I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most populations in Europe have created their own states. And the few tribal populations in Northern Europe generally were and certainly are today treated at least as fairly as anything in Canada. So who are they talking about? Would the Basques feel that they would be treated better as First Nations people in Canada than they are today in Spain?
Note that the treatment of immigrants is a completely separate topic in the article, so I don't think they could be referring to, say, the treatment of Syrian refugees with that sentence above.
We do have our own indigenous minority who are treated badly by society - Irish travellers. There's a lot of racism in Irish society towards them, and we could do with looking at how other countries treat minorities, indigenous or not, and recognize for all that we like to harp on about our own poor treatment in history, we are doing exactly the same here towards travellers.
Instead, it's the racism and discrimination against an ethnic minority that we should focus on.
Really? The Sami populations don't have any sovereignty that I know of.
But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed land right in the middle of downtown, it's a big controversy!
I'm not trying to dispossess or trivialize the Sami or the injustices they did suffer, it's just a very different relationship.
[1] https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-sami-side-of-trom...
The English starved them to death. The English forcibly displaced them. The English stole their resources.
The English even forbade them from speaking their language.
So what exactly should the English learn from Canadians today? Even the Irish in Northern Ireland have more freedom and autonomy than the First Nations have in Canada, not less.
Should different Slovak communities in the Czech Republic have their own lands and make their own laws? What if they're living in the same village as Czechs, how will they split the territory there?
There is simply no valid comparison between how populations in Europe live and have developed up to today, and how things sit in Canada with the First Nations.
And note, the Basque country in Spain is already an autonomous region with significant ability to do its own governance. The Basques there have been practicing their own traditions and using their own language since the fascist dictatorship fell. The Catalans of Catalunya (one of the richest regions of Spain, mind you) also speak their own language and are not in any other way culturally suppressed, again, since the fascist dictatorship fell. The reason for their struggle for independence is mostly their perception that they are being dragged down economically by the poorer parts of Spain (i.e. the strictly Spanish-speaking South).
Russian spending on 'internal security' is legendary.
We also have lost much to history. Take a look at the shuffling that happened during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
I also have no idea whatsoever what 1500 year old history has to do with anything. None of the cultures of that time exist today in any meaningful sense. Even the Italians or Greeks of today are not the Romans and Greeks of 300 CE, they are vastly different cultures and speak unintelligibly different languages.
Maybe the Irish, who were genocided by the English up into the 20th century.
I personally very much disagree with the concept that First Nations people in Canada are afforded more rights and are freer to practice their cultural identity than the Scots, Welsh, and Irish in the UK in 2024.
They (we?) do? This is the first I hear of this. Where did you read about this?
If anything they had a much bigger part oppressing the highlanders than the English.
Still comparison to First Nations seems off. Maybe it's about this: Disadvantaged ethnic groups such as Romani or Jews (particularly post-Soviet Jews in recent times) are often denied a connection to the nation state or (what you might call) the shared European cultural heritage. In contrast, I don't think anyone argues that First Nations aren't true Canadians.
What do you mean by no path to citizenship?
Are there historical groups of jews somewhere in the EU without any passport?
Other persons whose ancestors emigrated from the Holy Roman Empire (long before Germany existed as a modern nation state) are considered Germans by blood, so it's not about the time of emigration from Germany. These decisions are arbitrary, and it's puzzling why Ashkenazi Jews are still not treated as having German ancestry.
Brexit should have been a near no-op. But it was a huge pain. They hadn't even planned for it or thought about it.
EU should have a pre-memeber clearing state that countries stay in and then vote every year or n years to be "in" or "out" of the EU. But part of being in the EU should be to maintain non-in versions of all policies so that members can actually negotiate and easily leave without having huge bureaucratic cost.
This would make the EU stronger and better. Currently, there are many terrible undemocratic institutions that are being used to ruin countries.
How was it ever going to be a "near no-op"? Putting everything else aside, Northern Ireland was always going to be huge sticking points. Ireland would make sure it was.
Besides, it was in the EU's self-interest to maximise the pain for the UK, in order to discourage other member states from going the same way - and the EU succeeded. Marine Le Pen no longer talks about "Frexit", instead she proposes reforming the EU from within.
Also, them constantly replacing their negotiatiors didn't help. But at least they're out now.
Why on earth would the EU do that? Why would any organization put in huge effort to ensure that its members could easily and cheaply leave at any time?
