Keller: The Liberals broke the immigration system. But better is always possible

2023/11/01 Leave a comment

Particularly scathing commentary in the Globe, calling for lowering of permanent resident levels but silent on temporary residents:

This week, when it releases its new immigration targets, the Trudeau government has an opportunity to begin rethinking immigration policy.

For the past eight years, the Liberal plan has been about sharply and steadily increasing permanent immigration, while enabling even sharper increases in temporary immigration – with the two interconnected streams powered by huge jumps in the number of foreign students.

Why? The government’s reasons are a combination of faith and politics.

Faith that accelerating the country’s population growth will somehow spark higher per-capita economic growth and higher living standards – a faith belied by economic theory and evidence.

The Liberals also wanted to politically anchor themselves to the left of the Conservatives on the issue, and perhaps plant the seeds of a nascent wedge. This even though the Conservatives, who never miss an opportunity to attack the Liberals over so much as a misplaced comma, have always studiously avoided criticizing Liberal immigration plans.

The Liberal approach to immigration is having major economic consequences, many of them negative. Yet for years, there has been no national conversation critical of the Liberal approach. The topic is taboo. That’s what happens with issues of faith.

So let’s talk about what a rational immigration system would look like: It would start with acknowledging that the long-standing principles, goals and methods of the Canadian immigration system, created long before the Trudeau government came into office, are sound.

The key principle is that immigration should be designed to benefit Canada economically. The main goal should be choosing immigrants who offer the greatest benefit to Canada, by being mostly more educated and more skilled than the average Canadian, and thus likely to be more productive and earn higher wages. The right method for selecting these economic immigrants is the points system.

A government that wanted maximum benefits for Canada would have taken the above and doubled down. Instead, the Liberals have spent the past eight years watering it down.

In so doing, the Liberals have undermined the country’s long-standing pro-immigration consensus. Recent polls suggest that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Canadians want lower levels of immigration.

But that does not make Canadians “anti-immigration.” It just means they’re questioning the Liberal government’s immigration policy. Canadians are no more anti-immigration than someone who declines dessert after a hot-dog-eating contest should be accused of suddenly having become anti-food.

Last week in Toronto, a shared bed for rent was advertised for $900 a month. Not a room in a shared apartment. A shared bed in a shared room. Half of a 60-inch-wide mattress. Yours for just $10,800 a year.

This is happening in one of the world’s most bonkers housing markets, where a record shortage of places to live is meeting an immigration policy that celebrated a record of more than a million people coming to the country last year. This year’s numbers are likely to be higher; in the first six months of 2023, the temporary-resident stream alone brought in nearly 700,000 people.

This is happening even as the Bank of Canada’s high-interest-rate policy is trying to slow inflation by reducing economic activity, with one of the main transmission mechanisms being discouraging borrowing for new housing construction.

An immigration policy based on faith says there’s no connection between a sudden population surge and the price of rent. Basic arithmetic has other ideas.

Ottawa should lower its immigration targets, at least for the next few years. The current target for 2025, half a million new permanent immigrants, is nearly double the level of 2015.

Canada was not anti-immigration in 2015. Canada was not anti-immigration under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Pierre Trudeau, when immigration was even lower. And Canada will not be anti-immigration next year if, in response to facts not faith, immigration is a bit less than this year.

Next step: Ottawa has to get back to properly using the points system to select the most highly skilled, highly educated and highly remunerated economic immigrants.

What has instead happened under eight years of Liberal government is that the temporary-immigration stream has exploded. Most of the people in that stream are coming to flip burgers, stock shelves and deliver food. Big business loves this endless supply of minimum-wage workers. The rest of us should be less enthused.

One of Canada’s biggest problems, and a growing drag on our living standards, is low productivity growth. Canadian businesses don’t invest enough in new technology and innovation – the things that spell more goods and services produced for each hour of work. A bottomless barrel of low-wage labour further discourages Canadian business from making those capital investments.

And a lot of low-wage labour is arriving through the booming student visa stream – which has been quietly converted from a selective program for luring the best and brightest to a no-limits scheme allowing universities and especially colleges to, in effect, sell Canadian citizenship. This, too, has to be scaled back and smartened up.

Better is always possible, as someone once said. Hint, hint.

