Fear of Islam, immigrants and diversity are leading indicators of Donald Trump support – The Washington Post

2016/06/08 Leave a comment

Fear_of_Islam__immigrants_and_diversity_are_leading_indicators_of_Donald_Trump_support_-_The_Washington_PostHardly surprising:

That headline may be self-evident these days, but at least we have some pretty solid data to back it up.

According to a new Pew Research study, if you look just at Republican voters who think the growing number of newcomers in the United States “threatens traditional American customs and values,” more than twice as many have “warm feelings toward Donald Trump” as have cold ones. Among those who say immigrants strengthen U.S. society, it’s about 2-to-1 in the other direction.

What’s more, only 21 percent of Republicans said that immigrants “strengthen” America. But among these Republicans, only 30 percent told pollsters they have “warm feelings” about Trump and an even smaller share — 14 percent — feel “very warmly” about the presumptive Republican nominee.

The same was true of feelings about Islam and the fact that the U.S. population, in a few decades, will be mostly black, Latino and Asian, not white. In both cases, attitudes more antipathetic toward Islam and the country’s increasing diversity were more in-line with Trump support, while people who thought Islam is not more violent than other religions and that increased diversity isn’t a bad thing were colder toward Trump.

Source: Fear of Islam, immigrants and diversity are leading indicators of Donald Trump support – The Washington Post

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Quebec: Les seuils d’immigration haussés

2016/06/04 Leave a comment

Not much change from previous years and backing away from the initial proposal of 60,000:

Le gouvernement Couillard entend hausser de 50 000 à un maximum de 53 000 les seuils annuels d’immigration pour les deux prochaines années. En 2019, le nombre maximum d’immigrants reçus passerait à 54 500.

La ministre de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion, Kathleen Weil, a dévoilé jeudi le document La planification de l’immigration au Québec pour la période 2017-2019 qui servira de base à la consultation sur les seuils d’immigration. La consultation statutaire, prévue dans la Loi sur l’immigration, devrait s’amorcer en août ou septembre prochain.

En 2017 et 2018, on projette une fourchette variant de 49 000 à 53 000 immigrants par an, et de 50 500 à 54 500 en 2019. C’est moins que l’objectif de recevoir 60 000 immigrants par an qu’avait évoqué le premier ministre Philippe Couillard. Le document sur la politique d’immigration, dévoilé en mars, mentionnait qu’avec un tel seuil, le Québec pourrait éviter un recul du nombre de personnes en âge de travailler. Kathleen Weil reconnaît qu’avec des objectifs moindres, le bassin de main-d’oeuvre rapetissera. « Il faut mieux réussir l’intégration, a-t-elle fait observer. On ne peut pas nier le facteur chômage des personnes immigrantes et la reconnaissance notamment des compétences. C’est des obstacles importants. »

Selon le document, l’augmentation envisagée répondra aux besoins économiques du Québec. Aller plus loin poserait des « défis accrus » sur le plan de l’intégration et « pourrait mener à la remise en question par certaines personnes de l’apport de l’immigration ».

Le parrainage des réfugiés connaît certaines difficultés. La ministre a annoncé le lancement d’une vaste consultation « auprès des groupes parrains, des familles réfugiées et de tous les organismes et ministères oeuvrant auprès de ceux-ci, afin de bien cerner les besoins et de renforcer notre modèle d’accompagnement ».

Parmi les objectifs de la planification pluriannuelle, on note une augmentation de la proportion des immigrants qui proviendraient de la filière des travailleurs temporaires, une hausse de 75 % à 85 % des travailleurs qualifiés qui déclarent connaître le français et un maintien de la proportion des travailleurs qualifiés dont la formation est demandée.

Source: Les seuils d’immigration haussés | Le Devoir

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Gloomier future seen for Canadian immigration

2016/06/03 Leave a comment

IRCC analysts are asking many of the right questions:

With 35 per cent of male newcomers returning home and a growing middle class in developing countries less inclined to migrate, an internal government review is calling the future of Canadian immigration into question.

