My chief concern, David, apart from the sheer numbers and our entire infrastructure being insufficient to meet the strain (healthcare, schools, job market) is the lack of screening and expectation of integration. Principle among the consequences is increased violence such as the UK and Sweden are experiencing (including but not limited to grooming gangs), the influx of rabid islamists as well as others who view women as non-entities (or close thereto). These people will eventually vote and they most certainly will not vote for women, or vote in support of ideals on which our country was founded. Again, look at the UK. In short, unless and until we insist otherwise, immigrants bring their own culture with them.
Having found the survey questions too restrictive, I am responding here so that I can actually express my views. I see the problem as not being the absolute number of immigrants, but the irresponsible manner in which they are dumped here. We already have a model for a better way to manage immigration in the privately-sponsored refugee program. We should extend it to ALL immigrants, tying the rate of immigration to the ability and willingness of the existing population to absorb it, and providing a mechanism for assimilation. I am 70+, economically leftish, socially conservative.
There's a saying in medicine that I believe applies to immigration - "The dose makes the poison". In other words, for a drug to be effective the right amount has to be prescribed. Too little and the drug is ineffective, too much and the drug causes harm. With immigration, this government seems to be following the adage that more is always better. And now we're seeing the harm an overdose causes.
I wish the government had been more prepared for increased levels of immigration with healthcare, education and housing. But I don’t regret more immigrants.
As a libertarian I had to answer is an apparently non-libertarian manner by not choosing open borders for the same reason that Milton Freidman was opposed (actually the bottom of his priorities) to open borders - that you can't have open borders while having a welfare state. Therefore, first eliminate the later and then we can talk about the former.
As for housing shortages, there are two things that scuttle all flaccid attempts at the requisite campaign plank of Jacobins and Bolsheviks seeking office, "affordable housing". One, and this is huge and never mentioned and that is Canada's dearth of privately owned land available for housing in relative and absolute numbers. BC where I live, is the worst example with only 5% of the land base privately owned (the Canadian average is 11%), one percent of which is forest, 3.3% is agriculture and restricted from development leaving less than one percent for housing and other municipal land use. As a comparison, Vancouver which enjoys globally high housing costs is over twice as expensive as Calgary or Edmonton surrounded by easily developable private land.
The second reason is the obsession with planning for obsessive energy conservation in codes, rent controls, planning delays and fees, all under a federal regime that has driven capital out of the country and with the new Capital gains inclusion rate, one can easily surmise that the builders are now "shrugging". Virtually everything all three levels of government are doing is increasing the cost of housing. I built the last two houses that we live(d) in and I can attest to the lower costs in older (15 year old) but essentially adequate building codes.
Finally, at the risk of covering too many topics, and back to immigration, we and the west in general need to have an uncensored discussion about the wisdom in importing the theocracy that has been at war with western civilization for the last 1400 years. To put it bluntly, what starts as multiculturalism, the notion of moral equivalence of all cultures, ends in Jihad.
Absolutely. I was just focusing on the economic argument because it's presented so prominently in government communications - and because it's something whose outcome we can measure.
An immigration policy that was designed primarily to import caregivers for the elderly would probably look very different from the one we have.
Thanks. I suspect the demographic impact would be worth measuring too.
And immigration might have a way of offsetting economic decline from retirements.
To oversimplify, imagine the existing population of Canada was all turning 65 and retiring. If that was the only story, then economic growth would be negative. The population would stop working, stop producing and live off old savings.
Add some younger workers and GDP wouldn't have to decline. It could stay the same (if a new worker replaced an old worker) or even increase.
That's possible. The problem is that, despite having had consistently (relatively) elevated immigration rates for decades - and very high rates for the best part of the last decade - the GDP numbers nevertheless appear to be declining - at least in the short term. Your scenario would predict more stable rates.
The truth is that I'm not convinced that GDP is all that useful as a measure of the real economic well being of a population. Besides the fact that it's a blunt instrument, there's too much magic wand waving going on in the background for edge cases. I have an article that I'll hopefully publish soon that talks about one particular admission that Statistics Canada made to me concerning their labour productivity numbers.
I'm also working on a customized composite index made up of GDP, HDI, GNI, and Saving Rate measures.
David, correlating GDP p.c. and housing starts is just too simplistic to be useful. GDP is driven by a complex of factors and so are housing starts. Correlation (or lack thereof) between two complex phenomena offers no, or worse, misleading insight.
I completely agree. Although, technically, I was comparing GDP and housing starts to immigration - not to each other. I was specifically testing the government's claim that increased immigration would LEAD TO economic gains. So their policy inputs should have produced increased GDP.
But the truth is that I'm not at all convinced GDP is a particularly useful measure of the economy. I've got some posts coming that'll flesh that out a lot more.