Source: The Liberals broke the immigration system. But better is always possible

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Keller: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school 

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Yet more commentary from Keller, this time on international students. Valid criticisms but hard to see how any government, federal or provincial, would have the political courage to implement even if they should take significant steps in that direction, starting with caps and gradually eliminating the “visa mills” of the private colleges and the public institutions that work with them:

Marc Miller, the new federal immigration minister, gets it. Whether he plans to fix it; whether the Prime Minister’s Office is interested in fixing it; and whether the provinces will help all remain to be seen.

The “it” is Canada’s student visa program. Its defects and side effects have been getting a lot of attention, mostly in relation to housing prices. The fact that more than 800,000 visa students were in Canada last year, compared to fewer than 200,000 a decade and a half ago, is one of many contributors to a growing mismatch between housing demand and supply. It’s not discriminatory to point this out. It’s just math.

But in an interview last Saturday with CBC Radio’s The House, Mr. Miller said there are issues at stake that are bigger than housing. He’s right.

He described the international student recruitment system as an “ecosystem” that is “very lucrative” but has brought “some perverse effects: some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen as a backdoor entry into Canada.”

He said that the larger issue is “the integrity of the system.”

Bingo. Canadians want an immigration system that benefits and enriches Canada. It’s become obvious that part of the student visa program, maybe even most of it, is no longer hitting the target or even aiming at it.

As I said in my last column, the Trudeau government broke the immigration system by enabling a massive shadow immigration stream of temporary foreign workers, many now coming through student visas. And Ottawa had help: from private industry lobbying for an all-you-can-eat buffet of minimum-wage labour; from educational institutions with dollar signs in their eyes; and from provincial governments that saw an opportunity to put their higher education budgets on a diet, with foreign student tuition making up the difference.

The leader on that last account has been Ontario. Between 2000 and 2022, its number of foreign students rose from 46,000 to 412,000. The rise under the Doug Ford government has been especially vertiginous, and particularly pronounced in the college sector. In 2016, fewer than 35,000 new student visas were issued to attend Ontario colleges. Last year, the number was more than 143,000.

A lot of those students are at suburban strip-mall academies or office park “campuses.” Some are run by private entrepreneurs. Others are the product of entrepreneurial arrangements between public colleges and private operators, with the former providing the credentials and latter just about everything else.

What is being sold in many cases is not world-class education, but the right to come to Canada, to work while enrolled, to continue working after graduation and to move up the line for citizenship.

And at around $15,000 a year for an Ontario college credential, that’s selling Canadian citizenship at fire sale prices.

The road to citizenship via higher education – genuine education, of a genuinely higher level – is a path our immigration system should always be eager to promote.

When a foreign graduate in, for example, engineering, is given a student visa to do a master’s degree at, say, the University of Alberta, and after their studies they choose to remain in Canada, this country wins.

Our student visa system is supposed to be a pipeline of people who are more educated and skilled than the average Canadian, making them likely to be more economically productive than the average Canadian.

The student visa system is not supposed to be a route to come here to flip burgers, stock shelves or deliver Instacart.

Canada should be maximizing the number of high-skill, high-wage immigrants, and minimizing the number of low-skill, low-wage immigrants. A sensibly run student visa system would be entirely about the former. Instead, a big chunk of it is now about the latter.

How to fix that?

The first thing Ottawa should do is cap the number of student visas. Mr. Miller said this year’s tally will be around 900,000. He should cap future intake well below that.

Next, create a system to prioritize who gets the limited supply of visas. Some in higher education have suggested that can’t be done, but every university and college has a system to do something similar, year after year. It’s called the admissions department. If there are only 500 places in the medical school, the school has to figure out who are the best 500 to admit.

A spokesman for Mr. Miller told me that the department is having “exploratory discussions” about creating a “trusted institutions” framework, which would look more favourably on educational institutions meeting a “higher standard” in areas such as “international student supports and outcomes.”

To govern is to choose. The highest quality and highest value programs should get the visas.

Some provinces will scream, notably Ontario. It underfunds public colleges relative to other provinces, by leaning heavily on foreign student tuition. But at Ontario colleges, foreign students are paying surprisingly low tuition fees. The price is generally far below university tuition. It can rise.

Ottawa should also end the right to work in Canada while in school. Or at least restrict it to high-wage work. Make it so that a Canadian education is the reason a foreign student is coming to Canada, not the pretext.

