7 ms·

Canada's surging cost of living fuels reverse immigration

41 points by RyeCombinator 3y ago

catgirlinspace 3y ago
>reverse immigration so… emigration?
- dexwiz 3y ago
  Maybe dimmigration? Unimmmigration?
  - phantom784 3y ago
    They're still immigrants. They're moving to the US, not returning to their home country.
- SonicScrub 3y ago
  The term "reverse-immigration" is used by the article to highlight the number of people who emigrate after first immigrating. Which is certainly an interesting / concerning trend worthy of making note of. The choice of this terminology is deliberately chosen to make a distinction about this particular form of emigration
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Emigration means citizens of a country are leaving. In this case, it's immigrants to Canada who are deciding to leave, so reverse immigration is the correct word.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    Immigrant turnover
  - defrost 3y ago
    From the article it's not entirely clear if there's an increased exodus of immigrants ie. people that came to Canada that are now leaving despite intending to stay. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show. There are three (3) stories from immigrants who are leaving; one was a student who came to study, another a person retiring to asia (cheaper) after coming from there to earn in Canada. These are true stories but not the true stories of all of the ~84,000 people leaving Canada this year. The framing of this article (the immigrants are leaving!!) appears to rest on the gut feelings of the author and a handful of exit interviews that may very well not reflect the whole. It's also littered with weasel phrasing: "While the numbers are small now", and points out that most immigrants are staying ( 263,000 in past 12 months ) .. which has contracted the available housing hard, which has led to some immigrants not being able to find affordable housing. There's nothing that states or suggests the bulk of the 82K exits this years were once immigrants .. so "reverse immigration" to describe them all is suspect. There's no data that backs the notion that "turn arounds" (people that come to Canada for a number of years, then leave) have increased dramatically, just the stories that some of the departures are turn abouts (and there'll always be some).
    - soperj 3y ago
      > which has contracted the available housing hard, which has led to some immigrants not being able to find affordable housing. From what I've seen, more housing is available now than was available 12 months ago. Amazing what happens when prices are going down and investors aren't all vying for property.
alephnerd 3y ago
Canada's always been like this. I remember as a kid living in a single bedroom basement apartment with my parents and sibling in Vancouver as a kid, but we used it as a backup in case we wouldn't get a GC in the US. The racism was definetly palpable there as well, and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California. (Eastern) Canadians have a stick up their ass as if their QoL is better than the US, but most of their American experience is usually a rust belt town in Upstate New York or Michigan. Meanwhile, back in BC, almost every family I knew had at least one relative living in Sacramento, Spokane, Portland, Seattle, etc doing construction, municipal jobs, or something. > Justinas Stankus Tbf, his research is about ethnic conflict in Myanmar, so he kind of has to be in SEA Not sure this post is HN related though.
- bpye 3y ago
  > and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California. Even if this was once true - I doubt it is (on average) any more. The recent PISA rankings put Canada above the US in every area - especially so for science and mathematics. The socio-economic status of a student also impacted the quality of education less in Canada than in the US. [0] [0] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ https://www.oecd.org/pisa/
  - TMWNN 3y ago
    Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans. Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average. (Disclaimer: I have not reviewed this year's PISA results. However, I know of no reason why the above analysis would not still apply.)
defrost 3y ago
See graph in article: Canada's emigration rate (exiting the country) was "quite high" at rougly 0.15% of popuation for 15 years 1990-2015. It steadily declined to 0.07% in 2020 ... and <dramatic sting!> has now climbed a bit to 0.09%. It's a trend in a small number and trends are interesting, however ... another interesting and true headline might be: Canadians not leaving Canda forever nearly as fast as they used to!!
- pramsey 3y ago
  Yes, all the data in the story contradicts the frame. Journalistic malpractice.
- YZF 3y ago
  You mean Reuters is making stuff up? That's not possible. They interviewed like one person that says cost of living is high and they're considering moving. I'm not even sure the cost of living is still surging. Gas is cheaper. Real estate is going sideways. At least in my personal experience it's stabilized. More seriously. Canada had brain drain for some time. People leaving to the US e.g. I'm sure that's still happening. I think Trump being elected in the US slowed that somewhat. There's all sorts of reasons why people move from one country to another. Correlation, causation and all of that. The Globe and Mail has an this headline: "BoC Deputy Governor Gravelle says high immigration adding to housing inflation". EDIT: Also immigrants leaving isn't that unusual. Immigration isn't for everyone. You might have family and friends behind. It might be hard to make new connections. Get a job. It's pretty cold here too.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    >"At least in my personal experience it's stabilized" It has stabilized at the level the average Joe could never afford. Having a house was once relatively easy attainable goal. So we fucked it up.
- zaptheimpaler 3y ago
  > The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), Its about immigrants specifically leaving, which is arguably a good indicator of the desirability of living in the country.
_3u10 3y ago