So countries should maintain two sets of all regulations — the actual ones and then also parallel hypothetical ones — and this would somehow reduce bureaucratic cost rather than double it?
The execution of Brexit ought to put to rest the notion that “we’ll make our own rules!” somehow would save money or improve anything. Britain has accomplished exactly nothing except recreate local bureaucracies they had already managed to eliminate because of harmonized EU rules.
Do the United States have a system like that?
General consensus since then has been that states can’t leave, but who knows! Things could change.
Clearly the author is ignorant. Canadians are sick of immigration. Young Canadians doubly so. Racism is becoming more acceptable by the day.
In the EU, of course, everyone is against anglophones.
And we have an expanding economy and a ridiculous amount of free space.
So not sure your thesis works.
Also what do you mean with “lot of physical space”… May I remind you that this space is empty because, in both country, we have killed the locals.
I’m afraid you are considering Europe as “a lot of empty space”.
That's not at all what I was saying. I believe the US is wildly successful in integrating immigrants, since it is a nation of immigrants after all. Even the native population, which, despite what you said, was not entirely "killed". The indigenous population today owns a significant portion of land in the US and many tribes benefit significantly from using it or leasing it out (speaking from personal experience, the Agua Caliente and Apache tribes). Whether or not those tribes are "flourishing" is another fascinating story, but they certainly have the resources and potential.
USA has been successful at integrating the first kind, and the second one has just performed a nice illustration of their skills in New Orleans, like they do in my home country every year, and now every month, and one even said yesterday “We will rape all French people.”
Canada has a lot of land... but the majority of it is in the very cold northern part that people don't generally want to live in.
Always has been. Well at least in my experience in online gaming with a small portion of French Canadians.
Source here: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/pr...
> For the first time in a quarter century, a clear majority [58%] of Canadians say there is too much immigration, with this view strengthening considerably for the second consecutive year. This trend is evident across the population but is most significant in the Prairie provinces, while least so in Quebec.
https://www.environicsinstitute.org/projects/project-details...
Similar situation in Australia and US. And most of it misplaced.
One major issue is trying to buy a first home where the blame goes towards immigrants. Instead of towards older generations where the problem really lies. They apply political power across multiple levels of government to affect everything from planning, taxation, inheritance which systemically prevent young people getting into the market.
Likewise upwards mobility and income inequality gets blamed on immigrants instead of the wealthy.
Immigration keeps salaries low which is great for companies bad for young people.
Immigrants of a similar age want the same type of housing. Young people starting out cannot afford their parents home. They compete for the same resources. Older generations are least affected.
b) Immigration isn't keeping salaries low. Companies are. Because they have eliminated unionisation and so workers have no means to demand for higher wages. And with so much remote talent companies always have a backup plan in case there is a supply shortage.
c) As you say they compete for the same resources. Now why can't there be more homes ? Because older people fight increasing density, refuse to support taxes on investment properties and are increasingly refusing to downsize once their children move out. Remember for many their legacy depends on high property prices.
It's crazy to me how many old people who self-identify as conservatives / capitalists have no qualms about using their political pull to get government muscle to kill competition in real estate using the building permitting process. Free markets mean free markets. Charlie Munger was right: it's all about incentives.
Capitalists when it comes to ownership. They've made the investments, so young workers should work hard and accept lower wages to pay them shareholder profits. Company taxes should be low.
Socialists when it comes to healthcare. They are old and fragile, so young workers should pay high taxes on their labour to help the old people needing socialized service.
Feudalists when it comes to estates. They are the rightful owners of the land they inherited, so young workers should go into debt for life to buy it off them so that they can cash out lottery money for selling their real estate. Or even better, cash rent money while keeping the property.
Corporatists... I can go on and on.
Which will be largely paid for and staffed by immigrants.
And yet, many workers do make higher wages. Why do you think that is?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/cruises/2024/11/11/vil...
I've seen that tactic to try to discredit real, valid concerns with immigration, either by lumping it with racism (which definitely exists, but is not the only argument against unfettered immigration), or by pretending something else is the problem (something else may also be a problem, but that doesn't make the problems that people are worried about with high levels of immigration invalid).
In my understanding, the backlash against immigration in Canada is relatively recent, and it's basically caused by the fact that Canada took in a huge number of immigrants, historically speaking, in recent years. This results in:
1. People feeling likes many immigrant communities are creating enclaves instead of adopting the culture of Canada. 2. Many recent immigrants are unskilled, resulting in a larger burden on provincial-based social services.
