6 ms·

As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow an

As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow and steady pace of quality over quantity before liberals came into power.

arcticbull 6y ago
It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1] The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in. I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure. [1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Plan-Graph-2020-article.png https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  Right, in the long term it would be beneficial, but the infrastructure takes time to build up. Most immigrants understandably crowd in either Vancouver, Toronto or a couple of other big cities because that's where the opportunities are. Not sure where you live, but the food and rent have gone up dramatically in these cities. Forget about being able to afford buying a house or an apartment even if you've been responsibly saving up. The commute before covid was killer. I don't understand this off-hand dismissal of concerns because I don't have citations.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  >The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in. And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration. This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children. The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over. In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
    - gruez 6y ago
      >> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration. >This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children. But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        If you look at the chart, you'll see there is a substantial global negative correlation between income and fertility. High income countries have low fertility. Everywhere. The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
        gruez 6y ago
        >The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have? I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.
koluna 6y ago
If you are going to call out “infrastructure to support it”, care to elaborate and maybe throw in some numbers?
- core-questions 6y ago
  It's about _carrying capacity_, not "infrastructure". We can only absorb people at some maximum rate and still have a chance of bringing them on board with hard-fought Canadian cultural values, getting them up to speed with our official languages, and integrating them into local communities. Past that rate, the tendency is for newcomers to seek out people who are from their home country and speak their language. This creates insular bubbles of culture and damages any effort to actually create a cohesive whole. Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.
  - koluna 6y ago
    OK, so where exactly has this NOT worked? Where is this huge number of people that just aren’t adjusted to the “Canadian lifestyle”?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      Well, there are certainly areas of Vancouver and Toronto and their outlying suburbs that are on the verge of this; but it's more of an issue with recognizing the potential issues by looking at other countries that are further down the demographic path than Canada is. Or do you think it's necessary to have a problem in order to understand it?
  - 6y ago
malandrew 6y ago
There's a lot to be said for a slow steady pace. Society's relationship with politics tends to be oscillatory. If you push too hard in one direction (liberal or conservative), things swing back the other way and you end up with two steps forward, one step back and a loss of power for your team. A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage. The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.
SECProto 6y ago
Immigration to Canada has stayed very consistent over the last 20 years, check the wiki article [1] for details. It's not political (well, the rhetoric is political. The actual policies and statistics are not.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada
BitwiseFool 6y ago
It's a shame you're getting downvoted so heavily for such a reasonable position to take.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  If you're expecting HN, in all its "rational glory", to be anything but extremely pro-migration to the West when most of the users' are likely either 1st or 2nd generation migrants to the West themselves, then you're very naive.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    You can still be pro-migration while disagreeing with the pace of it - despite what the downvotes imply.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

arcticbull 6y ago

It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1] The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in. I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure. [1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Plan-Graph-2020-article.png https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...

frequentnapper 6y ago
Right, in the long term it would be beneficial, but the infrastructure takes time to build up. Most immigrants understandably crowd in either Vancouver, Toronto or a couple of other big cities because that's where the opportunities are. Not sure where you live, but the food and rent have gone up dramatically in these cities. Forget about being able to afford buying a house or an apartment even if you've been responsibly saving up. The commute before covid was killer. I don't understand this off-hand dismissal of concerns because I don't have citations.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in. And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration. This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children. The reality is that as a country becomes more developed, it's birth rate plunges. There's a strong negative correlation between income, development and birth rate. [1] This is not an east-vs-west thing, it applies the world over. In developed countries, women do not want to have more children, and you can't make them. So, you allow immigration [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
  - gruez 6y ago
    >> And instead of supporting the native Canadian population in having more children themselves, Canada, like most of the modern West, simply opted to replace them over time via migration. >This doesn't make sense. The country already incentivizes child birth, and provides socialized medicine. You can't make people have children. But this doesn't disprove the prior statement. It's possible that they're incentivizing having children, but not enough. Given the available choices of incentivizing having children even more (eg. free daycare or longer parental leave) or simply admitting more immigrants, Canada went with the latter because it's cheaper. After all, why bother letting the native population produce average workers when you can admit above average workers from across the world?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      If you look at the chart, you'll see there is a substantial global negative correlation between income and fertility. High income countries have low fertility. Everywhere. The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have?
      - gruez 6y ago
        >The question for me is why are you trying to force "natives" to have kids they don't want to have? I'm not sure how you got the impression that I'm for "forcing" people to have kids.

koluna 6y ago

If you are going to call out “infrastructure to support it”, care to elaborate and maybe throw in some numbers?

core-questions 6y ago
It's about _carrying capacity_, not "infrastructure". We can only absorb people at some maximum rate and still have a chance of bringing them on board with hard-fought Canadian cultural values, getting them up to speed with our official languages, and integrating them into local communities. Past that rate, the tendency is for newcomers to seek out people who are from their home country and speak their language. This creates insular bubbles of culture and damages any effort to actually create a cohesive whole. Multiculturalism in Canada is different than in America. Here, there's something bigger for us to assimilate to that actually still holds value as a construct; a greater Canadian archetype that has done extremely well as a common point for newcomers to converge on for the past few decades. However, it would be easy to exceed the rate at which this is workable, and end up with a fractured country where people retain their entire original identity and never "become Canadian". This is a legitimate concern for people that love the country created by people who are Canadian through and through and want to see some of our lesser-known values (such as anticorruption, engineering quality, sustainability, etc) continue to propagate.
- koluna 6y ago
  OK, so where exactly has this NOT worked? Where is this huge number of people that just aren’t adjusted to the “Canadian lifestyle”?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Well, there are certainly areas of Vancouver and Toronto and their outlying suburbs that are on the verge of this; but it's more of an issue with recognizing the potential issues by looking at other countries that are further down the demographic path than Canada is. Or do you think it's necessary to have a problem in order to understand it?
- 6y ago

malandrew 6y ago

There's a lot to be said for a slow steady pace. Society's relationship with politics tends to be oscillatory. If you push too hard in one direction (liberal or conservative), things swing back the other way and you end up with two steps forward, one step back and a loss of power for your team. A more productive approach would be to set the cruise control just left of center and not get greedy. If you do that and simultaneously monitor and manage externalities of policies you see as progress, you'll probably see more mileage. The complete lack of concern for externalities of policies and disregard for second and third order effects is why I've largely abandoned supporting most democrat positions. It's gotten so destructive that I'd rather stick with the devil I know than the devil I don't. And I would rather avoid oscillating between which devil has power since it's at the point in the reversal of political direction that the worst authoritarian abuses from either side happen.

SECProto 6y ago

Immigration to Canada has stayed very consistent over the last 20 years, check the wiki article [1] for details. It's not political (well, the rhetoric is political. The actual policies and statistics are not.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada

BitwiseFool 6y ago

It's a shame you're getting downvoted so heavily for such a reasonable position to take.

cmdshiftf4 6y ago
If you're expecting HN, in all its "rational glory", to be anything but extremely pro-migration to the West when most of the users' are likely either 1st or 2nd generation migrants to the West themselves, then you're very naive.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  You can still be pro-migration while disagreeing with the pace of it - despite what the downvotes imply.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]