Keller: Economically speaking, we’re all living in Brian Mulroney’s Canada [immigration]

2024/03/04 Leave a comment

Fair observation. Harper conservatives also maintained levels during 2008 financial crisis. Unclear whether Poilievre will maintain current plan of 500,000 new Permanent Residents by 2015 or not, not to mention curbing the steep rise in temporary workers and international students:

…There’s one more legacy of the Mulroney era that never gets talked about: immigration.

Until the early 1960s, immigration to this country was largely restricted to Europeans and Americans. Then, under John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives, Canada for the first time opened itself to the world, adopting a race-neutral immigration policy.

A quarter-century later, Mr. Mulroney’s PCs made a second big change to immigration, by moving to permanently increase annual immigration levels, regardless of economic conditions. Until then, Canada’s quotas had fluctuated year-to-year. In the boom times of 1967, for example, a Liberal government admitted 223,000 new Canadians. But numbers were sharply reduced under Pierre Trudeau, reaching a low point of just 84,000 arrivals in 1985.

The Mulroney government decided to not only steeply raise the annual targets, but to keep them there. In 1993, Canada accepted just shy of 257,000 immigrants.

The Chrétien Liberals would scale back those numbers, but only slightly. For most of the Chrétien era, the number of immigrants remained north of 200,000 a year, and at around 0.7 per cent of the population. That continued through the Harper era.

The Mulroney decision, paired with the Diefenbaker decision, slowly changed this place. The Canada of a couple of generations ago often talked about itself as the product of two founding peoples, British and French. Such phrasing now sounds anachronistic, and it is. But in the early 1980s, the visible minority population was less than 5 per cent of the national population.

Today, that figure is closer to 30 per cent. The mayors of Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary are all visible minorities, three of them are immigrants – and nobody cares. That too is part of the Mulroney legacy.

source: Economically speaking, we’re all living in Brian Mulroney’s Canada

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Douglas Todd: Population growth squeezing Canada’s young adults like never before

2024/03/02 Leave a comment

More on the generation squeeze and immigration with good quotes from Wright and Skuterud:

… But that hasn’t stopped politicians and business people from constantly raising the spectre of aging baby boomers, with Ottawa making it the primary rationale for “supercharged levels of immigration,” Wright said.

“Sometimes I talk about the ‘baby boom derangement syndrome.’ So much of public policy has been driven by this apprehended catastrophe of the baby boom retiring and then putting great demands on the public purse,” he said. The trouble is it’s creating a population bubble of people under 40.

“We should not be at all surprised that all of a sudden housing markets are under great stress now. It’s absurd that politicians pretend to be surprised by it,” Wright said, pointing to a February report revealing then-Immigration Minister Sean Fraser had been warned that Canada was accepting newcomers at a far higher rate than houses could be built. Early last year Wright predicted this would affect public opinion about immigration, and that has been borne out.

“What Ottawa is doing is making it damn difficult for young people to get a proper start in life,” Wright said. “That’s primarily in the housing market, but in the labour market as well, because you’re competing with a lot of people your age.”

Ontario’s University of Waterloo labour economist, Mikal Skuterud, has been among those tracking how the federal Liberals have drastically hiked the number of guest workers and study-visa-holders, most of whom work while in Canada and intend to apply for permanent resident status.

Last year more than one million foreign students were in Canada, three times the number when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected. (B.C. had 176,000 in post-secondary schools). While wages in some sectors are up, gross domestic product per capita has been flat for six years. Skuterud suggested low-skill workers, whose wages are actually declining, could be the most impacted by the surge of new residents.

In regard to life choices, Wright also wonders how much the country’s housing crunch — including the prospect of “living in a 700-square-foot hamster cage” — might be a significant factor behind why some young Canadians aren’t having larger families.

Cardus, a think-tank, commissioned the Angus Reid Institute to conduct a poll last year of 2,700 women in Canada ages 18 to 44. It found nearly half have fewer children than they desire. Canadian women intend to have, on average, 1.85 children per woman, but desire 2.2 children.

Given such personal strains, especially for millennials and Gen Z, the National Bank’s economists have declared Canada is caught in a “population trap” in which the population is growing faster than can be absorbed by the economy, society and infrastructure.

With so many facing stagnant wages and housing distress, National Bank economists Stéfane Marion and Alexandra Ducharme said: “At this point we believe that our country’s annual total population growth should not exceed 300,000 to 500,000.”