When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy with rising unemployment where many people see less opportunity, it's not hard to see why citizens are demanding lower rates of immigration.
Every immigrant community creates enclaves. Quebec is an enclave the size of a province.
> Many recent immigrants are unskilled, resulting in a larger burden on provincial-based social services.
I can find NO evidence for this whatsoever, do you have any?
The anger should be aimed at the rich in Canada abusing the system, as well as the paid for politicians enabling the abuse. It shouldn’t be aimed at the newcomers.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, you're in need of a major history lesson, like how the British first basically committed genocide with the expulsion of the Acadia French, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Acadians, and then when they realized that was a collosal fuck up they explicitly put policies in place to not expel the rest of the French in Quebec and deliberately treat them as second class citizens.
The French that founded Quebec where here predated the English that eventually founded the county of Upper / Lower Canada... You might have a misunderstanding of what the term immigrant means.
It is so ignorant of the definition I don't even know how to find common ground.
When you compare Canada, the US or some of the higher immigration countries in Europe to developed countries without immigration you'd wish you'd have price increase problems.
Japan, sometimes hailed as an alternative to immigration is now so poor and old that middle class Westerners travel there like they traveled to a middle income country twenty years ago. If you think Canada is stagnant you haven't been to places where a quarter of the population is aged over 60.
Immigration problems and friction are real but they absolutely pale to the economic disaster that low birth rate aging economies experience. Without significant migration you're looking forward to decades of deflation, politics dominated by people who raise pensions and basically no entrepreneurship. Cultural and housing problems are fixable (just build more housing), dying out is not.
Prices feel like a middle income country, but that is just the Yen sucking. Otherwise it feels very first world.
No it isn't. In purchasing power terms Japan has been, or is about to be overtaken by Poland and Slovakia [1]. This is largely due to demographics and the declining share of the working age population. There is nothing that impoverishes countries more. Gradual decline feels fine for a while, until it doesn't when the bulk of the workforce ages out.
[1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/po...
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/11/12/perceptions-of...
Also, a quick googling suggests both Poland and Japan both have fertility rates around 1.2. Working age of Poland is 65% of the population vs 60% for Japan. So a bit worse.
We've been through this endless times through history. When one ethnic group is exterminated, they are still dead even if strangers move into their land and dwellings. Whether that is done through war, disease or economic strangling of the youth. All has the same result and it is a crime against humanity and a crime against God.
As long as the Japanese are allowed to exist, they can flourish again. Not if they've been replaced by different people. It's the same for all of us in the world.
70%. Thats not "Something else" thats "The majority of the issue"
Immigration is already controlled here so that its roughly just backfill for population growth targets. State governments are supposed to release enough land to meet population growth targets. They have never met these land release targets.
So "Immigration" is already meant to be factored in as one of many factors, but isn't, and that immigration is a tiny % of the overall problem.
To focus on immigration as the entire issue, as happens quite a bit here, is fundamentally racist. And quite obviously so.
I honestly couldn't give 2 shits about enclaves. I live in a region where the australian government has dumped every refugee population since the 70s and uses it as a baseline for targeted welfare studies. This worst part of living here is the halal pepperoni.
No sane person is focusing on it as the "entire" issue, but it's one of the largest drivers, and it's not racist to notice that. To decry it as racist out of hand is precisely the problem.
Its not a "Huge" driver of housing prices, its a rounding error off the back of the fact that the states refuse to meet land release targets. Targets they signed up to. And its completely irrelevant to zoning issues.
Minimizing the actual issue in favor of reacting to race, man there's a term for that.
Unless your claim is that "supply and demand" is somehow irrelevant, the immigration rate is a knob that can be dialed down to reduce the severity of the problem. It's one of the easiest knobs to adjust too.
That's why people are frustrated, and understandably so.
It’s not that strange as one of the political parties basically explicitly protects business interests and oh boy did they profit. It’s political nihilism.
Is the population rising because NL natives are having more kids or because new people coming in?
Maybe it has something to do with the Ministry of Housing and Planning being abolished because the minister believed the "country was finished", or a minister telling a woman who asked how she was supposed to afford a home to "find a rich boyfriend", or all construction being blocked because the country has been violating NOx emission laws for decades, or an insanely high tax specifically on social housing, or...
We can kick them out for sure, but you won’t like the consequences.
Young people are not their base whilst old people who care about house prices are.
So it's in their political self-interest to not do anything about it.