The report by Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada also points to the challenge of reconfiguring an immigrant-selection system in a rapidly changing labour market where a growing number of jobs are temporary and there’s “increasing mismatch” of available skills and the skills in demand.

“What changes, if any, does Canada want to make to its current ‘managed migration,’ ” asked the 23-page study, titled Medium-Term Policy: Balanced Immigration and stamped “for internal discussion only.” “To what extent is the current overall immigration level appropriate and/or necessary?”

With major changes made in the last decade under the former Conservative government, legal and immigration experts are calling on Immigration Minister John McCallum to have a “national conversation” on the future of Canadian immigration.

“Ottawa must take a step back to do a review of the whole immigration program and reach a national consensus in moving our country forward as a nation-building exercise rather than as an economic imperative,” said Debbie Douglas of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants.

“The Liberals have good political instincts and like to be seen as doing more on the immigration front. It’s the right time to take a look at what is working and what is not working in the system.”

The new government has already announced reviews of certain immigration programs involving temporary foreign workers and the Express Entry processing system, but critics say such reviews must be done in a holistic manner rather than a piecemeal fashion.

“This is the most thoughtful brief (on Canada immigration) I’ve seen in 10 years,” said Queen’s University immigration law professor Sharry Aiken. “It’s asking all the right questions that are useful starting points for a wide-ranging discussion of the future of our immigration system.”

The internal report, obtained by the Star, also devotes attention to the estimated 2.8 million Canadian citizens — 9 per cent of the population — who live abroad, including a million people in the United States, 300,000 in Hong Kong and 75,000 in the United Kingdom.

Some 35 per cent of male immigrants to Canada return home, many within the first year. Between 1996 and 2006, the annual exit rate for citizens born in Canada was 1.33 per cent compared to 4.5 per cent for naturalized citizens.

“There has been a rather negative view of these expatriate Canadians, as they have been regarded as evidence of ‘brain drain,’ Canada’s lack of competitiveness in retaining high-skilled professionals and business leaders, and our insufficient success in integrating new arrivals,” the report noted. “Canada could choose to take a more proactive stance with expatriates.”

Measures implemented by other countries include: extending voting right to expats, providing non-resident representation in the national legislature, facilitating business and research networks, doing outreach to communities abroad to promote ties as well as creating tax treaties with other countries to facilitate work abroad.

The report also points to the greater emphasis the former Tory government put on selecting economic immigrants based on in-demand occupations in a so-called “project economy” marked by limited length of employment based on the duration of a contract or project.

“This environment makes it a significant challenge to target occupations and industries that are priorities for addressing through immigration,” it said.

While the report forecast does mean potentially lower immigration to Canada in the longer term, University of Toronto professor Jeffrey Reitz said global migration is still driven by “inequality” from poor to rich countries.

Although Ottawa introduced the Express Entry system in 2015 to let employers pick prospective immigrants from a pool of candidates to ensure newcomers are quickly employed, Reitz said the uptake of candidates outside the country has been small.

“Anything that improves the employment situation contributes to immigrant retention, but there is an aspect of retention in the family class. When you lose your job and you have no family, you move. A support group gives people a reason to stay,” explained Reitz, the director of ethnic, immigration and pluralism studies at U of T.

Hence, the immigration report raised the question over the strict differentiation of “economic” and “social” immigration in the current system, which channels applicants into the skilled and nonskilled streams.

“Regardless of how their application was accepted, immigrants make many contributions to Canadian society; economic migrants make social contributions; social immigrants make economic contributions,” it said.

“Given the somewhat artificial distinction between social and economic immigration, there may be grounds for giving greater weight to ‘non-economic’ criteria and on criteria related to the success of subsequent generations.”

Ryerson University professor John Shields said recent immigrants are caught up in the same “new economy” faced by young Canadians entering the workforce.

