As a recent immigrant … ouch.
With that said everyone in my town has been incredibly kind and welcoming of me and my family. We are native english speakers from the US and white though so we can pass for local as long as we dont say “prah-cess” instead of “pro-cess” or talk about the weather in Freedom Degrees instead of Celsius.
Count me in that number. Its factually true from my perspective.
Its factually true from my perspective.
That’s an interesting sentence
Economics Explained recently did a video reviewing Canada’s immigration policies. Most advanced economies have low birthrates and make up for it with immigration. Accepting an immigrant is (economically) much better than someone having a baby. A baby needs decades before it contributes to the economy. An immigrant is often educated and skilled in a desired field and will immediately contribute to the economy.
However, Canada might be the first country to stumble upon some downsides to immigration. Mainly, student visas might not contribute as much to the economy as once thought, Canadian immigrants leave to work in the US at incredibly high rates, and Canadian metropolitan cities are some of the most expensive to live in worldwide and immigration is exacerbating the issue (the issue isn’t immigration though, it’s a focus on building single detached family homes over high density housing).
Just down scroll down into the comment section. It’s mostly just people being racist. I sincerely hope those comments aren’t coming from Canadians. (The channel also did a video on why African countries struggle economically a few days later and the comment section was even worse)
Unfortunately we have what is basically a MAGA crowd too. In fact, some of them are dumb enough to actually use the term and wear stuff with MAGA on it. Yes, technically Canada is part of America, but I bet if you ask them if it covers Mexico or South America, they would either have not even thought of that or be unsure how to answer, as it wasn’t part of the videos they watched that made them mad.
I don’t disagree with the general claims you made, and I’m not commenting on the veracity of the specific linked video, but in general EE isn’t a reputable source for economics knowledge or analysis. If that’s news, check Money & Macro’s critique on a couple of EEs videos. It’s a clown show.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
a video reviewing Canada’s immigration policies
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Canada needs more people. It also needs more infrastructure.
Unfortunately Canada is doing a good job tackling #1, but a bad job tackling #2 because the financials work out to be just fine to do so.
Fucking idiots.
lol the irony
From a housing perspective, yeah, there are currently too many. That’s a policy failure not related to immigration itself though. The housing problem could be easily solved and then this level of immigration would make sense.
I mean depends on how you define easily.
Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.
This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.
Near me there are TONS of empty places, the developing is not the issue. Nobody can afford them. Hell I don’t even own and the place next to me sat empty for 3 months because it was going at an absurd rent for the size.
Why would I build affordable housing? That just invites the poor. /s
There are a bunch of new apartments in my city’s downtown (USA). They’re all premium spaces. I can afford a spot, but I doubt most can.
Just limiting how many properties a person/corporation can own would solve the problem alone. Tax should exponentially increase after 2+ properties.
Make coop housing viable, currently it’s almost impossible to start one.
Gov should be building housing too, just like the ww2 houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_box_houses
In addition, feds should be building housing to house every single person, unconditionally. On the topic of homelessness it’s the only way to reintegrate folks into society. Even if, say, 80% do nothing but shoot up in their free housing, it’s still cheaper for taxpayers when you consider the cost of taking care of folks on the street and the problems that causes.
And this may be controversial, but non-Canadians should pay a higher mortgage rate. Finland does this and they have probably the best housing situation on the planet.
I can agree it would help, but we’re at an all time low for housing to population. A Fraser institute study, so there’s a definite conservative bias to their presentation and info, but it shows how long this has been coming.
In theory, we should be okay - Fraser report shows were at 424 housing units per capita, and most households are an average of 2.4 people, which means in theory wevs got enough housing.
But comparison to other countries show that, in general, we need about 10% more houses (closer to the 471 G7 average) in order to feel more balanced. Most other European countries have more
I agree with all your proposals, but they all require land/housing already built OR the people available to build them, and THAT would be the real bottleneck
It’s worth noting that government housing programs started scaling back in the 80s. Funny how that works, isn’t it?
Tell that half to go back to where they came from. LOL
Where is that if I was born here
Are you First Nation?
Yes? Then you aren’t an immigrant.
No? Find out where your family originated from before coming to Canada, and that would be the place.
The bigots from the poll have a problem with the other immigrants who aren’t them or their family.
Oh, they have problems with indigenous people, too.