I'm all for the YIMBY and zoning reform push, but a) that's decided on the municipal level, b) change is slow, c) immigration rates can drastically change in very little time, if the feds decide. In Canada feds wanted to have their cake and eat it too: the population grew by over 3% in a year, but infrastructure at the provincial level (e.g. healthcare) didn't budge, and housing isn't building much faster than it was before.
If we understand that the key factor behind housing affordability is inelasticity of supply, then it should be easy to intuit that other things can be inelastic: policy and the law. By contrast, immigration rate might as well be a push of a button. It's not responsible to jack up the rate first and keep it that way just because it's not "the-thing-that-ought-to-change".
There are of course other externalities with high immigration rates (for contrast, US immigration rate is not that high), and the downsides to low immigration are overstated. Older generations won't live forever, but what I generally see is a call for unnecessary wealth transfer from young generation to old. Boomers are the wealthiest demographic already. We don't need to give them more freebies.
Federal government gave billions of incentives to states to build more houses who in turn enacted higher density zoning and overrode the concerns of municipalities. And suddenly we have lots of houses being built.
Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem. Having a continuous system for building lots of houses does.
Canada did this with a housing accelerator fund, for municipalities. Did not amount to much of anything. It's not clear if provinces can override but there's no political will for it. Without reading the numbers for Australia, I expect reform has been modest.
> Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem.
You contradict yourself in the same sentence. The same result can be achieved whether improving elasticity or reducing the immigration rate. "the problem" is the affordability, not the elasticity. That is your just preferred vector.
Even if zoning is improved, you can't defy the laws of physics; housing will still be relatively inelastic, whereas immigration rate can be much higher.
Australia's population growth rate was less than 1% last year, basically on par with US. Canada's was 3%. Incomparable. No amount of zoning reform will be enough to handle that sustainably.
One study found that something like 70% of the cost of owning a home in Sydney comes from zoning and land release issues. That is, a bit of reform in zoning laws and a heap of land being released could see a 1 million dollar home being available for 300k.
That said, so much of australias economy is based on the false premise that housing is a stable long term investment. If you dropped housing on its face you would probably bankrupt the country for a generation. That said, better now than later.
In either case you’re saying “make the number of houses correct for the number of inhabitants” - of course an obvious answer is “build more houses” but that can’t always work - San Francisco can’t remain SF at the density of Singapore. It’d still exist, but it wouldn’t be what it was.
You dont release enough housing to support 2% growth. (You also have zoning restrictions pushing the majority of housing prices)
It doesnt matter where they get the growth from, it could be baby bonuses, immigration, kidnapping migrant workers.
>San Francisco can’t remain SF at the density of Singapore. It’d still exist, but it wouldn’t be what it was.
I couldnt give 2 shits about some appeal to locale identity.
> No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
-Heraclitus
Obviously that's an extreme example, but other cultural differences will affect you as well.
[1] https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/11/03/violence-at-hindu-tem...
- Anonymous Roman Citizen, 412 AD
Also, I live in Germany half of the year, and there most of my neighbors don’t speak any English, and my neighborhood is fine. I don’t see the problem you are describing with your example.
If that’s your “extreme” example, I am curious what your day-to-day ones would be.
Perhaps it’s uncharitable but I am having a hard time seeing how this doesn’t alias to simple racism.
I think most would agree that it is easier to form connections with those who are more similar to oneself. Call it racism or tribalism if you want, but that's reality.
Why? You literally say on your very next sentence that it’s not - that diversity must be destroyed through integration and a melting pot.
Diversity and immigration always has a cost and that’s the destruction of your existing culture in part. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But you can’t overdo it.
And getting pissed at the people that don’t integrate is barking up the wrong tree. They never agreed to that and they should be left alone to live their lives.
We should go after the people that allowed this to happen.
Have some sense of perspective and you'll be less likely to turn into an old bitter man, shaking his fist at clouds.
To me it's pretty obvious not all cultures are good to mix with.
Which isn’t terribly far fetched - apparently some gladiators were basically sports stars, with death.
The answer to bad ideas is not to isolate them. It's to outcompete them. The battlefield of the modern world is the hearts and minds of it's citizens. If our morality is superior and our ideas are successful, we should just keep doing what we do and let them spread, like a virus.
This reads a lot like "everything is a social construct".
A culture is a property that's shared by the population. The absence of such a shared property is not its presence.
New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage that never existed in the first place and will do damage to themselves and everyone around them by trying.
Are you making the analogy because it sounds poetic, or because it actually makes sense? Humans are not plants, and they're not grown or raised to be killed for someone else's benefit.
If you insist on the analogy anyway: livestock are homogeneous just fine. Also you seem to be forgetting that weeds and invasive species are also things that can destroy ecosystems.
> New is good, anything else is death. Anyone pining for a 'good ol days' culture is chasing a mirage
That's what a melting pot is. It creates something new. You seem to be struggling to understand what people are actually arguing for or against.
This sounds like a propaganda position. We hear it in the US too. It's a typical Republican strategy to take an area where they can't formulate a coherent economic or policy agenda, and turn it into a social issue. Instead of stealing our jobs, the immigrants are now stealing our cats.
I think it is ok to just say “we don’t want poor immigrants. We want immigrants with something to offer.”
We actually have the opposite problem, to some degree. Acquiring more skilled talent from abroad has depressed skilled labour compensation here. And acquiring people from abroad with $$ to invest in the property market has led to ridiculously high housing price inflation.
Here's an official government source which says that ~40% of immigrants in 2023 are not in the "middle-income range or above", i.e. they are low-income. [1] The same source says that 75k out of the 450k admitted were refugees.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
In the US most immigration sentiment is around illegal immigrants and fear of crime. In Canada, up until COVID there was basically no ill sentiment towards immigrants because no illegal immigrants and not really much immigrant crime.
COVID flipped the job markets and economy, so people turned their eyes to skilled immigrants. Most Americans are frankly not that skilled as workers, have lower educational attainment than Canadians, it's a more rural, spread out population, etc. Plus the illegal immigration is still a bigger gripe, so they never turned as much on skilled immigrants during the downfall. Canada turned sharply and many who moved there and followed all the rules feel the anger of the population towards them is way higher than they expected (or feel they deserve).
A lot of people claim the immigrants don't want to integrate, but it's largely untrue. These are usually some of the most Westernized out of their peer groups from India already, to even consider immigrating to Canada / US. They also tend to be wealthier to afford the tuition to do so. That makes people happy when the economy is good, but it sucks when jobs are scarce.
Your understanding is outdated
What is "integration" mean to you?
Canada got their share of Chinese immigrants with $$$. That's how real estate in Vancouver ended up being inacessible for younger Canadians.
The real true difference is that the economy and job market flipped, and now there are layoffs, fierce job competition, and inflation. That type of environment makes people generally jealous and angry at others, and so there is a new focus on immigrants (when they probably haven't changed themselves much, I mean why would they?)
It was not the norm that 60% of all immigration was from a single country...
Additionally immigration has objectively increased at a time of large unemployment which used to not be allowed until the current government lifted the restriction on 6% unemployment.
You can have a mixture of opinions but we gotta stick to the facts first
Here's the stats for you:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/12-581-x/2023001/sec2-en...
Asian origin (all of Asia including China and India) has been the dominant origin for immigration to Canada since 2006, and it has only changed from ~40% to ~50% since then.
India alone accounted for 27% of immigrants admitted to Canada on a temporary basis in 2022: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
Now we can stick to the facts? Will you accept the facts or no?
Kind of the whole issue, isn't it?
They came here for better life. Nothing is wrong with that. Country can use it to its advantage or fuck it up.
Most of that’s left of that is place names and weird foods in some areas.
Although that's what they teach us in Canadian schools, in my experience it's the opposite. Ghettos and enclaves aren't really a thing in Canada like they are in the US.
There are some remarkably insular subcultures within the US like Latinos, Hasidic Jews, the Chinese (in some places), Amish and variants, Indians in certain towns like Edison, Black people in certain cities, to a degree that exists nowhere in Canada (and no, Brampton doesn't compare).
Subcultures in general are just not a thing in Canada, it's very much a monoculture.
I know you are making mostly an anecdotal claim, but if you compare Seattle and Vancouver, and more aptly, their suburbs Bellevue and Richmond, I think the American side is more assimilated simply because we don’t have the percentages of Chinese that the Vancouver area has.
We have essentially imported an entire massive underclass to run all our fast food restaurants and other such jobs.
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-s...
$150.7B yearly cost even after accounting for the tax revenue they supposedly bring.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
Also, at 90/10, the working people will surely start to wonder why they are paying rent (or tax) and who is going to stop them if they don’t. Same for invaders looking at obtaining the natural resources in Canada.
I picked an extreme ratio to illustrate the why, but in reality, it’s a far more gradual process, where ideally there is no violence, just various renegotiations of expectations.
> Land value is not a product of labour -- in Canada it's an investment and a way to move/launder money from other countries. Many many properties being build that are not designed to be realistically lived in.
It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
> It is sort of “land value is a product of labor from decades prior that has accumulated to the orderly, productive society today”. But that can gradually change.
I don't see the connection. The land I live on is worth well over a million dollars and increases at an significant rate every year but has no basis in reality other than demand for land outstrips the supply.
It’s only worth whatever it is because that land has access to utilities, sources of food, security due to social cohesion and judicial systems, etc. Some of that stuff takes decades to build.
And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
I am not disputing that supply and demand determine price, I am saying demand curves themselves can shift due to demographic changes.
> Canadian currency at the lowest in years. But most of the wealth of Canadians is not held in cash and not entirely even in Canadian investments.
I assume Canadian real estate is a huge portion of wealth for many Canadians. Maybe not nominal amounts skewed by the richest Canadians with international equities.
Land is valuable investment because the government decided many years ago that it can never decrease in value. It's a cycle: Canadian land value increases due to demand, this causes prices to increase, which increases the demand because it's a good investment. You'd be crazy to invest in business or anything else in Canada other than real estate. It's a sure thing and will give you the highest returns. If you a foreigner moving your money out of your country, even a little bit of loss is acceptable. There's no point in even renting out your property; the gains well exceed any reason to deal with that hassle. This is the reality.
The fact that people have to also live in the these investments is actually the problem! It's Bitcoin that people can sometimes live in. Its use as investment is completely divorced from the income of people living here and that is the problem.
> And if you stop being able to buy the food you want, get clean water, electricity, all that basic societal stuff because it is getting too expensive because there are too few labor sellers, then the land price (in real terms) will reflect that.
That's like saying Bitcoin should be worth nothing because it's useless as currency. I agree. But the reality is that Bitcoin is worth a lot -- just like property in Canada. It already doesn't reflect all that basic societal stuff because it's almost entirely unrelated to it. It should be but it's not.
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.
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.
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%...
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.
> 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.
For context for non Canadians, youth unemployment is at a decades high while we continue to increase immigration specifically for low income jobs.
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.
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.
I'm from Middle East and am now a Canadian after many years, I know first hand it took my own family ample time to adapt to Western values. I'm not going arguing which sets of values is better (though some of them in the West _objectively_ are) but highlighting that it's reductive to deny the differences.
I enjoy going into the (new) local Indian grocery in my town. On the other hand, I found the Russian (as an example) community in Toronto entirely hostile.
Seems like the majority of my son's friends in (small town / rural) high school are South Asian. And you know what? They're kinder better people than half the redneck neighbours I have around here, with their stupid "Stop Woke" signs on their lawns and shitty fake country music and their F150s barreling through stop signs.
What's that? Those are stereotypes? Wow. Shocking. Maybe we shouldn't make generalizations.
I don't share "values" with some amorphous blob of people from "Eastern Europe" just because they happen to have the same colour of skin as me.
Also... India is a commonwealth country and a former British colony, just like Canada... Unlike, I dunno, Bulgaria or Russia or Poland.
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
...because of immigration? Birth rates have been far below replacement for decades now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_Fertility_Rate_of_C...
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.
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?
That's why Japan has been bringing in nurses and caretakers from abroad en masse. Unless you want to make the argument that past a certain point they should just be left to die, but given that often the people that vote the most were elderly, well...
This
Canada's immigration policy is on the whole highly selective, focused on skilled immigrants. The largest category of immigrants is professionals. Immigration laws are enforced and illegal immigration is relatively low. Refugees are admitted, but the government retains control over the numbers, the source countries, which individuals get chosen, etc.
In 2015–2016, Germany admitted close to one million Syrian refugees. Over the same period, Canada took 44,000 of them. There is a never-ending stream of unauthorised arrivals (some genuine refugees, many economic migrants–it can be difficult to distinguish them) crossing the Mediterranean.
The biggest complaint about immigration in Canada is that it is contributing to an overheated property market, locking many younger Canadians out of owning their own home.
But the majority of immigrants to Canada are well-off, educated – so unlikely to get involved in social problems like crime or terrorism, and they tend to integrate well with mainstream society. There are some poorer and disadvantaged immigrant groups who are more likely to experience those problems, but their numbers are smaller. Compare to Europe where the number of poor / poorly educated / socially deprived immigrants is much larger.