Source: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school

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Keller: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

2023/08/23 Leave a comment

Another good column by Keller, on how the objectives of international student recruitment have been largely overtaken by economic objectives of low-paid workers:

Over the last two decades, the number of foreign students studying in Canada has increased almost sevenfold, to more than 800,000. The jump has been particularly sharp in recent years. At the end of 2022, there were nearly half a million more visa students than in 2015.

At first blush, this sounds like a success story: Canadian higher education must be so outstanding that record numbers from around the world are lining up to pay university and college tuitions several times higher than those for Canadian students.

Foreign students clearly believe that they’re paying for something that offers a positive return on their investment. But what are they paying for? And what are they getting?

Also: What are we getting?

For many international students, what they are buying is mostly not education. And what many – or most – schools are selling is not education. A big part of what is being bought and sold are public goods: the right to enter Canada, to legally work and to get on a track to citizenship.

There are, of course, excellent university and college programs attracting the best and the brightest to this country. That’s what tying higher education to immigration is supposed to be doing: boosting economic vitality by pulling in, say, the world’s best engineering or computer science students, and giving them opportunities to become Canadians after graduation.

Using foreign student recruitment to raise the education and skill level of the work force benefits all Canadians. When highly-skilled and productive foreigners graduate from a high-level program and become even more skilled and productive – and choose to become Canadians – everyone wins.

But much of the current visa-student pathway is about something else. It has become an important, though unofficial, stream of temporary foreign workers – a bottomless supply of labour to flip burgers, stack boxes and deliver late-night burritos, at minimum wage. And the number of student visas on offer is not capped.

Consider what’s happening at Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Between 2012 and 2020, their foreign enrolment grew by 342 per cent. There’s been more growth in the last three years. But a large part of that growth comes from public colleges selling their name, and their publicly-bestowed credentials, to private operators.

Students in these so-called public-private career college partnerships are often hosted at a “campus” that is a few classrooms in a strip mall or office park, usually somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – and often hundreds of kilometres from the public college whose credentials the private partner paid to use.

Consider Lambton College in Sarnia. According to its strategic mandate agreement with the province, between 2020 and 2024 it expects domestic student enrolment to drop from 2,104 to 2,038. But international student enrolment will more than double to almost 9,000. Most visa students study at one of two campuses in Toronto, run by private operators in suburban office parks.

Why is a foreign student willing to pay $25,460 tuition for a four-semester course in hotel and resort management, from a Lambton-affiliated private business called “Queen’s College,” in a warehouse district in Mississauga?

Perhaps because the holder of an education visa can legally work while enrolled. And thanks to private Queen’s link with public Lambton, the federal government will issue another work visa upon graduation. Even a low-level Canadian educational credential plus Canadian work experience boosts one’s chances of claiming “PR” status – permanent residency, the last stop before citizenship.

That’s what many schools are selling. At $25,460, it’s a bargain.

But it brings me back to the question of why Canada is not being more selective. Using the education-to-citizenship pathway to recruit highly skilled, future Canadian citizens is a great idea. It boosts GDP-per-capita, increasing the size of the economic pie by more than the number of forks in the pie.

But much of the educational visa stream is no longer about that. And graded on the curve, Lambton is far from the bottom of the class.

The federal government lists 526 higher-education institutions in Ontario as “designated learning institutions.” Most are private and may not offer much in the way of education. Yet enrolling at any DLI includes the opportunity to come to Canada on a student visa, and the legal right to work while enrolled.

Even more than at public colleges, that’s what foreign students at private career colleges appear to be paying for: the right to enter Canada, and to work, mostly at low-skill, low-wage jobs.

However, despite the fact that governments have allowed private operators access to a bottomless helping of student visas, they’re sufficiently dubious of their education that completion of a private career college program generally does not gives students the right to a post-graduation work visa – unlike grads from public-private partnerships.

When these private college students are asked to stop working and leave Canada upon graduation from their short course, will they? Don’t bet on it. But that’s a column for another day.

Source: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

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Keller: The Liberals have broken Canada’s immigration system

2023/08/19 Leave a comment

The Globe continues its transition from an immigration booster, hosting Century Initiative events, to one of the more trenchant critics of current policies, with weekly if not more frequent negative and well argued commentary:

Canada’s immigration system used to be the envy of the world.

Note my use of the past tense.

