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My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which a
by jszymborski 4y ago
My hot take is that, at least in my corner of the world (Quebec, Canada), a lot of this is exacerbated by exceptionally restrictive immigration controls which artificially limit movement.
The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
- jlokier 4y agoThat's surprising to me. Canada has a reputation where I am for being generally pro-immigration and friendly to immigrants. Is this not the case, or is it specifically different in Quebec?
- mmastrac 4y agoQuebec is effectively a country within a country. Even our legal systems differ in some major ways (this is why you often see contests that aren't valid in Quebec)!
- mikrl 4y agoYou have to remember that Canada is not a monolith. Quebec is rather nationalistic for historical reasons. In ways both productive and pathological IMO. I won’t get into it as an Anglo and immigrant but I encourage you to visit QC some time and steep yourself in the culture. Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian. A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
- __turbobrew__ 4y agoQuebec enacts many policies to protect their culture — french language requirements, banning religious symbols and clothing in certain places and jobs, etc — which make it harder for immigrants (and Canadians from other provinces) to integrate. I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoshouldn't a small degree of forced uniformity aid in integration ? we've seen in other more liberal communities (Denmark, Sweden) that influx of culturally different immigrants tends to create nuclei of those cultures where they just interact amongst themselves, and never integrate. I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce.
- wahnfrieden 4y agothat might speak more to danish and swedish culture, biases than to the immigrants. you picked notoriously racist societies with strong public neonazi movements instead of an example like toronto
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoI picked those societies because those are some of the ones I've interacted with therefore can have an opinion. And what I saw was not racism, what I saw was Arab immigrants trying to make Danish schools ban pork, or having a complete disregard to the "tidy" Danish way of life (whether you like that way of life or not)
- g8oz 4y ago>>I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce. I would argue that if the children of those immigrants are not fitting in then you have a problem. And that problem usually has to do with marginalization. In heavily immigrant areas do the people see themselves reflected in public insitutions? In teaching staff, bus drivers, police? America and Canada have historically been much better at this part than Europe.
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoAnd how did that end up for America ? A country so fragmented and divided, torn by tensions to the point where recent discussions were mentioning civil war as a possibility, or even as an ongoing thing in a new form. Does immigration offer so much more other than cheap labour ?
- throwawaysleep 4y agoQuebec is extremely nationalistic and bigoted.
- jszymborski 4y agowell, our politics are.
- peteradio 4y agoCan you connect the dots for "garbage not getting picked up/shitty roads" with tech industry and immigration?
- colechristensen 4y agoHaving come from a poor American community into the tech world, I oppose justifying immigration with filling tech jobs. There are a whole lot of people in country already very capable of learning to fill these jobs and very little industry or state encouragement or support to help them. Siphoning away the most ambitious and capable people from around the world also hurts the places they are from. To be clear I do support immigration, just not as an easier to acquire and cheaper source of skilled labor.
- ttyprintk 4y agoHN had a discussion on the program in Appalachia to try to find employable coders among economically dislocated mining engineers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155 Under this story about bootcamps there was also the experiment by Google to run fiber through those towns. I believe the lesson was that only a handful were employable as fully-remote devs.
- bombcar 4y agoThe key would be to cultivate the young. I expect I’d find it moderately hard to learn coal mining at my age and though I don’t believe it would have been impossible in my youth.
- jszymborski 4y agoThere are openings in Quebec for _every_ job. From the service to the tech to the civil sectors, there are vacancies in every sector. I think a major limitation to our immigration programmes is that it is too often limited to people with undergraduate or post-graduate degrees rather than skilled and unskilled workers of any stripe. But of course, I agree that increase in immigration needs to be balanced and met with social and financial support for those who immigrate.
- pyuser583 4y agoHow do Québécois feel about immigration from French speaking parts of the world? Is it preferred?
- timbit42 4y agoYes.