So while both Canada and Europe may have some problems with immigration, they are rather different problems.
What does "racism" mean?
Is it even possible to be opposed to immigration from certain cultures or at all without it "being" "racist"?
This seems to be very out of sync with the opinions of the Canadians I know, and the recent public issues with heavy immigration of unskilled males from the Punjab.
Those are two vastly different groups even if one contains the other.
Not Germany, Merkel. Merkel Incentivized and allowed admitting refugees at an unprecedented rate.
Firstly, as much as people spouting the same simplistic tune may wish for, by all means the government is not just a single person.
Secondly, Merkel or anyone else who would have been in that position during that time would have simply needed to deal with the fact that there were millions of Syrians bleeding into Western Europe across dozens of different routes and hence in ways which the legally open borders of Europe were absolutely not equipped to deal with effectively.
The fact countries of entry to the EU did not at all fullfil their legal obligations with regards to asylum processing is.... let me guess: Again Merkel's fault right?
With comments like these, you might win some imaginary "Thanks Obama/ Thanks Merkel" bingo you're playing with yourself, but it's really not contributing to any debate about where we pragmatically go from here into a better future.
I'd love to hear more about the latter rather than the former.
Five million of them.
Be good to see a source for the mechanism behind this.
The student to permanent resident pipeline is an entire booming industry in Canada with a dozen loopholes to exploit. Unless you honestly believe that millions of Indian international students are here to receive a quality education in “hospitality” at a strip mall diploma mill then return home.
He takes a simple observation and generalizes it instead of working backwards to the fact that Canada is just like the US geographically highly isolated with giant oceans on each side whereas Germany and Europe are a landmass directly connected to other continents.
I highly recommend the books "Prisoners of Geography" (1/2) for anyone interested in realizing how geography silently shapes politics.
Was. At present nearly every min wage and gig economy position in the country is 99% early 20s males from India taking advantage of being able to enrol in a diploma mill to qualify for PR. The Feds knew of this shady pipeline for years and did nothing because it juiced GDP numbers that otherwise would have revealed a recession.
Even once reputable colleges/universities couldn’t resist starting part-time no-show “hospitality” programs with 0 work and 100% pass rate to siphon tuition as the table stakes for being able to circumvent other immigration streams.
Australia has had the same problem and in the last few years the Australian government has cracked down heavily on education visas, diploma mills, etc. If Trudeau isn't doing it already, I expect Poilievre will. Which means this may turn out to be more of a passing problem.
Unwinding it will be a bit messy: lots of post-secondary institutions have to figure out how run programs with a lot less funding, and what to do with capital projects that no longer make sense in light of greatly reduced enrollment, etc.
The damage done to the average Canadian's view of immigrants will take some time to fade away. But I suspect it will, with time, especially since our traditional immigration system really does just skim the "good" immigrants -- the ones with money and the skills to succeed.
Trudeau's immigration video from December [1] was one of the most dishonest, condescending productions that I've ever seen, basically amounting to, "Yes, we destroyed our previous internationally respected immigration system and imported five million low skilled laborers over a couple years without adding any housing or infrastructure. Yes, that's hurt a lot of you and made you angry. No, we don't think that's a problem. But because you're so angsty, we'll throttle it back a tiny wittle bit over the next year or two before throwing the floodgates wide open again."
Not a shred of anything even resembling self-awareness or humility throughout.
---
Sentiment against immigration is real in Canada. You're comparing refugee numbers when in reality Canada's population grew faster than most of the G7 in 2023 [1]
[1] - https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-p...
The only reason I see why it is that way is when other Canadians restrict the supply of real estate (NIMBY) to inflate their own property value. Same for most other democratic real estate markets in the world in the past years, not just Canada, regardless of immigration levels.
Vancouver (the city) is a town where a 2 bedroom condo built in the last 20 years is likely going to run ~$1m, and where some 1 bedroom places go for that. The suburbs are a smidge better but not by much. A house, albeit probably a comically large and stupid one on the outskirts near nothing of flavor could be $1.5m-$2m
If you had a big house in Vancouver, if you are a developer, if you are a certain type of business owner, you were riding high. If you're anyone else, your resume is now one among a thousand for almost any low-med skilled position, and the most viable cities were already! sitting at a ~1% vacancy, which is a real life pressing problem. Immigration numbers are a part of this, but not remotely close to the whole picture.
In some cases the biggest development companies are also foreign and have been extremely present in shaping things https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/expo-86-chin...