“All immigrants including the refugee class contribute to the society economically. They pay dividends economically in five, ten years as integration is a long-term process that can take a lifetime,” said Shields, whose research focuses on labour markets and immigrants.

“Recent immigrants and young Canadians face a different kind of roadblock from those who are already established in Canada. The issue we need to deal with is creating higher quality employment in Canada and educate Canadian employers of the values of one’s work experience from somewhere else.”

Source: Gloomier future seen for Canadian immigration | Toronto Star

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The Daily — Study: Immigrants’ initial firm allocation and earnings growth, 1999 to 2012

2016/06/02 Leave a comment

Immigrants’_Initial_Firm_Allocation_and_Earnings_GrowthThis study suggests limited mobility:

After arriving in Canada, immigrants whose first paid employment was in high-paying firms fared better in both the short and long-term than their counterparts whose first paid employment was in lower paying firms.

A new study uses Statistics Canada’s new Canadian Employer–Employee Dynamics Database to examine the differences in the earnings trajectories of immigrants, according to their initial allocation to low-, medium-low, or high-paying firms.

The benefit of initial employment in high-paying firms remained even after accounting for individual demographic and human capital factors.

For example, immigrant men first employed in low-paying firms earned almost $11,000 less in the first year after landing than their counterparts in high-paying firms. After 14 years in Canada, the earnings gap between these groups was $8,600 despite employment transitions during the intervening years. Similarly, the earnings difference between immigrant women initially employed in low-paying firms and those initially employed in high-paying firms was approximately $6,000 in the first year after landing and $5,500 in the 14th year after landing.

Furthermore, the returns of earnings to educational attainment and knowledge of English or French were larger in both the short and long-term among immigrants initially employed in high-paying firms than among those first employed in low-paying firms.

Source: The Daily — Study: Immigrants’ initial firm allocation and earnings growth, 1999 to 2012

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A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US – Vox

2016/05/31 Leave a comment

Great data visualization and Canadian version would be comparable, although the post 1960s mix would be somewhat different:

It’s easy now to assume that Mexico has always been among the main sources of immigration to America. But as this wonderful chart by Natalia Bronshtein shows, that’s not even close to true.

200 years immigration

(Natalia Bronshtein)

Bronshtein pulled 200 years of government data to put together the visualization. There’s an interactive version on her website: you can hover over any color, at any point, and see the exact number of immigrants who became residents from that country in that decade.

But taken as a whole, the chart tells a very clear story: there are two laws that totally transformed immigration to the United States.

The first, the National Origins Act of 1924 (a capstone on a series of anti-immigration bills passed in the few years before that), set very strict quotas on immigration to America from any country — and especially strict quotas on any country that wasn’t in western or northern Europe. (Immigration from Asia was, for the most part, simply banned.) That’s the bottleneck you see in the graph.

The second, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, demolished the old quota system. But instead of just turning the clock back to the dawn of the 20th century, the 1965 law created a completely different era of immigration to the US from all over the world — and especially from Latin America and Asia. None of the colors that are dominant on this chart up until the 1920s are dominant from the 1970s onward. Once large-scale immigration to the US was restored, the face of it looked totally different.

Source: A gorgeous visualization of 200 years of immigration to the US – Vox

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Opinion: Mass immigration cause of demand for housing

2016/05/30 Leave a comment

Herbert Grubel on the impact of immigration on the Vancouver housing market (overall immigration not just the wealthy).

While I agree with his characterization of many of the interest groups supporting continued high levels of immigration, his reference to the “silent majority” is left undefined: is it code for ‘old-stock’ Canadians or a more inclusive concept that includes many second generation new Canadians who face similar affordability issues (see Chinese real estate investors are reshaping the market):

The other alternative is curtailing mass immigration, which is the responsibility of the federal government. Such curtailment will not take place since federal politicians are pressured to maintain present policies by the many beneficiaries of mass immigration: the construction industry, real estate agents, employers hiring immigrants to keep labour costs low and increase profits, retailers benefiting from increased sales, the owners of land and homes whose capital gains depend on high demand by immigrants, the members of the immigration industry (lawyers, consultants, providers of adjustment assistance, teachers of English as a second language and others who are paid by government to serve immigrants), members of immigrant communities wanting to increase their economic and political influence, and immigrants who want to have their parents and grand-parents join them.