My chief concern, David, apart from the sheer numbers and our entire infrastructure being insufficient to meet the strain (healthcare, schools, job market) is the lack of screening and expectation of integration. Principle among the consequences is increased violence such as the UK and Sweden are experiencing (including but not limited to grooming gangs), the influx of rabid islamists as well as others who view women as non-entities (or close thereto). These people will eventually vote and they most certainly will not vote for women, or vote in support of ideals on which our country was founded. Again, look at the UK. In short, unless and until we insist otherwise, immigrants bring their own culture with them.
Having found the survey questions too restrictive, I am responding here so that I can actually express my views. I see the problem as not being the absolute number of immigrants, but the irresponsible manner in which they are dumped here. We already have a model for a better way to manage immigration in the privately-sponsored refugee program. We should extend it to ALL immigrants, tying the rate of immigration to the ability and willingness of the existing population to absorb it, and providing a mechanism for assimilation. I am 70+, economically leftish, socially conservative.
There's a saying in medicine that I believe applies to immigration - "The dose makes the poison". In other words, for a drug to be effective the right amount has to be prescribed. Too little and the drug is ineffective, too much and the drug causes harm. With immigration, this government seems to be following the adage that more is always better. And now we're seeing the harm an overdose causes.
I wish the government had been more prepared for increased levels of immigration with healthcare, education and housing. But I don’t regret more immigrants.
As a libertarian I had to answer is an apparently non-libertarian manner by not choosing open borders for the same reason that Milton Freidman was opposed (actually the bottom of his priorities) to open borders - that you can't have open borders while having a welfare state. Therefore, first eliminate the later and then we can talk about the former.
As for housing shortages, there are two things that scuttle all flaccid attempts at the requisite campaign plank of Jacobins and Bolsheviks seeking office, "affordable housing". One, and this is huge and never mentioned and that is Canada's dearth of privately owned land available for housing in relative and absolute numbers. BC where I live, is the worst example with only 5% of the land base privately owned (the Canadian average is 11%), one percent of which is forest, 3.3% is agriculture and restricted from development leaving less than one percent for housing and other municipal land use. As a comparison, Vancouver which enjoys globally high housing costs is over twice as expensive as Calgary or Edmonton surrounded by easily developable private land.
The second reason is the obsession with planning for obsessive energy conservation in codes, rent controls, planning delays and fees, all under a federal regime that has driven capital out of the country and with the new Capital gains inclusion rate, one can easily surmise that the builders are now "shrugging". Virtually everything all three levels of government are doing is increasing the cost of housing. I built the last two houses that we live(d) in and I can attest to the lower costs in older (15 year old) but essentially adequate building codes.
Finally, at the risk of covering too many topics, and back to immigration, we and the west in general need to have an uncensored discussion about the wisdom in importing the theocracy that has been at war with western civilization for the last 1400 years. To put it bluntly, what starts as multiculturalism, the notion of moral equivalence of all cultures, ends in Jihad.
Speaking of Bolsheviks, I wonder if these quotes by Solzhenitsyn have relevance to our immigration situation:
https://files.catbox.moe/pti3tl.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/khk98o.jpg
As a former public servant, the subtle burn in paragraph 2 is *chef's kiss*.
Isn't one of the other goals dealing with the aging population?
To provide workers to offset the large and growing number of retirees?
Absolutely. I was just focusing on the economic argument because it's presented so prominently in government communications - and because it's something whose outcome we can measure.
An immigration policy that was designed primarily to import caregivers for the elderly would probably look very different from the one we have.
Thanks. I suspect the demographic impact would be worth measuring too.
And immigration might have a way of offsetting economic decline from retirements.
To oversimplify, imagine the existing population of Canada was all turning 65 and retiring. If that was the only story, then economic growth would be negative. The population would stop working, stop producing and live off old savings.
Add some younger workers and GDP wouldn't have to decline. It could stay the same (if a new worker replaced an old worker) or even increase.
That's possible. The problem is that, despite having had consistently (relatively) elevated immigration rates for decades - and very high rates for the best part of the last decade - the GDP numbers nevertheless appear to be declining - at least in the short term. Your scenario would predict more stable rates.
The truth is that I'm not convinced that GDP is all that useful as a measure of the real economic well being of a population. Besides the fact that it's a blunt instrument, there's too much magic wand waving going on in the background for edge cases. I have an article that I'll hopefully publish soon that talks about one particular admission that Statistics Canada made to me concerning their labour productivity numbers.
I'm also working on a customized composite index made up of GDP, HDI, GNI, and Saving Rate measures.
Thanks, I look forward to your further work.
Yes, GDP has its drawbacks.
David, correlating GDP p.c. and housing starts is just too simplistic to be useful. GDP is driven by a complex of factors and so are housing starts. Correlation (or lack thereof) between two complex phenomena offers no, or worse, misleading insight.
I completely agree. Although, technically, I was comparing GDP and housing starts to immigration - not to each other. I was specifically testing the government's claim that increased immigration would LEAD TO economic gains. So their policy inputs should have produced increased GDP.
But the truth is that I'm not at all convinced GDP is a particularly useful measure of the economy. I've got some posts coming that'll flesh that out a lot more.