Born and raised in Vancouver, still have a house in BC. Living in Paraguay, life is much better and way more friendly. 100x less stupid. Honestly there’s a bigger homeless problem in Vancouver than Buenos Aires, Rio, or even Asuncion. That said Canada is super beautiful but Argentina has Patagonia which is better than the Rockies at a tenth of the price. Most of North America is highly overrated currently. CDMX is really the only city I’d consider in NA.
- YZF 3y ago
  Doesn't Mexico City have a huge crime problem? What about health care? Poverty?
  - _3u10 3y ago
    It has high crime areas which are generally not where you want to live. Most Latam cities are pretty good about keeping the criminals separate from the people. This is kind of what I meant by 100x less stupid than Vancouver. Brazil and Colombia are the exceptions, though the populace generally supports the idea of law and order so it at least has a hope. Healthcare in Paraguay is much better for day to day stuff than Canada and if you need more go to Argentina / Brazil / Europe.
  - aprilthird2021 3y ago
    I was just in Mexico City a few months back. It's far safer and cleaner than NYC for example while still being just as cosmopolitan.
    - tempestn 3y ago
      Mexico City had a crime rate in 2022 of 46k crimes per 100k inhabitants. In New York City it was 2900.
      - tempestn 3y ago
        Found an interesting recent article on the murder rate too: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/mexico-city-murder-rate-dropped-disappeared-number-rises https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/mexico-city-mu...
transcriptase 3y ago
Canada becomes more of a joke with each passing day. The government has managed to create an economy predominantly dependent on a real estate bubble driven by money laundering and capital flight/money parking from China. Simultaneously suppressing wages by increasing the population by 2% per year via trivial immigration requirements and student visas for Indian nationals that lead to PR status and allows full time work with government subsidies for the employer for not hiring Caucasians. All of this in the name of allegedly compensating for young Canadians not having children to pay into the ponzi that is the CPP etc. Somehow making children less affordable is supposed to fix this. Downvoting this doesn’t make it any less true. Even the mainstream media in the country is starting to realize they won’t get skewered for saying so.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  The housing crisis is becoming global... somehow no country and no largeish city is spared (and sometimes not even smaller cities in smaller and shittier countries). It's interestig how we're building a critical mass of people who are getting their calculations of future retirement income (social security or whatever), see the number they'll get when they retire, see the rent price and instantly become a member of "nothing left to lose" group... basically the most dangerous group for anyone who'll be blamed for any crisis... Regarding canada specifically... I personally found it funny, how they called all the 'freedom truckers' nazis, and then cheered an actual nazi in the parliament... I mean... WWII is not some obscure thing that noone knows anything about, it doesn't take a lot of history knowledge to put two and two together to at last cast some questions about the side the guy was on. On the other hand, canada has some history with nazism and importing nazis after the war, but they managed to keep that pretty quiet.
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    Well, except Japan. And it is not because old people are dying, but because it is easy to build there.
- aprilthird2021 3y ago
  I think a lot of these decisions are bad, but the real problem of declining, aging population is there. Governments that don't have immigration to bolster the working age population end up like Japan, with an economy that shrinks after a boom and never returns. The problem of what to do with a shrinking, aging population, and governments, economies, etc. which are not built for declines in growth is something no one has solved yet. And the problem needs to be addressed somehow. If people don't want to have kids, these kinds of policies will keep coming because the problem isn't going away
ArtemZ 3y ago
Natural outcome of ultra liberal politics I guess. While the U.S remains one of the most desirable immigrantion destinations in the world, largely thanks for it's strong conservative politics.
- aprilthird2021 3y ago
  Saudi also has strong conservative politics. The US has been at the center of the highest growth money-making industry in the world in the last few decades: tech. You can really chalk everything up to that.
- squigz 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on some specific "ultra liberal" policies/legislation that you feel had an effect on this data?
  - ArtemZ 3y ago
    * Increased taxes to pay for increased government spending * Increased immigration led to housing shortages, making new homes unaffordable for local population. Prohibitive construction codes, regulations that make DIY house construction next to impossible for common people. * Low quality education, push for gender and other social studies in lieu of STEM * Drug use normalization * Poor law enforcement which raises safety concerns.
lee101k 3y ago
[dead]
MrGinkgo 3y ago
A little unrelated to the article, but I had a "crash blossoms"-esque double take reading that headline. I was very concerned about what constituted "living fuels"
lbrito 3y ago
Reuters is a fairly sane and neutral news outlet, but it is painfully obvious how the "Canada is shit" narrative is tied to and amplified by certain rising stars (well, one) in federal politics. Its now reaching Gabo-level surrealism. Vancouver is now worse than a favela in Rio. I moved from Brazil to Vancouver. BC has problems as any other place on Earth, but claiming it is a hellhole is just dumb. It is sad that these extreme and tone-deaf points of view are being mainstreamed and normalized.
incomingpain 3y ago
wtf, emmigration is in the 120,000 range while immigration is in the 1,000,000 range. This is literally the opposite of the article title. Immigration to Canada is at world war levels. You might think, 'but we're not at world war' oh but we are... but you're censored from talking about it. Reuters come on. You're better then this, you aren't usually like the rest of these pretend journalists.

41 points by RyeCombinator 3y ago

catgirlinspace 3y ago

>reverse immigration so… emigration?

dexwiz 3y ago
Maybe dimmigration? Unimmmigration?
- phantom784 3y ago
  They're still immigrants. They're moving to the US, not returning to their home country.
SonicScrub 3y ago
The term "reverse-immigration" is used by the article to highlight the number of people who emigrate after first immigrating. Which is certainly an interesting / concerning trend worthy of making note of. The choice of this terminology is deliberately chosen to make a distinction about this particular form of emigration
alephnerd 3y ago
Emigration means citizens of a country are leaving. In this case, it's immigrants to Canada who are deciding to leave, so reverse immigration is the correct word.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Immigrant turnover
- defrost 3y ago
  From the article it's not entirely clear if there's an increased exodus of immigrants ie. people that came to Canada that are now leaving despite intending to stay. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show. There are three (3) stories from immigrants who are leaving; one was a student who came to study, another a person retiring to asia (cheaper) after coming from there to earn in Canada. These are true stories but not the true stories of all of the ~84,000 people leaving Canada this year. The framing of this article (the immigrants are leaving!!) appears to rest on the gut feelings of the author and a handful of exit interviews that may very well not reflect the whole. It's also littered with weasel phrasing: "While the numbers are small now", and points out that most immigrants are staying ( 263,000 in past 12 months ) .. which has contracted the available housing hard, which has led to some immigrants not being able to find affordable housing. There's nothing that states or suggests the bulk of the 82K exits this years were once immigrants .. so "reverse immigration" to describe them all is suspect. There's no data that backs the notion that "turn arounds" (people that come to Canada for a number of years, then leave) have increased dramatically, just the stories that some of the departures are turn abouts (and there'll always be some).
  - soperj 3y ago
    > which has contracted the available housing hard, which has led to some immigrants not being able to find affordable housing. From what I've seen, more housing is available now than was available 12 months ago. Amazing what happens when prices are going down and investors aren't all vying for property.

