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In Canada, one cannot lump all immigrants together even those from the same part of the world. Canada used to be pretty strict on immigration only allowing hig

In Canada, one cannot lump all immigrants together even those from the same part of the world. Canada used to be pretty strict on immigration only allowing highly skilled individuals from all over the world. But in the last decade this has changed to just importing as many bodies as possible. I won't go into the reasons for this change but it has dramatically altered the character of the country in this time. We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.

FpUser 2y ago
>"We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs." This
jt2190 2y ago
Canada is in a demographic crisis: The birthrate is too low, the population is aging and the country can’t afford to provide people with all of the social benefits AND have no laborers paying in to the benefit system. Importing lots of young labor rebalances the demographics and bolsters funding of benefits, at the expense of a housing crisis and social tensions. The alternative is to deeply cut benefits, which is political suicide for any party that dares to try.
- briHass 2y ago
  How is this largely under-educated, low-skill workforce working menial/minimum wage jobs going to rescue the entitlements system? Canada's Southern neighbor has a similar issue: despite what may be morally correct, it's been a net negative for taxpayers, and the US doesn't have near the number of expensive social programs.
  - estreeper 2y ago
    > it’s been a net negative for taxpayers This analysis[1] from the Cato Institute found the opposite: “immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits”. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...
    - xvector 2y ago
      The House budget committee disagrees: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_cost_of_illegal_immigration_to_taxpayers.pdf https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_cost_of_illegal_i... $150.7B yearly cost even after accounting for the tax revenue they supposedly bring.
      - kccqzy 2y ago
        The article is about illegal immigration while the rest of the thread is about legal immigration. Isn't it clear to everyone that the kind of people the government doesn't want in the country don't bring benefits to the country? And if they cheated on their way into the country, what does it imply about their integrity and their future tendency to cheat on taxes as well?
        unquietwiki 2y ago
        I can make an opposite claim on immigrants: those wealthy enough to clear the bar of entry, have more incentive to cheat on their future taxes to maintain their lifestyle. Though it sounds like the real issue is probably "getting paid under the table", which happens plenty for citizens and "undesirables" alike.
    - jokethrowaway 2y ago
      They're not talking about the low skilled illegal immigrants. If someone can manage to clear the bar to immigrate in the US they're likely to be way more productive than your average american, so it makes sense that they're creating value for society.
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Military conquest/empire building is an alternative... But it's not polite to mention.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Isn't suicide better than choking your offspring to death?
- wvenable 2y ago
  I don't think we have that much of demographic crisis. First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. And secondly, as Boomers, they are a very large generation but will soon be dying off. But more to point, this is nothing new. We have always had immigration to offset low birth rate. I'm more inclined to believe that the recent importing people en masse has benefited a few large employers of low skilled workers, continue to increase the cost of real-estate which has become more than 50% of our GDP, and artificially pumped up the GDP purely through population increases. Canada might have better off if it wasn't mostly unaffected by the 2008 financial crisis; instead we have been kicking that can down the road for almost two decades. Canada probably shouldn't have gotten itself into this mess but it's easy to see how it happened and also why it's so hard to change course.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    >First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. The working age population is the wealth. For example, you can have a country with 90 retired people and 10 working people. The 90 retired people can have $1M or $1B or $1T in their accounts, but it isn't going to matter if they have insufficient products/services to buy. The money just provides a relative ranking of what proportion of product/service is allocated to whom.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Canadian wealth is dominated by real estate, mostly land, which isn't directly a product of labor.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Valuable land is a product of labor, even if only due to being within the boundaries of a secure and orderly society. Armies, judicial systems, etc, plus labor to bring about the goods and services. Plenty of examples of prime land decreasing in price due to the labor around it not being of sufficient quality/quantity. It might even be that a society decreasing in wealth (real wealth, in the form of ability to create desirable goods and services) will try to inflate the value of land to preserve the purchasing power of those towards the top of the socioeconomic order. But that probably won’t work in the long term.
- switchbak 2y ago
  I really don't understand the downvotes on this one. This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy that the Liberals implemented in the last decade. In fact, Canada has been a strong proponent of using immigration to pad its lacklustre birth rate for a very long time, and is (or was) often viewed as a success model of how to achieve that while retaining social harmony. I think that should probably be contrasted with the more aggressive policy of the last few years - that was more so a reaction to COVID related worker shortages.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    > This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy Is it? When and where did Trudeau say this, because European leaders never have as far as I know. I'm pretty sure that actually left wing politicians always explicitly deny that this is the rationale in the loudest possible terms, because the idea that the left want to import high fertility foreigners who will then outbreed and thus replace the natives is sometimes called "Great Replacement", and the media/political establishment all consider it an unspeakably terrible conspiracy theory only believed by Nazis.