Source: Douglas Todd: Population growth squeezing Canada’s young adults like never before

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Pearce: How open source tech can make Canada’s immigration system fairer

2024/03/02 Leave a comment

Bit of an odd piece, as hard to see that it would if would necessarily make the system “fairer” and the extent to which the government could assess objectively open source tech, not to mention the risks of gaming the system. And some of his choices of headers and assertions suggest a limited knowledge of the demographics of immigrants and how the current system works (it’s complicated!):

Federal immigration minister Marc Miller recently announced the government is implementing a two-year cap on the number of international students admitted into Canada. 

This comes amid the government’s broader changes to the immigration system to streamline the types of people who can settle in Canada. Last year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada introduced category-based draws for permanent residence applicants. The new requirements are designed to prioritize applications from health-care and STEM professionals, and other in-demand workers.

While Canada has plans to welcome 485,000 permanent residents this year, these recent policy shifts signal the government wants to restrict the type of people who can come here. 

However, does Canada’s immigration system unfairly exclude the people who could make meaningful contributions to our society and economy? 

Immigration policies favour the rich

Governments, businesses and universities might be tempted to roll out the red carpet for richer immigrants who bring their wealth to Canada and benefit the country by simply spending their money here. However, policy should be focused on attracting smart and innovative people, regardless of their net worth, as they are far more valuable in the long term. 

Research shows that skilled workers boost the productivity of their local peers. It is also well known that immigrants play an important role in creating value for firms and can also attract foreign companies to a country. 

Research from the United States indicated that more than 25 per cent of tech companies established between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant as a key founder. Similarly in Canada, semi-skilled and high-skilled immigration have a positive effect on our economic growth.

Canada has a number of immigration streams. Perhaps the most straightforward is Canada’s investor visa, which allows foreign entrepreneurs to gain permanent residency and, eventually, citizenship. Immigration programs like Express Entry require applicants to demonstrate they have a minimum amount of money. Others like the skilled worker program favor those who have attained certain levels of higher education.

This means that current immigration policy can often favor the rich because it is easier to assess a person’s bank statements than it is to assess their talents or intelligence. 

Despite Canada’s points-based system that ranks potential immigrants, smart, capable people can easily fall through the cracks if they don’t meet financial, employment or formal educational requirements. These are people who lack the money and educational certificates to earn a lot of immigration points.

Yet some of them may have already created millions of dollars of value with their contributions to open source (OS) technology that you and I use every day.

Open source to the rescue

A new study by my colleague Jun-Yu Qian from Western University and I shows that there is another way to find the value of contributions of people wishing to come to Canada. Immigrants could be assessed based on their contributions to open source development.

Free and open source software (FOSS) refers to programs that can be used, studied, copied, modified and redistributed with few or no restrictions. The core idea of open source development is that if you make an improvement in software or hardware, you must share it back with the community. The result is often rapid churn in innovation in a wide array of areas.

Open source tech developed by people from all over the world has enormous impact on the economy. Today, open source software is in supercomputers, 90 per cent of cloud servers, 82 per cent of smartphones and most artificial intelligence. 

More than 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use the open-source software. To put it plainly, if you use the internet, you use open source technology every day. 

On the hardware side, there are now millions of free designs that consumers can download and 3D print or digitally manufactureto save money compared to conventionally manufactured products. 

In our paper, we calculated the value on an individual open source project based on how many times it was downloaded and multiplied that by what the substituted cost is on the open market. Similarly, we calculated the fraction of the total value an individual contributor made to a massive collaboration project, like Linux, Android, Arduino or RepRap.

We found that even modest contributions to open source technology can result in substantial value and high societal return on investments. These values could be used to determine the contribution an individual has made to open source tech development when assessing their ability to live in and support themselves in Canada.

Investing in immigrants

Studies have shown how immigrants are consistently providing positive return on investment for their adoptive countries. Simply put: immigrants bring more economic value than they cost. 

In the study, we found the median contributor to Open Office (a free office suite that can replace Microsoft’s offerings) made only a tiny contribution to the code (0.00716 per cent) but provided significant financial savings.

The mechanisms we introduced could serve as tools to utilize contributions by potential immigrants. Making this kind of change to immigration policy would go some way to benefiting smart people willing to work hard and make open source contributions, and the countries lucky enough to attract them.

With the help of the open source development, countries like Canada can widen the net and attract highly innovative people to come and live here, even if they don’t have the formal qualifications.