There are also Canadians who enjoy more abstract benefits from mass immigration: socially conscious people who want to do good and get satisfaction from seeing immigrants escape poverty in their home countries, and making Canada a globally admired multicultural society. Politicians whose re-election chances are increased by catering to these do-gooders and who, ironically, gain status and self-esteem by designing and financing at taxpayers’ expense policies for the assistance of those suffering from the high costs of housing.

Because of the politics surrounding building rules and immigration policies, Vancouver’s young will continue to suffer from the high and increasing costs of housing. Many will leave Vancouver. Some will live in the basement of their parents’ home or share accommodations with others, postponing and often forgoing marriage and having children.

However, eventually the silent majority of Vancouverites who do not benefit from mass immigration may vote for changes in federal policies. This will happen once this silent majority becomes aware of the negative effects on their own well being caused by mass immigration: fiscal deficits resulting in higher taxes; lower wages and incomes per person; traffic congestion, pollution, scarcity of family physicians, hospital beds and university places and diminishing returns from multiculturalism.

Source: Opinion: Mass immigration cause of demand for housing | Vancouver Sun

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The Asian force behind Vancouver’s housing boom

2016/05/28 1 Comment

More on immigration and the over-heated Vancouver housing market and the related analysis by David Ley:

If he wanted to, geographer David Ley could consider himself a data point in his own research. It was back in 1996 that he was named UBC director of the Metropolis Project, an international inquiry into immigration and diversity. By that time, he’d seen his own Kerrisdale neighbourhood being remade by rich immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan who’d sent house prices soaring.

Ley’s 2010 book, Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, displayed empathy for the immigrants while also identifying problems that their mass arrival wrought. By the time it was published, a new wave, this time from mainland China, had begun turbocharging Vancouver property markets yet again. For concerned officials and researchers, Ley’s book was one of the few resources available, even though it described an earlier time and a different group.

Today, a continuing lack of research and official data about the role of Chinese immigrants and investors in Vancouver’s housing insanity* remains, for some in government and the real estate industry, a rationale for doing nothing. “The interesting question is why there are deniers,” Ley says. “Often you find a vested interest.”

Ley’s latest research describes an influx of foreign capital turning Vancouver’s housing market into a Wild West land rush. He pins much of the blame on governments for whom rich Asian immigrants have become an easy fiscal fix.

In the early 1980s, Canada and especially British Columbia were in deep recession. One cure, governments in Ottawa and Victoria hoped, would be programs encouraging high-net-worth individuals from Asia and elsewhere to immigrate.**

While the immigrants did come, the economic benefits did not. It hardly mattered that Canada’s visas had less demanding standards than most other countries’, Ley says, because we didn’t uphold them anyway. Originally, aspiring business-class immigrants could choose from two main streams. In the investor stream, Canada required a lower net worth and minimum investment than did the United States – and, in the end, while banks and governments definitely got a take, there was never much in the way of actual investment.

Meanwhile, “with the entrepreneur stream, after two years you had to have hired one Canadian,” says Ley. “In the equivalent American scheme, you had to hire 10 Americans.” But in B.C. – where more than half of all business immigrants eventually landed*** – evaluations were minimal or were waived. “And this was because there was half a dozen people in the Vancouver office tasked with following up on the thousands of cases, which simply wasn’t possible.”

The Canada Revenue Agency has been similarly ineffective. The declared income of business immigrants is lower than any other category of immigrants, including refugees, Ley points out. Nor did we bother tracking property markets. The B.C. government did keep records of home buyers’ nationalities but stopped during the 1990s. “The reason I’ve heard is that there was a storage issue,” he says. “I’m passing that along while raising my eyebrows.”