alephnerd 3y ago

Canada's always been like this. I remember as a kid living in a single bedroom basement apartment with my parents and sibling in Vancouver as a kid, but we used it as a backup in case we wouldn't get a GC in the US. The racism was definetly palpable there as well, and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California. (Eastern) Canadians have a stick up their ass as if their QoL is better than the US, but most of their American experience is usually a rust belt town in Upstate New York or Michigan. Meanwhile, back in BC, almost every family I knew had at least one relative living in Sacramento, Spokane, Portland, Seattle, etc doing construction, municipal jobs, or something. > Justinas Stankus Tbf, his research is about ethnic conflict in Myanmar, so he kind of has to be in SEA Not sure this post is HN related though.

bpye 3y ago
> and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California. Even if this was once true - I doubt it is (on average) any more. The recent PISA rankings put Canada above the US in every area - especially so for science and mathematics. The socio-economic status of a student also impacted the quality of education less in Canada than in the US. [0] [0] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ https://www.oecd.org/pisa/
- TMWNN 3y ago
  Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans. Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average. (Disclaimer: I have not reviewed this year's PISA results. However, I know of no reason why the above analysis would not still apply.)

defrost 3y ago

See graph in article: Canada's emigration rate (exiting the country) was "quite high" at rougly 0.15% of popuation for 15 years 1990-2015. It steadily declined to 0.07% in 2020 ... and <dramatic sting!> has now climbed a bit to 0.09%. It's a trend in a small number and trends are interesting, however ... another interesting and true headline might be: Canadians not leaving Canda forever nearly as fast as they used to!!

pramsey 3y ago
Yes, all the data in the story contradicts the frame. Journalistic malpractice.
YZF 3y ago
You mean Reuters is making stuff up? That's not possible. They interviewed like one person that says cost of living is high and they're considering moving. I'm not even sure the cost of living is still surging. Gas is cheaper. Real estate is going sideways. At least in my personal experience it's stabilized. More seriously. Canada had brain drain for some time. People leaving to the US e.g. I'm sure that's still happening. I think Trump being elected in the US slowed that somewhat. There's all sorts of reasons why people move from one country to another. Correlation, causation and all of that. The Globe and Mail has an this headline: "BoC Deputy Governor Gravelle says high immigration adding to housing inflation". EDIT: Also immigrants leaving isn't that unusual. Immigration isn't for everyone. You might have family and friends behind. It might be hard to make new connections. Get a job. It's pretty cold here too.
- FpUser 3y ago
  >"At least in my personal experience it's stabilized" It has stabilized at the level the average Joe could never afford. Having a house was once relatively easy attainable goal. So we fucked it up.
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
> The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), Its about immigrants specifically leaving, which is arguably a good indicator of the desirability of living in the country.

_3u10 3y ago

Born and raised in Vancouver, still have a house in BC. Living in Paraguay, life is much better and way more friendly. 100x less stupid. Honestly there’s a bigger homeless problem in Vancouver than Buenos Aires, Rio, or even Asuncion. That said Canada is super beautiful but Argentina has Patagonia which is better than the Rockies at a tenth of the price. Most of North America is highly overrated currently. CDMX is really the only city I’d consider in NA.

YZF 3y ago
Doesn't Mexico City have a huge crime problem? What about health care? Poverty?
- _3u10 3y ago
  It has high crime areas which are generally not where you want to live. Most Latam cities are pretty good about keeping the criminals separate from the people. This is kind of what I meant by 100x less stupid than Vancouver. Brazil and Colombia are the exceptions, though the populace generally supports the idea of law and order so it at least has a hope. Healthcare in Paraguay is much better for day to day stuff than Canada and if you need more go to Argentina / Brazil / Europe.
- aprilthird2021 3y ago
  I was just in Mexico City a few months back. It's far safer and cleaner than NYC for example while still being just as cosmopolitan.
  - tempestn 3y ago
    Mexico City had a crime rate in 2022 of 46k crimes per 100k inhabitants. In New York City it was 2900.
    - tempestn 3y ago
      Found an interesting recent article on the murder rate too: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/mexico-city-murder-rate-dropped-disappeared-number-rises https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/mexico-city-mu...