    - switchbak 2y ago
      The Liberal immigration policy was created on the basis of consulting done by McKinsey & Company. This group has long been a primary source of policy and ideas for the Liberals. In 2016 this group put out a document that says this: [1] "Besides contributing to output today, immigrants provide a needed demographic boost to the current and future labor force in destination countries. Improving the old-age dependency ratio is of critical importance to countries like Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where most public pensions have a pay-as-you-go structure and worsening dependency ratios threaten to make many plans unsustainable. The presence of both first- and second-generation immigrants can help combat such unfavorable demographic trends, particularly because immigrant groups tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born populations in these countries." Please don't try to graft American politics onto the Canadian political landscape. This is an entirely different context, with quite differing histories and opinions. I honestly can't remember anyone in Canada saying "Great Replacement" in recent memory. Most Canadians are grateful for the quality program that we used to have, and for the issues it's helped us avoid. Please leave such conspiratorial and loaded language to Reddit. 1: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/global%20migrations%20impact%20and%20opportunity/mgi-people-on-the-move-full-report.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >Importing lots of young labor Everything old is new again, in this case slavery. What century is this, the 17th? I thought we graduated from hauling tons of slaves across oceans.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Who else is going to do menial jobs for low pay when the current citizenry have access to higher paying jobs?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      Teenagers and old people. This is no longer possible though. In my area there were hundreds of people (mostly immigrants) lining up at 4am in the hopes of getting a job at a grocery store. > for low pay Why not raise the pay? Why is the solution to devalue labor by massively increasing supply? This is what leads to decades of little to no wage growth.
      - 3vidence 2y ago
        +1 For context for non Canadians, youth unemployment is at a decades high while we continue to increase immigration specifically for low income jobs.
    - remarkEon 2y ago
      Does everyone have memory loss? People in high school had after school jobs. Retirees did something on the side for some extra cash to send to their grand-kids. For whatever reason, after "tech" had its moment in the sun (and on Wall Street) the downward wage pressure went to 11. And that's why everyone is so insistent on more immigrants.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    Apparently everything banal is hyperbole again.
- FpUser 2y ago
  Canada could have imported as many young educated people as it wanted from Eastern European countries, Russia, former USSR members etc. What happens in reality is they can't get enough points due to some truly moronic rules. Yet somehow we mostly have people from other parts of the world whose main specialty is food delivery.
  - greenavocado 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - xperimentgonbad 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - gassiss 2y ago
    canada is very protective of its regulated fields. if you didn't graduate in the US or Canada, it's very hard for an immigrant to become a vet/dentist/doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/etc. So these people end up in a rut where they are either delivering food, or stuck in an entry level job forever
    - FpUser 2y ago
      From my experience those intelligent people who for whatever reasons can not get back to their original occupation still doing rather well in other fields. I am in Canada since the beginning of 90s. have many immigrant friends, most of them are well off.
  - wmoxam 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Oh, so, tell me... What's the difference against between people from Eastern Europe and those "other parts of the world" ? You're implying a big difference, but I can't put my finger on what it might be.
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  Exactly. Immigration is largely a symptom of declining birth rates. If the birth rate is above replacement, guess what, no immigrants needed!
  - 3vidence 2y ago
    If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded??? You would think to combat birthdates you would increase immigration to an appropriate level not 10x it in 5 years. Secondly immigration has a complicated affect on demographics since the people coming are generally 21 or older which is very clearly different than a birth which starts at 0 years old
    - gruez 2y ago
      >If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded??? ...because of immigration? Birth rates have been far below replacement for decades now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_Canada_from_1861_to_2016.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_C...
      - 3vidence 2y ago
        I don't think 10x your immigrant population in 2 years is demographically the same as a natural population growth over 10 years. They result in 2 very different distributions. One having a very large segment of the population in one specific age category. Which also puts a lot of pressure on systems / infrastructure that is relevant to that category.
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    You don't need immigrants either way. The idea that a country must import more immigrants because birthrates are not increasing or are below replacement is just "number go up" economics. It's the same trite and annoying arguments that some Bitcoin boosters make (the ones who don't actually understand the underlying technology, there's a parallel there). Japan, for one example, isn't going to collapse. Or should they import 50M immigrants from across the planet to make sure the numbers in the spreadsheets go up?
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Mass Low skill immigration decreases productivity per capita and reduces wealth.
  - 3vidence 2y ago
    If anyone has wondered this Canada in the past 10 years should be a fantastic case study. It seems almost embarrassingly clear from the data that these 2 factors have a strong correlation / causation.
SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
Minor correction, you have imported a massive underclass to run your fast food restaurants and other such jobs for far cheaper than a Canadian would be willing to do it for.

FpUser 2y ago

>"We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs." This

jt2190 2y ago

Canada is in a demographic crisis: The birthrate is too low, the population is aging and the country can’t afford to provide people with all of the social benefits AND have no laborers paying in to the benefit system. Importing lots of young labor rebalances the demographics and bolsters funding of benefits, at the expense of a housing crisis and social tensions. The alternative is to deeply cut benefits, which is political suicide for any party that dares to try.

briHass 2y ago
How is this largely under-educated, low-skill workforce working menial/minimum wage jobs going to rescue the entitlements system? Canada's Southern neighbor has a similar issue: despite what may be morally correct, it's been a net negative for taxpayers, and the US doesn't have near the number of expensive social programs.
- estreeper 2y ago
  > it’s been a net negative for taxpayers This analysis[1] from the Cato Institute found the opposite: “immigrants pay more in taxes than they consume in benefits”. [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-states https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...
  - xvector 2y ago
    The House budget committee disagrees: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_cost_of_illegal_immigration_to_taxpayers.pdf https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_cost_of_illegal_i... $150.7B yearly cost even after accounting for the tax revenue they supposedly bring.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      The article is about illegal immigration while the rest of the thread is about legal immigration. Isn't it clear to everyone that the kind of people the government doesn't want in the country don't bring benefits to the country? And if they cheated on their way into the country, what does it imply about their integrity and their future tendency to cheat on taxes as well?
      - unquietwiki 2y ago
        I can make an opposite claim on immigrants: those wealthy enough to clear the bar of entry, have more incentive to cheat on their future taxes to maintain their lifestyle. Though it sounds like the real issue is probably "getting paid under the table", which happens plenty for citizens and "undesirables" alike.
  - jokethrowaway 2y ago
    They're not talking about the low skilled illegal immigrants. If someone can manage to clear the bar to immigrate in the US they're likely to be way more productive than your average american, so it makes sense that they're creating value for society.
engineer_22 2y ago
Military conquest/empire building is an alternative... But it's not polite to mention.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Isn't suicide better than choking your offspring to death?
wvenable 2y ago
I don't think we have that much of demographic crisis. First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. And secondly, as Boomers, they are a very large generation but will soon be dying off. But more to point, this is nothing new. We have always had immigration to offset low birth rate. I'm more inclined to believe that the recent importing people en masse has benefited a few large employers of low skilled workers, continue to increase the cost of real-estate which has become more than 50% of our GDP, and artificially pumped up the GDP purely through population increases. Canada might have better off if it wasn't mostly unaffected by the 2008 financial crisis; instead we have been kicking that can down the road for almost two decades. Canada probably shouldn't have gotten itself into this mess but it's easy to see how it happened and also why it's so hard to change course.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  >First of all, the aging population is the one with all the wealth. The working age population is the wealth. For example, you can have a country with 90 retired people and 10 working people. The 90 retired people can have $1M or $1B or $1T in their accounts, but it isn't going to matter if they have insufficient products/services to buy. The money just provides a relative ranking of what proportion of product/service is allocated to whom.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Canadian wealth is dominated by real estate, mostly land, which isn't directly a product of labor.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Valuable land is a product of labor, even if only due to being within the boundaries of a secure and orderly society. Armies, judicial systems, etc, plus labor to bring about the goods and services. Plenty of examples of prime land decreasing in price due to the labor around it not being of sufficient quality/quantity. It might even be that a society decreasing in wealth (real wealth, in the form of ability to create desirable goods and services) will try to inflate the value of land to preserve the purchasing power of those towards the top of the socioeconomic order. But that probably won’t work in the long term.
switchbak 2y ago
I really don't understand the downvotes on this one. This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy that the Liberals implemented in the last decade. In fact, Canada has been a strong proponent of using immigration to pad its lacklustre birth rate for a very long time, and is (or was) often viewed as a success model of how to achieve that while retaining social harmony. I think that should probably be contrasted with the more aggressive policy of the last few years - that was more so a reaction to COVID related worker shortages.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  > This is quite literally the rationale behind the policy Is it? When and where did Trudeau say this, because European leaders never have as far as I know. I'm pretty sure that actually left wing politicians always explicitly deny that this is the rationale in the loudest possible terms, because the idea that the left want to import high fertility foreigners who will then outbreed and thus replace the natives is sometimes called "Great Replacement", and the media/political establishment all consider it an unspeakably terrible conspiracy theory only believed by Nazis.
  - switchbak 2y ago