Then there is the federal agency Fintrac, which is supposed to stop money laundering. Anecdotal information suggests that a large portion of Chinese buyers pay in cash (in the U.S., there is data).****  “The property market is one of the easiest ways to dispose of hot money,” Ley notes.

Ottawa abruptly eliminated both the investor and entrepreneur streams in 2014, but many of the 50,000 Chinese lined up at the time opted instead to use a new 10-year come-and-go visitor visa that does not lead to citizenship. Of the more than 300,000 Chinese come-and-gos that year, most were tourists, but a significant number employed it as an inexpensive, low-hassle mobility tool, in many cases to buy a second home occupied by student children.

In 2014 China had more than one million people with liquid assets of over $2-million. Up to 60 per cent were weighing or pursuing emigration, with Vancouver among the three top intended destinations. It’s hardly surprising that several surveys and estimates (none of them officially sanctioned, of course) place the proportion of Chinese buyers of detached homes on Vancouver’s west side at about 70 per cent and growing. “The top end of the market is not being supported by local conditions,” says Ley. “We’ve got a housing market that is totally out of whack with the labour market.” That is, people who actually hold jobs in Vancouver increasingly cannot afford to live there.

Some of the additional machinations that are throwing that market out of whack have only recently come to light. New Coast Realty stands accused of both shadow flipping and predatory pricing, following a Globe and Mail investigation.

Of course, there are beneficiaries besides the real-estate industry: namely, Vancouver homeowners. But not Ley. “My wife and I are steadfast stayers. But the craziness of the last six months has shifted a lot of people.”

Source: The Asian force behind Vancouver’s housing boom – The Globe and Mail

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Chinese K-12 students a booming demographic for B.C. schools

2016/05/26 Leave a comment

While from an integration perspective, earlier arrival generally means better results, it is telling how strategic some Chinese parents are, and how market-oriented some private schools are:

The average age of Chinese students arriving in B.C. and Canada is dropping dramatically as growing numbers of international K-12 pupils, not just college students, are enrolling in local schools.

According to a monthly report published by Canadian immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, there is a demographic shift occurring in the kind of student visas being processed by Canada’s embassy in Beijing. Kindergarten-to-Grade 12 students made up 37 per cent of all study permits issued in China last year, a sharp rise from 18 per cent just six years ago. In B.C., there were 1,094 Chinese students enrolled in K-12 in 2009; by 2014, that figure had quadrupled to 4,306.

Kurland says the statistics suggest a shift in the thinking of Chinese families about how to get their children — and perhaps themselves — Canadian residency. He pointed to recent changes in Canadian immigration law that make “Express Entry” a lottery system for international college students, causing Chinese families to seek ways to improve their chances.

“It used to be, if you are from China, and you are in Canada on a college study permit, you had an excellent chance of gaining residency,” Kurland said. “They may have had to wait, but students could say, ‘I know I’m in.’

“The new system threw all of that predictability and transparency out the window. It didn’t make sense to gamble $30,000 to $40,000 a year (on college) if the goal was permanent residence.”

Experts say sending students to Canada at a younger age speeds integration into Canadian society and improves their chances for residency in a number of ways. Kurland speculates that Ottawa may already be looking at changes to give residency preference to students who graduated from Canadian elementary and secondary schools. But there are other reasons why parents are sending their children to B.C. earlier.

Huichen Li, 26, has first-hand experience.

“I have asthma, so my parents thought coming here would be better for my health,” said Li, who is currently president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s campus in Richmond. “We thought we could get adjusted earlier by coming earlier.”

Li arrived in Canada as a Grade 10 student and attended North Vancouver’s Bodwell High School, a private international boarding school. He lived in a dorm for a year before his parents followed him.