Yeah, I’d have to agree with that.
My family came from Russia four generations ago. I’m not able to move to Russia even if I wanted to.
I was born here, and therefore by definition I am not an immigrant.
I think you’ve missed the point.
Are you saying I can’t criticize immigration because my family generations ago are immigrants? If not, then I did miss your point.
My rebuttal to that is that I did not choose to be born here. And I’m here now and it’s obvious that immigration levels are too high given our failing housing and health care policies for example.
You can certainly criticize immigration policy, but having a problem with immigrants seems like a double standard.
Does that make sense now?
Yes so why are you assuming that’s not the reasoning the people in the poll have? Barely anyone in Canada actually dislikes immigrants themselves
What a ridiculous statement though. There were people in Canada before the current indigenous people, does that make our First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples settlers and conquerors? Where’s the buck stop?
Concerns over immigration are mostly about the economy
https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/new-immig.pdf
It is incorrect to think of economic activity as a limited resource that must be defended against the rapacious outsider. Economic activity is not only consumed by people, but also created by them. Value is a product of human labour. In fact, Canada should be looking to increase it’s population rapidly so that the market that exists here can develop enough of a gravity of its own that we aren’t so reliant on the US market.
Outsourcing and automation have been far, far more impactful with regards to wages. NAFTA as well has hollowed out a lot of our economy so that the only real growth sectors are resource extraction which feeds the US market, and real estate. Protectionism is a bit of a dirty word however I think it’s necessary to develop industries where we can create value-added products out of our own natural resources, and ultimately build a much more varied and healthy economy. And we need far more people than we are birthing locally to do that.
This is true under conditions of no significant resource constraints. We’ve hit a resource constraint in the most in-demand locations- housing - due to all the known causes like zoning, etc. Regardless of the causes, it’s a constraint that increases the costs across the economy but it is felt the most by the lower parts of the wage scale. It may be wise to balance that while solving the resource constraint in order to avoid destabilization. People will vote against the precarity of their housing situation whether it negatively affects other priorities or not and for a good reason.
Thanks, municipalities, by trying to persevere the character of your neighbourhoods, you’ve managed to destroy the character of Canada.
People are upset about immigrants because of housing. Housing is a problem because cities made it de jure illegal.
But immigrants make a good scapegoat.
I think this is it. The survey points to rational thinking amongst the most severely affected, not a racist aversion.
They (upper class) want it to sound racist though. Immigration plus housing crunch is making people who own property incredibly rich
Ooooof, now that’s a spicy conjecture! I don’t think this is done consciously by most but it doesn’t change the effects. 🤭
I think it’s definitely done consciously by politicians though, as the majority of MPs are landlords
And the other half arrived this year
Since 1 in 4 Canadians is a first generation immigrant themselves, I’m wondering if this 50% figure represents 2/3 of all Canadian-born Canadians.
Or maybe some leopards eating faces is going on?
More like ladder-kicking. Every ladder-kicker is going to hell, 100%
Think of how stupid the average person and now remember that half of them are super than that.
half of them are stupider than [the average person]
About half, depending on how biased the distribution is. The statistic to use for this is the median, not the average!
Intelligence follows a normal distribution, hence, for any reasonably large population, mean and median are the same.
Intelligence follows a normal distribution
That’s news to me, as I’m not aware of well stablished quantifiable definitions of intelligence.
I don’t know what worries me more, that I might be in the lower half or the upper 😐
Ah yes. Where you say “no immigrants” and people go “you’re racist” and the fact is that it’s as it was said: too many immigrants. Nothing racist about it. We can’t sustain this size of population.
Yep, I’m an immigrant, I have nothing against them of course, but Canada cannot sustain 500k-1m new immigrants per year, it’s insane
40K nets around 32K in Ontario. 1 bedroom rent in Toronto’s suburbs is over 2K. That’s 24K per year. 24K / 40K = 60% of gross income to housing. 24K / 32K = 8K leftover after housing. 8K / 12 = $666 per month for all else. This number falls to $333 on minimum wage. Monthly transit pass is $156. If you live outside TO proper, you often pay for two passes. Mississauga’s is $131. A cheap phone bill with data that could somewhat replace Internet is $35. Internet connection is $50+. Have you gone to a grocery store recently? Better not have any unplanned expenses.