To appreciate what was good about Canada’s previous immigration strategy – the one followed until recently through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal – contrast it with the dysfunction of our friends down south.

Since the 1980s, the United States has had relatively low legal immigration compared with Canada. The U.S. also wasn’t particularly focused on admitting the highly educated and highly skilled. And there was an unofficial immigration stream – called illegal immigration or undocumented immigration, depending on one’s politics – that involved millions of people, most in low-skill, low-wage jobs.

In 2015, when the Trudeau Liberals came into office, Canada was already a high-immigration country, with a rate two-and-a-half times higher than the U.S. More importantly, Canada was a smart immigration country, with immigration selection built around the points system, which sent educated, skilled, young immigrants to the front of the line.

Both countries’ immigration had long been a mix of family reunification, refugees and economic immigrants, but Canada put the accent on the latter. Within the economic stream, our points system put the emphasis on people who were more educated or skilled than the average Canadian, and whose contribution could boost not just gross domestic product, but GDP per capita.

A skilled immigrant doesn’t just grow the size of the economic pie. They’re likely to grow it at a rate greater than the rising number of forks in the pie.

As for the U.S., it stood out for having a large pool of permanently temporary immigrants, most filling low-wage jobs. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that there were 12 million people classified as illegal aliens in the country.

Canada’s own count was unclear, but clearly far lower.

And that was at least partly because of another bipartisan Canadian policy choice. This country had long devoted considerable efforts to making it hard to enter or remain in Canada without permission. People from countries whose citizens had a record of overstaying tourist visas found it extremely difficult to get a tourist visa.

A 2017 World Economic Forum survey ranked Canada as having among the world’s most stringent travel visa rules, placing us at 120th out of 136 countries. But that this was a feature of the Canadian system, not a bug.

We had a wider door than the U.S., yet taller walls. The welcome mat and the walls were complimentary, not contradictory. Canada was a high immigration country with unusually high public support for immigration. Why? Because the manner, scale, makeup and regularity of immigration clearly benefitted Canada, and Canadians.

Our immigration approach was successful, stable and boring.

In 2013, the U.S. Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act. The bill died in the House of Representatives because the Republican leadership refused to take it up – they wanted to campaign against illegal immigration, not fix it – but in the Senate it was supported by the entire Democratic caucus, plus a third of Republicans.

The legislation proposed a points system to focus admissions on skilled immigrants; more opportunities for visa students who earned advanced degrees in science, technology and engineering to remain in the U.S.; and strong measures to discourage illegal immigration.

Had it become law, it would have given the U.S. a more Canadian-style immigration system.

A lot has changed over the past decade. But not so much in the U.S.

Since 2015, the Trudeau government – with the co-operation of the provinces, educational institutions and business – has remade our immigration system. Without anyone noticing, and without public debate, it has become more American.

What gets most talked about most – and what isn’t American – is how Canadian immigration levels that had been stable for a generation are being steadily increased. By 2025, this country will be welcoming half a million new Canadians a year, and rising, double the number of a decade earlier.

But the Liberals have brought about a much bigger and little-noticed revolution in the shadow immigration system’s various temporary foreign worker streams – whose accent is on admitting people for low-skill, low-wage, low productivity jobs. Just like the shadow immigration system in the U.S.

Canada’s streams of temporary admissions are now larger than traditional immigration, and growing fast.

I’ve recently written about how hard it is for doctors – even Canadian graduates of overseas medical school – to get permission to work in Canada. The supply of these highly-educated professionals is greatly restricted.

At the same time, however, the Liberal government has gone to extraordinary lengths to give employers a nearly unlimited supply of low-wage workers, with many of those now arriving via the education visa stream. Those visas used to be entirely about education, but many schools now appear to be partly or even mostly peddling something else, namely the opportunity to reside and work in Canada, usually in a low-wage job.

More on this, and how to fix it, next week.

Source: Opinion: The Liberals have broken Canada’s immigration system

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Keller: It’s time for Canada to take its foot off the immigration gas pedal

2023/07/29 Leave a comment

Indeed as I and others have been arguing for some time with respect to Temporary Foreign Workers and productivity, along with a more serious discussion regarding immigration policy and programs:

The guy who cut my hair last week taught me something about the Temporary Foreign Worker program: It’s even looser than I thought.