Randall Martin, executive director of the B.C. Council for International Education, said China’s previous “One-Child Policy” put a lot of pressure on many families’ only child. If a child has the responsibility of possibly supporting all family members as they age, going abroad early can be very important, he said.

“Basically, a child has six guardians: two parents and four grandparents,” Martin said. “Ultimately, the sense from the families is that — if the state can’t support those six people — that one child has to. … And if you’ve got one child, you want the best for his or her health, and that’s not going to be in a major city in China. With the ability of all these relatives to support a student going abroad, it’s almost a no-brainer.”

The enormous market also means many B.C. schools actively court Chinese K-12 students, which concerns some in the industry.

Paul Romani, founder of Vancouver’s Pear Tree Elementary, said his school accepts very few international students, and charges all students similar fees. But many other institutions charge significantly higher fees for international students, giving administrators an incentive to go after more Chinese students, he noted.

“There are some private schools in B.C. that are increasingly exploiting the higher fees charged for international students, as well as the unbelievably generous ‘donations’ … which few B.C. families could ever compete with,” Romani said.

Source: Chinese K-12 students a booming demographic for B.C. schools | Vancouver Sun

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The winners and losers of globalization, Branko Milanovic’s new book on inequality answers two important questions: Corak

2016/05/24 Leave a comment

Miles Corak’s review of Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization makes interesting reading, particularly  the section on immigration:

If we really can get into this global mindset that he is asking us to adopt, then we might think more creatively, and perhaps less dogmatically, about a series of challenges that we face as citizens of individual nations. There are a number of examples in the last chapter, but perhaps the most striking deals with citizenship and migration, examples that cut at the very core of the approach.

There remains a huge boost to incomes depending upon where an individual lives, and this creates big incentives for migration from poorer to richer countries. American politics has long been struggling with meaningful immigration reform, driven by the large inequalities between countries but also formed, informed, and misinformed by the large inequalities within the country.

The refugee crisis now afflicting Europe is partly geopolitical but also deeply economic. Better lives are to be had if one can make it to Germany or Sweden. “Physical walls between jurisdictions,” Milanovic tells us, “are being built, in part, because there is a huge financial wall between being and not being a citizen of a rich country.” In his view, this is because our national politics ties us to a binary notion of citizenship. He speculates that Americans and other citizens of the rich countries might be more amenable to immigration if there were what he calls an intermediate level of citizenship, a level that would have less economic value than full citizenship because it would entail higher taxation, less access to social services, or perhaps an obligation to return to the country of origin.

In other words, put aside the idea of a “path to citizenship” as a right. Americans have tolerated a de facto inferior form of residency, but in a way that keeps many immigrants and their children in the shadows. Milanovic is advocating bringing them out of the shadows through, for example, a legally administered program for temporary foreign workers, giving migrants the right to work in the country but also the obligation to return home.

This is something actually done in Canada, but the policy went afoul politically because it made the competition for jobs between natives and migrants more transparent. It may be a policy particularly appropriate to the European Union, where the walls are something more than metaphorical. This is context that Milanovic probably has in mind. But it is hard to imagine how much traction a temporary foreign-worker program, or the other variants he suggests, would have in the U.S., because the perception that immigrants compete for jobs and lower wages of the native-born will still bite.

Indeed, at the same time, Milanovic makes clear that he feels the “great middle-class squeeze” is not over, and will likely lead to more polarization in rich societies and their politics. This will not only ensure immigration policy will continue to be challenging, it may also be all the more troubling for policy directed to equality of opportunity.

In the coming years, the observed differences in the skills and abilities between the top echelons and everyone else will not be that great, with chance, family background, and inheritances playing a bigger role in allocating incomes. “The new capitalism will resemble a big casino, with one important exception: those who have won a few rounds (often through being born into the right family) will be given much better odds to keep on winning.” If this is so, then it will be harder and harder to sustain the story that inequality is somehow the precursor of opportunity, offering rewards and incentives for the more productive among us to contribute to higher growth and incomes for all. And the status quo will become politically less and less sustainable.

