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The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or F

The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or French. Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is. An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles. Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading. ETA: source: Bryan Kaplan's books & articles.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing. And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Additionally a large factor in the number of "foreigners" in Canada seems to be foreign students, who often don't actually stay in Canada after graduating but tend to be affluent and thus drive up costs/prices without contributing to the labor pool.
hnbad 3y ago
The way "foreign migration" is done in most of Europe is to isolate those people from the domestic population, provide them with the bare minimum in social services to keep them alive and prohibit them from working while constantly threatening to deport them at a moment's notice. At least that's how it's done for asylum seekers and refugees. Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself. And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again. Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Exactly this. I'm Canadian but have German family, and the difference in mentality is astounding. Europeans remain entranced by "blood citizenship" and archaic, essentialist, ideas of citizenship based around family descent and ethnicity. E.g. I could qualify for German citizenship/passport on account of ethnic-descent (on both sides of family) but people with the wrong last names, working hard and with a lot to contribute, can have a much more difficult time (though I understand there's been reform here.) I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial. I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is. An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles. Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading. ETA: source: Bryan Kaplan's books & articles.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing. And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
- hnbad 3y ago
  Additionally a large factor in the number of "foreigners" in Canada seems to be foreign students, who often don't actually stay in Canada after graduating but tend to be affluent and thus drive up costs/prices without contributing to the labor pool.

hnbad 3y ago

The way "foreign migration" is done in most of Europe is to isolate those people from the domestic population, provide them with the bare minimum in social services to keep them alive and prohibit them from working while constantly threatening to deport them at a moment's notice. At least that's how it's done for asylum seekers and refugees. Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself. And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again. Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Exactly this. I'm Canadian but have German family, and the difference in mentality is astounding. Europeans remain entranced by "blood citizenship" and archaic, essentialist, ideas of citizenship based around family descent and ethnicity. E.g. I could qualify for German citizenship/passport on account of ethnic-descent (on both sides of family) but people with the wrong last names, working hard and with a lot to contribute, can have a much more difficult time (though I understand there's been reform here.) I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial. I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.