GOLDSTEIN: High immigration policy undermining housing, healthcare and climate goals

2024/08/05 Leave a comment

Nothing new here but another Postmedia commentary:

It’s hard to know what the Trudeau government was thinking two years ago when it dramatically increased its immigration targets given the added pressure this has put on three issues it says are priorities — housing affordability, improving healthcare and reducing industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, 271,845 immigrants became permanent residents of Canada.

In 2022, his government set a target of 465,000 for 2023, 485,000 this year and 500,000 in 2025, followed by another target of 500,000 in 2026, announced last year.

Simultaneously, there has been a huge increase in non-permanent residents during the Trudeau era (international students, temporary foreign workers and asylum seekers).

Trudeau himself said in April that in 2017, they constituted 2% of Canada’s population, while today it’s 7.5% or almost three million people, a number the PM described as “far beyond what Canada has been able to absorb” and “something that we need to get back under control.”

All of this has directly contributed to rapid population growth — Canada’s population hit 41 million people on April 1, an increase of one million people in less than a year, almost all of it due to increases in permanent and temporary immigration.

While the Trudeau government is sticking with its previously announced permanent immigration targets, it has now set a goal of reducing the number of temporary residents to 5% of Canada’s population by 2027.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller has announced plans to cap and reduce the number of international students and foreign workers, and in an interview with Reuters last week said more measures are coming to end “the era of uncapped programs.”

Asked if the government made a mistake by allowing rapid growth in temporary residents, Miller said, “Every government makes mistakes. I think we are all human.” But “coming out of COVID, in particular, we were facing massive labour shortages.”

Asked about a recent Leger poll that found 60% of Canadians surveyed believe too many immigrants are coming to Canada, Miller responded: “I’m not naive enough to think Canada is immune to the waves of anti-immigrant sentiment,” although he acknowledged Canadians want a system that is not out of control.

The Trudeau government often blames anti-immigration sentiment when questioned about its immigration policies, despite the fact years of polling have shown Canadians are generally supportive of immigration.

The reason there is concern now comes from statements by Trudeau that temporary immigration needs to be brought under control and by Miller that the skyrocketing number of international students was a source of concern about the integrity of the immigration system itself.

The federal government has long argued Canada needs high immigration because of its low domestic birth rate, which is not providing enough future workers to grow the economy.

But that policy has also undermined the goals of the Trudeau government on three major issues it says are priorities — housing affordability, healthcare and climate change.

Internal government documents obtained by The Canadian Press earlier this year revealed that in announcing its significant boost to immigration targets in 2022, the Trudeau government ignored warnings from its own public servants that doing so would increase the cost of housing and negatively impact Canada’s already beleaguered healthcare system.

“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units,” the documents said.

“As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth … Rapid increases put pressure on healthcare and affordable housing.”

Last month, a peer-reviewed study by Lauren Eastman, Sukhy K. Mahl and Shoo K. Lee published by the Canadian Health Policy Journal — A Growing Problem: Is Canada’s Health Care System Keeping Up With Newcomers — found that, “newcomer demand for health human resources including family physicians, specialists and registered nurses, far out-strips new supply in recent years, leading to a shortage of 1,122 family physicians, 690 specialists and 8,538 registered nurses in 2022. Immigration and healthcare resource policies should work in tandem to ensure the healthcare shortage facing Canadians is not exacerbated.”

Herbert Grubel, a former federal MP and emeritus professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, and Patrick Grady, a former senior official in the federal finance department, estimated in a 2021 article in the Financial Post that based on higher immigration levels, “greenhouse gas emissions will be 7.5% above what they would have been otherwise” in 2030, and “this gap will be much larger by 2050, the year the government has promised to reduce emissions to net-zero as required by the Paris accord.”

Source: GOLDSTEIN: High immigration policy undermining housing, healthcare and climate goals

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Herbert Grubel: Canada should not open its doors to the world

2015/10/03 Leave a comment

The contrary view to Corcoran (Terence Corcoran: Open our doors to the world). The Grady/Grubel study he refers to have been effectively countered by Pendakur (Fiscal Effects of Immigrants in Canada, Fiscal Effects of Immigrants in Canada):

Fifth, the most important difference between modern Canada and when previous waves of immigrants entered this country is the existence of the welfare state. In the absence of its universal social benefits in the past, only healthy immigrants with strong work ethics, drive and skills came to Canada. Under present conditions, potentially many immigrants would not possess these qualities and impose heavy fiscal burdens on our welfare programs and ultimately bankrupt them. It is for this reason that Milton Friedman, one of the world’s most ardent advocates for human and economic freedom concluded that, “The welfare state and free immigration are incompatible.”

The problem identified by Friedman has been quantified in a study by myself and Patrick Grady, in which we found that the average incomes and tax payments of recent immigrants (documented by Statistics Canada) are much lower than those of the average Canadian and that the immigrants consume roughly the same amount of government services as the average Canadian. The difference between the taxes paid and services consumed by the average recent immigrant equals about $6,000 annually. Given the total number of these immigrants, the annual fiscal burden on Canadian taxpayers comes to about $30 billion.

Sixth, immigrants in large numbers cause a substantial redistribution of income, decreasing the incomes of workers and increasing the income of employers. Drawing on the basic results of a study of the redistribution effect in the United States by Harvard University Professor of Economics George Borjas, in Canada the decrease of the annual income of labour is $40 billion and the gain of employers is $43.5 billion, resulting in a net gain of $3.5 billion for the latter. This gain is called the immigration effect and is due to increased opportunities to trade.

Advocates for free immigration make much of this gain but the data show that it is very small relative to the redistribution of income. These advocates also laud the increase in Canada’s aggregate national income resulting from the immigrants’ economic activities. However, all of this increase accrues to the immigrants in the form of wages, lowers per capita incomes and is accompanied by greater congestion and pollution in metropolitan areas. Increased demand for and cost of housing reduces the ability of young Canadians to own homes and start families, creating frictions between generations.

The economic and social costs just discussed do not make the case against all immigration but make the case for the selection of immigrants with prospects for economic success that are high enough to eliminate the fiscal burden and the admission of immigrants in numbers small enough to prevent the risk of creating the substantial redistribution of income, the establishment of ethnic enclaves, the threat of jihadist terror and the problems associated with substantial and rapid population increases.

In the context of the current debate over policies for the admission of refugees from the Middle East, it is important for all Canadians that these considerations are given proper weight in the selection of immigrants and decisions about their numbers.

Source: Herbert Grubel: Canada should not open its doors to the world

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , , ,