about $500 a week to those who lost income due to COVID — for “spoiling” workers.

Far better to call a person earning $500 a week, and not wanting to work for less than that bare minimum, lazy than pay them higher wages.

Perhaps the new immigrants coming in to rescue our economy, including those who have to remain jobless in service of this country, might be thanked in other ways? Maybe they’ll be housed relatively easily? Not have to worry about finding good schools for their children? Or have a safety net should they fall ill?

No such luck. Provincial parsimoniousness has already extended to defunding education, defunding health care and not building enough or affordable houses on land already earmarked for homes.

Politicians and their owning class friends are eyeing for-profit education and for-profit health care once the current systems are squeezed to the point of hopelessness. Large developers, quite coincidentally, bought precisely those thousands of acres of environmentally sensitive and protected Greenbelt land that Ontario’s premier opened up to build housing.

Yes, developers will need construction workers willing to work for less than a decent wage, if they hope to pad their profits. Instability in foreign lands fostering desperation can be a wonderful boon.The very rich benefit mightily from boosted immigration in other ways, too. More people means more consumers and buying food is non-negotiable. Ka-ching, that sound of cascading coins, is an inadequate metaphor to capture the surge in sums of money for people like Weston, whose family’s net worth is about $8 billion US.

We — as a nation — either need to be better prepared to receive newcomers or, failing that, be honest and say: Welcome, newcomers — welcome to your new life of multi-dimensional suffering.

Source: Dear immigrants: Coming to Canada? Here’s what you’re really in for

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Leuprecht: Closing Roxham Road loophole a benefit to all migrants

2023/04/15 Leave a comment

Of note:

To stem the surge in irregular migration at Roxham Road, the U.S. and Canada recently extended their Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), to apply between ports of entry as well. Under the renegotiated STCA migrants must apply to a Canadian agency before crossing from the U.S. into Canada, and vice versa.

Both countries can now turn back asylum seekers attempting to cross irregularly or without authorization. This “new deal” is good news for migrants and for the continent overall. In lieu of border disorder, it affirms three fundamental principles of a sustainable migratory system: the orderly processing of documented migrants, due process and the rule of law, as well as the efficient and effective use of scarce public resources.

Migrant advocates often argue that borders should be open: Whoever shows up at a border should be allowed to cross and lodge a claim. But who shows up is not random. Rather, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest is fundamentally incompatible with a principled approach to the protection of refugees and asylum seekers. Instead of unequal access for those who can afford to pay, the STCA is an important step toward levelling the playing field for all vulnerable people in genuine need of protection.

Neither domestic nor international law offer an internationally accepted definition of “migrant.” To the contrary, the careless and indiscriminate use of the term ignores the democratic socio-political process that defines a non-citizen’s status, which determines conditions of admissibility that distinguish undocumented migrants from economic immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. States have legal and moral obligations to immigrants and refugees, and to consider asylum claims. Under domestic and international law, these obligations differ by such criteria as human vulnerabilities, labour needs and other material and ethical considerations.

Public perception of queue jumping at Roxham Road challenges the legitimacy of a well-administered migration policy that is fair for the most vulnerable and grounded in the rule of law. Irregular migration puts at risk the integrity, sustainability and legitimacy of the social contract on which the domestic migratory regime is based. Such a contract preserves the integrity of a state’s borders and the successful political and economic socialization and integration of migrants, as well as social justice and the collective benefit of migration in fostering prosperity.

These are the three cornerstones for the legal regime that admitted a record one million newcomers (immigrants and non-permanent residents) to Canada in 2022. However, polls show that the impression that government is no longer able or committed to the orderly management of the state’s borders causes popular support for legal migration to decline and risks stoking nativist populism that calls into question the sustainability of the entire migratory system.

With population expected to grow by 2.5 billion in the Global South over the next 25 years, that system is coming under massive strain. The number of people who strive for asylum or refugee status in the Global North vastly exceeds the fiscal and social capacity of receiving countries. The current refugee system sprung up after the Second World War in an acknowledgement that certain people deserve temporary protection. Evidence in Canada and the U.S. shows that many asylum seekers today are not seeking temporary protection: their intent is to immigrate.

In a world where travel is relatively cheap and easy, refugee and asylum provisions have become a back door for economic immigrants who would not otherwise be admissible, and who do not qualify under exemptions that would allow them to lodge a claim at an official port of entry. In 2022, for example, 40,000 people crossed into Canada irregularly from New York at Roxham Road, whose location has made it a semi-unofficial port of irregular entry. Yet, almost half had entered the U.S. legally. At Roxham Road, 40 per cent who cross end up having their claims denied. Although the rate is above average, even failed claimants are unlikely to be removed.

For all intents and purposes, many are economic migrants. Claimants originate in countries marred by conflict, corruption and dire economic conditions: Central America, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti. Sophisticated human smuggling networks, which fall under the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime, prey on their misery. Yet, it is not illegal for someone to avail of the services of a smuggler or even to commit identity fraud for the purposes of making an asylum claim. In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates the vast majority of people who try to make it to North America engage the services of human smugglers and what is now a $10-billion-a-year industry.

The STCA discourages irregular (asylum) or illegal entry (human smuggling) at Roxham Road. Claimants who fall under an exemption can still register their claims at Lacolle, Que., which is the closest point of entry. The only “new” element is that on either side of the border claims have to be registered at a formal port of entry. The renewed STCA manifests the open border paradox: co-operative bilateral and binational governance and border management is actually essential to advance mutual security, prosperity and democracy, while mitigating the exploitation of vulnerable migrants.

To be sure, the STCA is no silver bullet. Its effectiveness hinges on co-ordinated enforcement at and beyond the border, Canada stepping up to take a bilateral and trilateral approach with Mexico and the United States to help relieve despair at the U.S.-Mexico border, far-reaching reforms to the UN Convention on Refugees and to the U.S. asylum system, as well as greater access to legal migration pathways in the Global North, where jobs are aplenty and demand for unskilled labour is high.

Victims in need of protection should have equal opportunity to lodge their claim, offshore, while people on the move should lodge a claim in the first country where it is safe for them to do so. Instead of ideological turf wars over the STCA by critics intent on stigmatizing inequalities between the U.S. and Canadian systems, comprehensive reform of the North American and global migration systems is in order if such tragedies as the detention centre fire in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, that killed 40 last month, and the eight migrants who drowned in the St. Lawrence River two weeks ago, are to be prevented.

Special to National Post

Christian Leuprecht is Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. 

Source: Opinion: Closing Roxham Road loophole a benefit to all migrants

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

COVID-19 Immigration Effects – February 2023 update

2023/04/15 Leave a comment

Latest monthly update. Of particular interest, percentage of TR2PR of permanent resident admissions is over 60 percent in both January and February. Not sure whether this reflects a conscious decision to address housing availability and affordability concerns, given TRs already in Canada, or not.

Filed under Citizenship, Immigration Tagged with ,

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