Fixing that, and a number of other things that aren’t quite right about the immigration system, comes down to the Trudeau government. So, don’t hold your breath.

After Sean Fraser was shuffled from Immigration Minister to Housing Minister on Wednesday, he said Canada can’t “close the door on newcomers.” As if that’s what the government’s critics are calling for. Is it possible for Canadians to discuss a serious economic issue, seriously? Or is polarizing name-calling all that our politics has left?

The Liberals have a habit of crafting marketing strategies before policies, and then having policies become hostage to the talking points. Immigration is such a case. We’re about to find out whether the Liberals can make a course correction, or whether they’ll double down on the polarizing talking points, attacking suggestions for reform as so much xenophobia.

The Liberals have raised Canada’s immigration targets, year after year, while also making it ever easier for businesses to recruit low-wage, not-so-temporary temporary foreign workers, and schools to enroll hundreds of thousands of overseas students – many of whom sought student visas in part for the chance to become low-wage, not-so-temporary temporary foreign workers.

One of the negative consequences is that the national housing squeeze has been made worse, with a big jump in postpandemic arrivals pushing high prices higher and low vacancy rates lower. It’s not political. It’s just arithmetic.

The Liberals could fix things – not by stopping immigration but by scaling it back, and making it more targeted to highly skilled economic immigrants. The latter is supposed to be the core mission of our immigration system. Returning to that common-sense approach would benefit Canadians and the economy.

And now, back to my neighbourhood barbershop. The place was empty when I walked in on a Friday afternoon, so I dropped into a chair and started chatting with the barber. He spoke excellent English with a Spanish accent, and I asked where he was from.

“Mexico,” he said.

How long had he been in Canada?

“One year and seven months.”

Why did he come to Canada?

“I looked online for jobs, found one I wanted and applied.”

Temporary Foreign Worker program?

“Yes.”

He gave me a good haircut (as good as can be when the subject has little more than half a head of hair) and a better insight into one part of the immigration system.

It’s perfectly reasonable for Canada to have a system for filling temporary gaps for highly skilled labour. That’s what the TFW program is supposed to do.

But that’s mostly not what it’s doing. Instead, it’s offering low-pay, low-skill and low-productivity employers a way to recruit overseas, at low cost, rather than having to search harder at home, or offer higher wages, or invest in technology and training to increase efficiency.

The government of Canada’s TFW Job Bank has around 10,000 postings from employers searching for a temporary foreign worker. Most jobs offer a salary of less than $40,000. Nearly all pay less than $60,000, which is below the Canadian average.

There are, for example, 17 employers looking for barbers, from Edmonton to Hamilton to Montreal, with pay starting at $15 an hour.

There are also some high-wage jobs. A Vancouver health care provider is looking for five family physicians, at a salary of $300,000 to $350,000. A veterinary clinic is offering up to $190,000 for an emergency vet. eBay Canada in Toronto is seeking a software engineer, at a salary of $160,000 to $180,000.

But the TFW database is mostly low-wage work.

Home Hardware in Woodstock, Ont., is seeking two cashiers at $16.55 an hour. A Mac’s Convenience in Edmonton is looking for one cashier at $15 an hour. City Avenue Market in Port Coquitlam, B.C., needs a cashier, at $17 an hour.

A Tim Hortons in Sherbrooke, Que., wants seven “assistant waiter/waitress,” at $15.25 an hour. Western Pizza in Regina has four vacancies for servers, at $14 an hour.

All of those low-wage jobs, along with most others I looked at, were listed as full-time and permanent. These aren’t temporary positions, even though that’s what the TFW program is notionally about.

And I haven’t touched on the larger but more opaque group of foreign workers: those who come on a student visa, work at low-wage service jobs, and then use Canadian educational credentials plus Canadian work experience in hopes of landing permanent residency in the country.

If everyone on that path was a graduate in engineering, computer science or other highly paid fields, the system would make sense. But a large share of the visa students are not.

As I wrote earlier this week, our plans to use the various immigration streams to raise GDP per capita are being undermined by too heavy a focus on filling low-wage, low-skill jobs.

We can make our immigration system better. But first, we need an honest conversation about what our immigration system aims to do. And what’s not working.

