Conservative immigration policy should focus on the goal of citizenship: Tory critic

2024/04/13 Leave a comment

Still fairly general but nevertheless interesting and relatively non-controversial. However, the possible transfer of additional immigration powers to Quebec, and further devolution to other provinces such as Alberta, bears watching. Will also be interesting to see how strong a line a Conservative government will take with respect to temporary workers given business community pressures:

Conservative immigration policy should be focused on the ultimate goal of citizenship, the party’s critic on the file said Thursday while moderating a panel in Ottawa.

Tom Kmiec criticized the sharp increase in temporary residents in Canada, as a large number of potential immigrants compete for few permanent resident opportunities. 

“We don’t want people just to come here, work here for a few years, and then leave,” Kmiec said in an interview after the panel at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference.

“You can see the numbers are getting worse and worse and worse.”

The panel members explored politically conservative solutions to Canada’s ballooning population growth, which the Liberal government admits is becoming unsustainable. 

Canada should focus on integrating people into Canada on permanent basis, Kmiec said.

That means moving beyond immigration targets and filling labour gaps to an approach that focuses on making newcomers part of “the Canadian family,” he said.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller promised in March that Ottawa would put a “soft cap” on the number of temporary residents allowed to come to Canada. Those targets are expected to be set in September. 

Miller also levelled out the number of new permanent residents expected to come to Canada in 2026, putting at least a temporary halt to year-after-year increases to immigration levels. 

But the fix will require focusing on the experiences people have when they come to Canada, including reducing massive processing backlogs, Kmiec said. 

“Immigration is not accounting,” he said.

There has not been enough emphasis on citizenship in recent years in Canada, Aaron Wudrick, the director of the the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s domestic policy program, told the panel. 

The system has largely become an economic exercise, he said. 

The Liberals have come under increased scrutiny over the last year for some of the consequences of the rapidly increasing number of temporary residents, including the impact on the availability and affordability of housing. 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has suggested the possibility of tying immigration levels to new housing starts in response. 

That would likely mean lowering immigration levels, at least temporarily, Wudrick said, but doing so will have consequences.

“A lot of businesses in this country have a difficult time filling low-wage work, the solution has been to import cheap labour,” he said. 

When that low-cost labour is no longer available, prices are likely to go up, he said. 

“There’s not a magic bullet, where we’re just going to cut the numbers and suddenly all these problems are going to go away.”

Quebec Conservative Leader Eric Duhaime, who also appeared on the panel, advocated for giving provinces more control of the immigration in their jurisdictions.

Quebec already sets its own immigration targets, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has argued her province should have the same power.

The federal Conservative policy on that will likely be part of the party’s next election platform, Kmiec said.

“That’s something being actively debated, I think, within the (conservative) movement more broadly,” he said. 

Source: Conservative immigration policy should focus on the goal of citizenship: Tory critic

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Aaron Wudrick: It’s time for a grown-up conversation on immigration

2024/01/11 Leave a comment

Wudrick weighs into the question of values even if to date, most critics have focussed on the practicalities (housing, healthcare, infrastructure etc) with little substantiation. However, the influx of 1,000 or so Gaza’s, fleeing the destruction, combined with the range of anti-semitic language and actions, provides a high profile example. Doesn’t appear to be an accident that applicants have to provide their social media links:

Canada has been shaped by large-scale immigration. With the exception of Indigenous Peoples, the vast majority of Canadians today are either immigrants or descendants thereof. Our nation has thrived as a pluralistic and multiethnic society, built through the gradual integration of people from around the world. 

While this is largely a good news story it should not obscure a hard truth: in the 21st century, the challenges associated with immigration are vastly different from those of 50 or 100 years ago, and until recently policymakers have been unwilling to discuss immigration policy accordingly. These challenges can be broadly categorized into three areas: economic impact; infrastructure capacity; and cultural friction.

When it comes to economic impact, immigration has historically, on balance, been beneficial to Canada’s economy and standard of living. But in recent years the evidence has become more mixed. In particular, the sheer number of new arrivals—over one million in 2022 alone—especially in the form of temporary and lower-skilled migrants, is increasingly being used as a substitute for Canadian labour, driving down wages. This downward pressure, while good news for employers trying to contain costs, has the dual effect of dragging down per-capita GDP, while disincentivizing business investment in labour-productivity-enhancing innovations. 

The cause of the jump in total migrants per year is also no secret: there has been an explosion in the number of international postsecondary students studying in Canada over the last decade—jumping from 248,000 in 2012 to 807,000 in 2022—largely as a result of postsecondary institutions seeking a more lucrative income stream since they are able to charge international students much higher fees. With no annual cap on foreign student visas, this has effectively become a massive back-door entry loophole to get into the country. Many of these students arrive with the hope of becoming permanent residents, which also entitles them to sponsor family members to come to Canada, further boosting migration levels.

Equally concerning has been the effect of this population growth on housing prices, which is a straightforward arithmetic function of supply and demand. Canada has some of the most expensive housing in the world, overwhelmingly a result of insufficient housing supply, especially in major cities. High levels of immigration, also concentrated in these cities, exacerbate the problem from the demand side. Both Canadians and newcomers suffer if they cannot afford a place to live. Similarly, many Canadians are unable to find a family doctor and face crowded schools, transit, hospitals, or other crumbling infrastructure. Rapid population growth makes these challenges harder to manage.