Source: How open source tech can make Canada’s immigration system fairer

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Century Initiative Message

2024/02/29 Leave a comment

For the record as they try to respond to the dramatic shift in public opinion:

Vladimir Lenin famously characterized the slow-fast pace of human history by observing that, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

While hyperbolic, I couldn’t help but think of this pithy observation in the context of Canada’s quickly moving national conversation on immigration. Put simply, Canada has undergone one of the most significant debates about immigration in a generation, with a previously held consensus under fire from critics, journalists and politicians who are questioning the pace, volume and methodology of Canada’s immigration planning.

These questions do not come out of nowhere. Research from Century Initiative, conducted with Environics, shows that Canadians have not only become less satisfied with the direction and state of the economy, but a growing number of them believe that there is too much immigration in Canada. Having said that, this same research illustrates this waning support is not tied to nativism or xenophobia, but practical concerns about issues like housing, infrastructure, and health-care capacity. These concerns are valid.

The easy solution to any of these issues is to simply curtail population growth – but this is also the approach that would result in an aging, less-skilled work force, less foreign investment, less diversity and less influence on the global stage.

At Century Initiative, we have long argued not only for ambitious immigration targets, but for the long-term planning needed to achieve prosperity from coast to coast: immigration, infrastructure investments, economic management, support for children and families, and educational investments to name a few key pillars. The need for this planning is more pronounced than ever amidst this changing political and opinion environment. In these pivotal weeks, we haven’t been sitting on the sidelines.

Source: Century Initiative Message (email, not yet on their website)

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Keller: The Trudeau government needs more than words to restore the immigration consensus

2024/02/28 Leave a comment

Keller continues his well founded critique of immigration policies and highlights, as others have done, the mismatch between immigration and housing (I would add healthcare and infrastructure) timelines and the need to downsize temporary migration and other measures:

… Ending the severe mismatch between housing demand and supply, in this decade rather than the next (or the one after that), means addressing the cause of the spike in demand. It means significantly downsizing the temporary foreign worker program, downsizing and smartening up the student visa program, and things like reintroducing visa requirements for Mexican tourists, which the Trudeau government removed in 2015, and which has led to tens of thousands of refugee claimants arriving at Canadian airports.

Canada had an immigration consensus from the 1960s to 2015. The Trudeau government broke it. Mr. Miller can restore it. But des belles paroles won’t be enough.

Source: The Trudeau government needs more than words to restore the immigration consensus

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L’explosion de l’immigration temporaire crée «une impression de perte de contrôle»

2024/02/28 Leave a comment

Money quote: “Mais la multiplication des mesures a été faite sans prise en compte de l’impact cumulatif de ces mesures” (But the multiplication of measures was made without taking into account the cumulative impact of these measures):

L’appétit pour les immigrants dits « temporaires » plutôt que pour ceux dits « permanents » bouleverse le marché du travail au point où « ça donne aujourd’hui une impression de perte de contrôle », selon une étude de l’Institut du Québec (IDQ) parue lundi.

L’explosion du nombre d’immigrants temporaires sur le sol québécois n’est plus un secret. Il s’est accru de 46 % l’an dernier, pour un total de 528 034 personnes installées au Québec et de plus de 2,5 millions au Canada. Cette augmentation massive n’est pas le fruit du hasard, mais celui d’une multiplication des voies d’entrée autorisées par les gouvernements.

« Il y a un cumul de mesures pour faciliter la venue d’immigrants temporaires à l’intérieur de programmes bien connus. Mais la multiplication des mesures a été faite sans prise en compte de l’impact cumulatif de ces mesures », explique la coautrice de l’étude, Emna Braham, aussi directrice générale de l’IDQ. « Ça donne aujourd’hui une impression de perte de contrôle. Sauf que les leviers existent pour corriger le tir, autant à Québec qu’à Ottawa. »

Qualifiés ou non, formés ici ou non, bon nombre de ces immigrants temporaires espèrent un jour s’installer pour de bon au Québec. Et puisque devenir un résident permanent passe de plus en plus par le statut de temporaire, « on risque de se retrouver avec des goulots d’étranglement », prévient Emna Braham….

Source: L’explosion de l’immigration temporaire crée «une impression de perte de contrôle»

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Cape Breton U tripled its international recruitment. Students say they pay the price.

2024/02/28 Leave a comment

A poster child for how education institutions have gone overboard in international student recruitment and numbers:

…Figures obtained through access to information legislation show that in 2018, Cape Breton University hired 53 agents to recruit international students. The next year, that number leapt to 142, and then in 2020 it hit 179. The school cut back to 102 recruitment agents in 2021, and then to 70 and 53 in the following years.