    The Liberal immigration policy was created on the basis of consulting done by McKinsey & Company. This group has long been a primary source of policy and ideas for the Liberals. In 2016 this group put out a document that says this: [1] "Besides contributing to output today, immigrants provide a needed demographic boost to the current and future labor force in destination countries. Improving the old-age dependency ratio is of critical importance to countries like Germany, Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom, where most public pensions have a pay-as-you-go structure and worsening dependency ratios threaten to make many plans unsustainable. The presence of both first- and second-generation immigrants can help combat such unfavorable demographic trends, particularly because immigrant groups tend to have higher fertility rates than native-born populations in these countries." Please don't try to graft American politics onto the Canadian political landscape. This is an entirely different context, with quite differing histories and opinions. I honestly can't remember anyone in Canada saying "Great Replacement" in recent memory. Most Canadians are grateful for the quality program that we used to have, and for the issues it's helped us avoid. Please leave such conspiratorial and loaded language to Reddit. 1: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%20and%20social%20sector/our%20insights/global%20migrations%20impact%20and%20opportunity/mgi-people-on-the-move-full-report.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/public%...
Dalewyn 2y ago
>Importing lots of young labor Everything old is new again, in this case slavery. What century is this, the 17th? I thought we graduated from hauling tons of slaves across oceans.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Who else is going to do menial jobs for low pay when the current citizenry have access to higher paying jobs?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    Teenagers and old people. This is no longer possible though. In my area there were hundreds of people (mostly immigrants) lining up at 4am in the hopes of getting a job at a grocery store. > for low pay Why not raise the pay? Why is the solution to devalue labor by massively increasing supply? This is what leads to decades of little to no wage growth.
    - 3vidence 2y ago
      +1 For context for non Canadians, youth unemployment is at a decades high while we continue to increase immigration specifically for low income jobs.
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    Does everyone have memory loss? People in high school had after school jobs. Retirees did something on the side for some extra cash to send to their grand-kids. For whatever reason, after "tech" had its moment in the sun (and on Wall Street) the downward wage pressure went to 11. And that's why everyone is so insistent on more immigrants.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  Apparently everything banal is hyperbole again.
FpUser 2y ago
Canada could have imported as many young educated people as it wanted from Eastern European countries, Russia, former USSR members etc. What happens in reality is they can't get enough points due to some truly moronic rules. Yet somehow we mostly have people from other parts of the world whose main specialty is food delivery.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - xperimentgonbad 2y ago
    [flagged]
- gassiss 2y ago
  canada is very protective of its regulated fields. if you didn't graduate in the US or Canada, it's very hard for an immigrant to become a vet/dentist/doctor/lawyer/engineer/accountant/etc. So these people end up in a rut where they are either delivering food, or stuck in an entry level job forever
  - FpUser 2y ago
    From my experience those intelligent people who for whatever reasons can not get back to their original occupation still doing rather well in other fields. I am in Canada since the beginning of 90s. have many immigrant friends, most of them are well off.
- wmoxam 2y ago
  [flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Oh, so, tell me... What's the difference against between people from Eastern Europe and those "other parts of the world" ? You're implying a big difference, but I can't put my finger on what it might be.
roncesvalles 2y ago
Exactly. Immigration is largely a symptom of declining birth rates. If the birth rate is above replacement, guess what, no immigrants needed!
- 3vidence 2y ago
  If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded??? You would think to combat birthdates you would increase immigration to an appropriate level not 10x it in 5 years. Secondly immigration has a complicated affect on demographics since the people coming are generally 21 or older which is very clearly different than a birth which starts at 0 years old
  - gruez 2y ago
    >If that is the case why is Canadas population expanding almost faster than ever recorded??? ...because of immigration? Birth rates have been far below replacement for decades now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_Canada_from_1861_to_2016.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_C...
    - 3vidence 2y ago
      I don't think 10x your immigrant population in 2 years is demographically the same as a natural population growth over 10 years. They result in 2 very different distributions. One having a very large segment of the population in one specific age category. Which also puts a lot of pressure on systems / infrastructure that is relevant to that category.
- remarkEon 2y ago
  You don't need immigrants either way. The idea that a country must import more immigrants because birthrates are not increasing or are below replacement is just "number go up" economics. It's the same trite and annoying arguments that some Bitcoin boosters make (the ones who don't actually understand the underlying technology, there's a parallel there). Japan, for one example, isn't going to collapse. Or should they import 50M immigrants from across the planet to make sure the numbers in the spreadsheets go up?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Mass Low skill immigration decreases productivity per capita and reduces wealth.
- 3vidence 2y ago
  If anyone has wondered this Canada in the past 10 years should be a fantastic case study. It seems almost embarrassingly clear from the data that these 2 factors have a strong correlation / causation.

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago

Minor correction, you have imported a massive underclass to run your fast food restaurants and other such jobs for far cheaper than a Canadian would be willing to do it for.