But, while concerns about immigration’s impact on our economy and infrastructure have slowly begun to attract more attention and public discussion, the issue of cultural friction remains largely taboo. 

It should be said that historically, Canada has been fairly successful at integrating people from diverse religious, linguistic, and racial backgrounds, and even today there is a strong case that Canada manages these challenges better than most other countries. What was once a fairly organic process that allowed for integration over years, if not generations, has been supplanted by activist government policy that preaches an official doctrine of big-M Multiculturalism, which fetishizes and subsidizes cultural differences while simultaneously erasing and downplaying Canadian history. In effect, the implicit social contract between Canada and newcomers has become unbalanced. Canada is and should remain a place where newcomers are free to retain their religion, language, and culture. But we must also actively invite all Canadians, new and old, to join a shared national project to ensure we are working towards living together rather than simply side by side.

In addition to counterproductive government policies, few have noted that the integration process has been dramatically changed by technological advance which now allows for immigrants to retain permanent, real-time cultural ties to their native countries. This phenomenon—where people can be physically present in one place but maintain daily cultural and social ties to their homeland—presents a special challenge to a country with a relatively weak national identity. This is particularly true of Canada’s large diaspora communities, including those from China, India, and Iran, which have increasingly impacted Canada’s international relationships and given rise to interference (alleged or proven) by these countries on Canadian soil.

Canada has historically enjoyed strong support for immigration across the political spectrum, a consensus that is not common in other countries. Recent opinion polling suggests that this consensus is rapidly eroding, if not already gone. We are long overdue for an honest, constructive, and robust debate about the way forward on immigration. We owe it to Canadians—both present and future.

Aaron Wudrick is the domestic policy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Aaron Wudrick: It’s time for a grown-up conversation on immigration

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Wudrick: Canada needs immigration reform that is fair and constructive

2023/03/08 Leave a comment

Right-leaning outlets cautioning on the risk to the social consensus in favour of immigration, particularly perceptions of queue jumping. But not xenophobic to raise these and other concerns:

Much has been written recently on rising concerns about Canadian immigration levels, and specifically the Trudeau government’s announcement of significantly higher immigration targets. As commentators have noted, Canada has historically had cross-party consensus on immigration that can be legitimately described as a uniquely Canadian phenomenon.

This good news has been a point of Canadian pride (or smugness) in a time of global political turbulence, given that in many of our peer countries, immigration backlash has manifested itself in sometimes ugly and xenophobic ways.

But here’s the bad news: This consensus is at risk, and may already be little more than a mirage. It’s consoling that immigration skepticism has not coalesced around any single political party, where it could become a political wedge issue. But fraying support for immigration across party lines exposes an even greater risk: that the issue will be ignored by all parties until it reaches a dangerous boiling point.

Part of the challenge is that Canadians concerned about immigration are often afraid to say so out loud for fear of being called racist or xenophobic. And to be clear, there are racist and xenophobic Canadians, as in every country. But it would be a colossal mistake for our political class to wave away any misgivings about our immigration policy as mere prejudice.

Politicians must understand some of the factors that stoke concerns with our policies and targets. Start with the Roxham Road border crossing between New York State and Quebec, where unlawful (irregular) refugee crossings have skyrocketed in recent years. Recently, news broke that New York City is paying for bus tickets to help asylum-seekers reach the border.

Roxham Road matters because it is about fairness. It represents a legal loophole that people are exploiting. Refugees are a legitimate humanitarian issue, but allowing a class of people to essentially “skip the line” will undermine support for a rules-based system that the public can believe is fair to all.

Second, for many Canadians the concern is not who is coming, so much as how many: for a population already dealing with serious supply strains, immigrants represent a demand spike that will only worsen the situation. Housing is an obvious example; so is access to health care. Just ask the six million Canadians who cannot find a family doctor.

Some argue, fairly, that new immigrants actually represent part of the solution to these supply challenges, providing much-needed additional labour, from construction workers to nurses and doctors. But such tangible factors are not used to inform government immigration targets, which smack of central planning. Perhaps it’s time we shifted away from immigration by fiat and adopted a more market-based approach.

Consider the relative success of refugees to Canada based on their path of entry. Experience shows that privately sponsored Syrian refugees have a better chance of finding employment than those brought in under government programs. This suggests that when migrants have non-government partners invested in their success, their integration into Canadian society is likely to go more smoothly.

While humanitarian refugees require sponsorship and charity from individual Canadians and communities, for many economic immigrants the relevant invested partner will be employers who, given labour supply challenges, are often among the loudest champions of high immigration levels.

Here, too, a legitimate criticism is often raised, since efforts by employers to create cheap pools of labour can drive down wages for all Canadians. But this blurs the immigration discussion with a separate issue: the difference between employers unwilling to pay higher salaries, and those who simply cannot find job candidates at any economically viable salary level.

Canada’s immigration consensus has served our country well for half a century. If we are to salvage it, we will need to listen to those with legitimate concerns about high immigration rates — and more importantly, adjust our approach away from government targets towards a system that prioritizes matching our supply of and demand for immigrants and refugees as smoothly as possible.

Aaron Wudrick is Director of the domestic policy program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Source: Wudrick: Canada needs immigration reform that is fair and constructive

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