In 2018, the year Nguyen arrived from Vietnam, there were 1,982 full-time international students at the school, making up 48 per cent of the university’s population, figures from the Association of Atlantic Universities show. Now, there are nearly 7,000 international students at the school, three-quarters of the university’s population.

That’s more than a fifth of the entire population of Sydney, N.S., the coastal community where the university is located.

The university doubled its revenue in that time, from $69.1 million in 2018 to $139.5 million last year, according to financial statements available online. International students pay around $20,000 each year in tuition and fees at the school.

Nguyen said the community quickly became strained as more students arrived. Jobs became scarce and students crowded into rentals, many of which were in need of repair. CBC News reported that Rajesh Gollapudi, a business analytics student at the school, died in a fire in 2022 in a house he shared with seven other people. Court documents show the landlords have been charged with several fire safety infractions, and they are scheduled to enter a plea in March in provincial court.

Public buses between Cape Breton towns became packed with students, who had to live farther away and plan their days around sporadic rural bus schedules and long commutes, Nguyen said. Some live in their cars because they can’t find housing, or they live in Halifax and make the long drive to Cape Breton….

Source: Cape Breton U tripled its international recruitment. Students say they pay the price.

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Hepburn: Having immigrant engineers and physicians driving Ubers is a national disgrace:

2024/02/27 Leave a comment

Not much new here, largely ignores uncontrolled temporary workers and students, and some points are more assertions than evidence-based:

The Canadian dream – for prospective Canadians and for those of us born here – is that Canada welcomes people from all over the world and integrates them successfully, creating substantial economic gains for newcomers, their families and also for Canada. That dream is only possible if immigrants can navigate the barriers to full employment.

For now, Canada is the lucky recipient of a record number of immigrants, but that luck is not likely to last. The countries we rely on most for immigrants are experiencing declining birth rates and, in some cases, rising GDP and opportunities.

Countries like Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland, with faster-growing productivity, more wealth per capita, or higher quality of life for immigrants, are increasingly perceived as more attractive destinations for resettlement.

The abundance of international talent seeking permanent residency here is likely temporary, unless Canada makes some overdue changes to support newcomer productivity. It’s an opportunity we cannot afford to waste.

Source: Having immigrant engineers and physicians driving Ubers is a national disgrace

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Rioux | Le tabou de l’immigration

2024/02/27 Leave a comment

Rioux on what he perceives as the denial of the left (which of course is matched by denial on the right), making reasoned discussion more difficult. That being said, I would rephrase his “rien n’apparaît plus urgent que de rapatrier l’immigration du champ de la morale à celui de la politique” to à celui des questions concretes comme le logement et système de santé:


…C’est à partir des années 1970 qu’une gauche morale, embourgeoisée et néolibérale, soulignent les auteurs de l’étude, devint ouvertement multiculturaliste et abandonna toute idée de réguler l’immigration.

Le Rassemblement national n’avait plus qu’à cueillir l’électorat populaire, abandonné de tous. Au point où il est justifié de se demander si, malgré les étiquettes qu’on lui colle, ce parti ne s’inscrit pas aujourd’hui dans la tradition des grands partis populaires de gauche.

Mais il n’est jamais aisé d’admettre son erreur. C’est pourquoi, en France, celle qu’on appelle encore la gauche a plutôt choisi de s’enfoncer dans le déni alors même que la moitié de ses électeurs, pourtant de moins en moins nombreux, continuent à penser qu’il y a trop d’immigrés en France.

Là-bas comme au Québec, rien n’apparaît plus urgent que de rapatrier l’immigration du champ de la morale à celui de la politique.

Source: Chronique | Le tabou de l’immigration

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Raj: Why Canada’s consensus on immigration is fraying

2024/02/26 Leave a comment

The unfortunate all to common mistake of conflating concerns over unbridled temporary migration with overall permanent resident migration, as well as the distinction between concern over the practicalities of housing, healthcare etc to a rapidly increasing population, driven more by temporary immigration. Raj completely misses the point (and I suspect Poilievre understands the distinction).

Abacus in its regular polling also appears to ignore this distinction:

Money quote:

Anti-immigration sentiment used to be politically taboo. Election after election, a majority of voters told party leaders they wanted more immigrants, not fewer. That vision of a Canada welcoming newcomers with open arms, however, is increasingly challenged. Unless governments address a growing perception that unbridled migration is making the country worse off, we may be walking towards a darker, more divisive path, one that makes us less wealthy in the long run.

Source: Why Canada’s consensus on immigration is fraying

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