transcriptase 3y ago

Canada becomes more of a joke with each passing day. The government has managed to create an economy predominantly dependent on a real estate bubble driven by money laundering and capital flight/money parking from China. Simultaneously suppressing wages by increasing the population by 2% per year via trivial immigration requirements and student visas for Indian nationals that lead to PR status and allows full time work with government subsidies for the employer for not hiring Caucasians. All of this in the name of allegedly compensating for young Canadians not having children to pay into the ponzi that is the CPP etc. Somehow making children less affordable is supposed to fix this. Downvoting this doesn’t make it any less true. Even the mainstream media in the country is starting to realize they won’t get skewered for saying so.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
The housing crisis is becoming global... somehow no country and no largeish city is spared (and sometimes not even smaller cities in smaller and shittier countries). It's interestig how we're building a critical mass of people who are getting their calculations of future retirement income (social security or whatever), see the number they'll get when they retire, see the rent price and instantly become a member of "nothing left to lose" group... basically the most dangerous group for anyone who'll be blamed for any crisis... Regarding canada specifically... I personally found it funny, how they called all the 'freedom truckers' nazis, and then cheered an actual nazi in the parliament... I mean... WWII is not some obscure thing that noone knows anything about, it doesn't take a lot of history knowledge to put two and two together to at last cast some questions about the side the guy was on. On the other hand, canada has some history with nazism and importing nazis after the war, but they managed to keep that pretty quiet.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Well, except Japan. And it is not because old people are dying, but because it is easy to build there.
aprilthird2021 3y ago
I think a lot of these decisions are bad, but the real problem of declining, aging population is there. Governments that don't have immigration to bolster the working age population end up like Japan, with an economy that shrinks after a boom and never returns. The problem of what to do with a shrinking, aging population, and governments, economies, etc. which are not built for declines in growth is something no one has solved yet. And the problem needs to be addressed somehow. If people don't want to have kids, these kinds of policies will keep coming because the problem isn't going away

ArtemZ 3y ago

Natural outcome of ultra liberal politics I guess. While the U.S remains one of the most desirable immigrantion destinations in the world, largely thanks for it's strong conservative politics.

aprilthird2021 3y ago
Saudi also has strong conservative politics. The US has been at the center of the highest growth money-making industry in the world in the last few decades: tech. You can really chalk everything up to that.
squigz 3y ago
Could you elaborate on some specific "ultra liberal" policies/legislation that you feel had an effect on this data?
- ArtemZ 3y ago
  * Increased taxes to pay for increased government spending * Increased immigration led to housing shortages, making new homes unaffordable for local population. Prohibitive construction codes, regulations that make DIY house construction next to impossible for common people. * Low quality education, push for gender and other social studies in lieu of STEM * Drug use normalization * Poor law enforcement which raises safety concerns.

lee101k 3y ago

[dead]

MrGinkgo 3y ago

A little unrelated to the article, but I had a "crash blossoms"-esque double take reading that headline. I was very concerned about what constituted "living fuels"

lbrito 3y ago

Reuters is a fairly sane and neutral news outlet, but it is painfully obvious how the "Canada is shit" narrative is tied to and amplified by certain rising stars (well, one) in federal politics. Its now reaching Gabo-level surrealism. Vancouver is now worse than a favela in Rio. I moved from Brazil to Vancouver. BC has problems as any other place on Earth, but claiming it is a hellhole is just dumb. It is sad that these extreme and tone-deaf points of view are being mainstreamed and normalized.

incomingpain 3y ago

wtf, emmigration is in the 120,000 range while immigration is in the 1,000,000 range. This is literally the opposite of the article title. Immigration to Canada is at world war levels. You might think, 'but we're not at world war' oh but we are... but you're censored from talking about it. Reuters come on. You're better then this, you aren't usually like the rest of these pretend journalists.