Source: Opinion: It’s time for Canada to take its foot off the immigration gas …

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Keller: Canada’s economy is stuck in a rut. High immigration isn’t the cause – or the answer

2023/07/26 Leave a comment

Of note. More on the perverse effects of current immigration policy, permanent and temporary, on productivity and per capita GDP:

Between 1990 and 2022, Canada’s population grew by 40.6 per cent. That’s more than most of the world’s highly-developed countries.

Switzerland’s population increased by 30.6 per cent over the same period, or about three-quarters of Canada’s pace, according to data from the World Bank. Norway was up 28.7 per cent. Sweden’s population grew at about half of Canada’s rate, as did the Netherlands and Austria. Taiwan and Denmark’s population growth was a little more than a third of Canada’s. Finland grew at roughly a quarter of Canada’s pace. Germany’s population rose by just 5.9 per cent, or one-seventh the Canadian rate.

These countries have something else in common: According to the International Monetary Fund, they are on the very short list of nations whose per-capita gross domestic product is higher than Canada’s.

In plain English, they’re wealthier than us. If you took the annual economic output of each country and cut it into the same number of slices as it has people, their residents would each get a slightly larger slice of the pie than the average Canadian.

Canada’s higher-than-our-peers population growth – powered by a higher immigration rate – is not why our economic performance in recent decades has left something to be desired. But neither is the country’s higher population growth, and the Liberal government’s plan for ever-rising immigration, some kind of magic solution for goosing Canadian living standards.

If Canada were a country where a calm and rational discussion of immigration was possible, we’d be talking about this. We’d be thinking hard about how the immigration system can best be designed to raise living standards for the average Canadian – not just growing the population and the economy, but growing the economy at a pace considerably faster than the population.

As a recent study from TD Economics points out, Canada has spent the last couple of decades “falling behind the standard-of-living curve.”

Since 2011, Canada’s GDP has grown at the same pace as the United States, and ahead of the rest of the G7. But Canada’s population has been growing faster than the rest of the G7, masking our economic underperformance.

When you look at GDP per capita rather than GDP – and ask not “is the country bigger?” but “is the average Canadian better off?” – Canada is losing ground.

In 1980, Canada’s GDP per capita was US$4,000 ahead of the average advanced economy, according to TD. By the year 2000, Canada and the others were neck and neck. And today, Canada is behind. Why? Because since 2014, our real GDP per capita has grown by just 0.4 per cent a year, compared with 1.4 per cent in other advanced economies. Unlike those countries, the growth of Canada’s pie is barely keeping pace with the rising number of forks.

A higher-than-average rate of immigration didn’t cause that. Yes, that short list of countries with higher per-capita GDP than Canada is mostly made up of places with lower population growth. But it also includes one country whose growth was only slightly below Canada’s – the U.S., whose population rose by 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2022 – and another, Australia, which had higher immigration levels and higher population growth for much of the same period.

Canada’s sclerotic economic performance is owing to decades of low productivity growth, caused in large part by low levels of business investment in plant, equipment and technology.

But immigration can be used to boost productivity growth, or to suppress it.

Canada’s immigration system was designed with a clear understanding of that. The core of our immigration system has long been economic immigration. Immigrants in that stream are chosen based on a points system, with applicants with more education and skills going to the head of the line.

To the extent immigration is tilted toward arrivals who are of working age and have more education, skills and earning power than the average Canadian, that boosts Canada’s GDP per capita. High-skills immigrants add more to the pie than the average Canadian – increasing the size of everyone’s slice.

The goals of the economic immigration stream were never perfectly executed, but since 2015, the Liberal federal government has further diminished it.

They somewhat reduced the share of economic immigrants, while raising the share of family-class and refugees. At the same time, the Liberals ramped up admissions of temporary foreign workers, including through a visa student program whose numbers are not limited, and have exploded.

A lot of those temporary workers are filling low-wage jobs in retail and fast food. Employers find it convenient to have an almost bottomless supply of minimum-wage labour, but making sure there are always more than enough people ready to prepare and deliver your burrito, at $15-an-hour or less, is not the right economic imperative for Canada. It doesn’t boost GDP per capita but lowers it.

It also discourages low-wage businesses from raising pay to attract new workers, or making productivity-raising investments that reduce the need for labour. Those approaches would lower inequality and raise productivity – and Canada needs to do both.

And I haven’t even mentioned the impact of immigration on housing.

We need be thinking hard about all of this, and discussing it honestly. Will our politics even allow it? More on that, later this week.