Source: The winners and losers of globalization, Branko Milanovic’s new book on inequality answers two important questions | Economics for public policy

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Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students

2016/05/24 Leave a comment

Not surprising that universities and other educational institutions view foreign students from an economic perspective and that foreign families consider not only the education but financial (shift money to Canada, invest in real estate) and political benefits (citizenship).

But, as in the case over the debate over housing prices, it raises policy issues:

Immigration Canada data shows about 72,000 foreign students from Mainland Chinese were accepted in 2014, 36,000 from India, 17,000 from South Korea and 13,000 from France. In total, one out of four foreign students in Canada is from China.
Canadian politicians talk in predictable ways about the increasing number of foreign students.

Wilkinson maintains Chinese and other foreign students bring “social, cultural and economic benefits.” And they pay full fees for their own educations, unlike subsidized homegrown students.

The federal Immigration Minister John McCallum often calls foreign students “the cream of the crop.”

But noted specialists in higher education, including Boston College’s Philip Altbach and Ontario’s Jane Knight, say the quality of foreign students is going down as their numbers inflate.

Most foreign students are now second tier, say Altbach and Knight. They’re generally not doing well in the schools in their countries of origin. But many have rich parents.

Given the trend, Knight argues that most Western foreign-student programs have lost their humanitarian origins and become elaborate cash grabs. They make it possible for governments like British Columbia’s to mask that they are tightening education funding.

What are some foreign students in Canada doing when they’re not studying?

Canada’s federal housing agency, looking for new methods to track foreign ownership in the country’s soaring real estate markets, has considering classifying foreign university students as foreign buyers as it steps up its investigation into global money-laundering.

Bloomberg News discovered that Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp., the Crown corporation that tracks housing data, is especially interested in how the red-hot housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are partly fuelled by foreign students, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar homes near the UBC campus.

In a related study, urban planner Andy Yan, head of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, discovered that in a six-month period in 2015, about 70 per cent of 172 detached homes sold on Vancouver’s west side were purchased by Mainland Chinese buyers.

Yan’s research showed that, of all self-declared occupations among owners of the high-priced homes in the study, 36 per cent were housewives or students with little income.

Five of eight homes owned by “students” were bought outright with cash at an average value of $3.2 million.

Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, a frequent adviser to the federal parliament, said it’s clear that most children from around the world who are able to afford to live and pay full education fees in expensive cities like Toronto and Vancouver are from “elite families.”

One bonus of getting children into Canada as foreign students, Kurland says, is that those who are able can become players in real-estate investment. Students are being declared as property owners of Vancouver residential property because they aid in international money transfers, Kurland said.

Foreign students have the advantage of being able to appear as residents of Canada for income tax purposes, even as their declared earned income would be extremely low.

As principal resident of a dwelling, Kurland said, a foreign student does not have to pay capital gains when his or her home is sold at a profit. “Then, out of the goodness of their heart, they can send the profit back to their uncle in China,” Kurland said with irony.

In addition to aiding the movement of trans-national wealth, however, possibly the more common reason a well-off foreign family puts a great deal of effort into establishing their son or daughter in Canada is that it goes a long way to obtaining a second passport.
Canadian politicians often rank international students as prime candidates for immigration. Roughly three out of 10 foreign students have gone on to become Canadian citizens. And that proportion is expected to rise.

Kurland believes more foreign students from China are being flown to Canada at “younger and younger ages … in part because they’re a no-fit in the Chinese educational system.” They need to establish themselves early in Canada’s educational system if they’re going to make it.

The immigration lawyer, who publishes a newsletter called Lexbase, discovered that Mainland Chinese families have doubled the rate at which they’re sending their children to Canadian elementary and high schools. Four out of 10 foreign students in Canada, including those from Mainland China, now apply for “secondary school or less.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Mixed motives fuel rise of foreign students | Vancouver Sun

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