Source: Canada’s economy is stuck in a rut. High immigration isn’t the cause – or the answer

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ICYMI – Keller: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

2023/04/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary pointing out the reality of trade-offs and the unreality of “open borders” and permanent residence for all:

If you’ve been dreaming of a guilt-free, morally pure, no-hard-choices solution to the problem of irregular border crossers into Canada, illegal border crossings in the United States, overwhelmed refugee determination systems in both countries and people smuggling in all directions, I offer you this simple answer: open borders.

Under open borders, anyone who wanted to move to Canada could. Simple as that. If 10 million immigrants wanted to come to Canada this year, then 10 million would.

There’d be no more refugee claimants sent back to the United States under the Safe Third Country Agreement. Anyone would be free to enter Canada, work as soon as they arrived, remain as long as they liked and become a citizen. There would be no need for an Immigration and Refugee Board to determine who is or isn’t a genuine legal refugee; there’d be no need for refugee claims at all. We would also get rid of Canada’s immigration points system, which gives priority to people with advanced educations and in-demand skills. We’d admit everyone, and give priority to no one.

There would be no annual immigration targets, such as this year’s target of 465,000 immigrants, including 266,000 economic immigrants, 78,000 spouses and children, 28,500 parents and grandparents and more than 92,000 refugees and compassionate cases. Under open borders, Canada would not select immigrants, and “no one is illegal” would not be a slogan. It would be the law.

While you ponder that, I should make it clear that I don’t think an open border is right for Canada. But unless you do, there’s no way to design an immigration system that doesn’t involve choices – sometimes hard and unpleasant ones – about who gets in and who doesn’t. There’s no avoiding it.

Many Canadians are uncomfortable with the closing of the Roxham Road-sized loophole in the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. I believe the government made the right move, but the discomfort of the critics is not without reason – real people are affected, and not in pleasant ways.

However, unless you go all the way to open borders, every approach to immigration and refugee policy involves at least some people who want to come to Canada being denied entry. It’s inevitable.

The Roxham Road loophole was not a principled response to any of that. A Canadian family hoping to bring in their grandparents still had to apply from overseas and wait in a queue. Ditto regular immigrants from overseas. Same story for refugee claimants from Syria or Afghanistan in a refugee camp.

But if you were from a country where U.S. visa rules are loose enough, and you had enough cash for a plane ticket, you could fly to the United States and then slide into Canada’s refugee-determination system at Roxham Road. Or if you were able to get to Mexico, make it across the U.S. border and then head north, you could similarly jump the queue and make your claim directly on Canadian soil.

But every successful refugee claim at Roxham Road was quietly but effectively reducing the number of spots available to people in refugee camps an ocean away.

What’s more, unless our policy is that everyone who claims asylum gets asylum, we need some sort of legal process to figure out who is a refugee and who isn’t. Canada has such a system and, after detailed investigations that tend to last for years, it finds that many refugee claimants are not refugees, and orders them deported. That’s what happened to one of the families that recently died trying to illegally cross from Canada into the United States though Akwesasne Mohawk territory.

And then there’s the underpinning of our entire immigration strategy. The Trudeau government aims to raise immigration to 500,000 permanent residents a year by 2025 – roughly double the level under the Harper and Chrétien governments. That move was justified in 2016 by the government’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth as a plan for, well, economic growth. A higher population, said the council, would expand the economy, but only if new immigrants are more productive than average Canadians will each slice of pie grow faster than the number of forks. If immigrants are less productive than Canadians, the number of forks will grow faster than the pie.

“An increase in overall economic output (GDP) is a positive thing for Canada,” wrote the council, “but only if the expansion translates to a rise in living standards for the average Canadian (GDP per capita). This goal can be achieved by focusing the recommended increase in immigration flows among educated and highly skilled workers, and those with specialized skill sets lacking in Canada.”

In other words, Canada’s immigration policy is not just about having more Canadians, but more educated, skilled and productive Canadians. To do that, newcomer immigrants have to be mostly young, educated and skilled. One big knock against the Liberal government is that while many new immigrants meet the criteria, too many do not. Immigration can raise everyone’s living standards, but only if we’re selective about who we let in, and who we do not.

To govern is to choose. There’s no getting around it. Nowhere is that more true than at the border.

Source: Why the Trudeau government was right to close Roxham Road

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