For better and worse.
Sounds pretty racist to me. Maybe you can be clearer on what you mean by non-racist remigration? The far-right groups, which are, at least in my country (Germany), the only once using the term to my knowledge, clearly mean it in a racist way.
Not sure how "No no" is, if it is a language barrier or if you meant to write "No one". But the parent comment to mine brought it up.
> People want temporary foreign workers--who immigrated here in unprecedented numbers in recent years--to leave the country, not anyone who has darker skin.
I'm not very familiar with Canadian immigration. But if they are temporary foreign workers, they by definition shouldn't have a citizenship and instead just a (temporary) work visa. Also, I wouldn't call that immigration, hence it also isn't remigration. The challenge should just be, to no longer extend the visas and not fuck up the economy, right?
I think I understand the disconnect. In Canada, anyone who is living here but is not a citizen is usually considered an immigrant (unless they are a refugee). Once they have their citizenship, they're just Canadian. We don't really make the migrant distinction, at least in my experience.
So when I say that we need to reduce the number of immigrants living in Canada in 2025, I only mean we need to reduce the number of temporary foreign workers. Part of the problem is that many people who came on temporary work visas don't plan to leave, they intend to exploit loopholes in the system to turn what was a temporary visa into permanent residency. So yes, in theory we just need to not extend the visas. In practice things will be messy.
I don't think the native people of Hawai'i or the Maori in New Zealand wanting Americans (for the former) and Anglos (for the latter) to leave is "racist."
Similarly, I don't see how Germans wanting non-Germans to leave is racist.
To me, "racist" would imply the belief one is superior to the other, and that's clearly orthogonal to the remigration question.
> Similarly, I don't see how Germans wanting non-Germans to leave is racist.
Wanting non-Germans to leave when they are not refugees and do not participate in society is not the problem. The problem is the definition of non-German.
It would be inhuman to not give someone either citizenship or a permanent permit residency if they worked for a long time in a country. Do people really expect guest workers to come (alone?) into a foreign country, work the shittiest jobs for 15 years and then return to their home country to start a family with 35+ years?
Also, it would not work. Germany still attracts foreign workers in some fields (e.g. nurses). If you tell them, they get to work for 15 years and then have to return, no one would come. If the indigenous people of Germania advocating for no labor migration are ok with dying in their own excrement, because there are no nurses, I guess that would be one way to solve the problem.
At least in America, “less immigration” won out over “more immigration” by clear polling margins every year since 1965, except for a few years in the 2010s. Democratic processes gave them more.
I’ve seen similar results in the UK. Parties mentioning immigration restriction consistently do well and then end up doing nothing or increasing it.
Obviously colonization is only one kind of mass human migration and there are important differences between it and the migration now ongoing, but I don't think "the choice of the people already there" is really a factor in either. One could also argue that in most cases, a determined effort to repel colonizers would have prevented colonization. There was no such societal consensus, so it happened.
> Also, it would not work. Germany still attracts foreign workers in some fields (e.g. nurses). If you tell them, they get to work for 15 years and then have to return, no one would come. If the indigenous people of Germania advocating for no labor migration are ok with dying in their own excrement, because there are no nurses, I guess that would be one way to solve the problem.
Why wouldn't more young Germans just go into nursing? This seems like a rather exaggerated doomsday scenario. There would be shortages, wages would have to rise, and more Gerrmans would choose nursing over what they choose now.
Further, since birth rates are dropping everywhere, aren't you just buying yourself a few years? Eventually everywhere the immigrants are coming from will have the same problem you describe - and their home countries will be in horrific shape because you've sucked away all their talent. What happens then? This is a shortsighted policy no matter how you look at it.
You are probably referring to the Gallup poll [1]. To me, it seems, they don't make a distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Some questions even dig into the illegal part. I'd say illegal immigration is a different question, and also somewhat unique to the US. Here in Germany, illegal immigration would be a no-go. If you look at polls about legal immigration in the US it is a totally different result where 46% say keep the level and 30% want to increase it. [2]
> It seems like even if you vote for the anti immigration parties you get just as much immigration.
I did not find anything supporting your argument on an international level. Although for the US you are probably right considering the recent H1B drama. On the contrary, here is an international comparison showing that in many developed countries, people think migration strengthens their country vs. being a burden [3].
> wages would have to rise, and more Gerrmans would choose nursing over what they choose now.
I think it's not an either/or. It's a big problem with no silver bullet. We'll have to do multiple things.
> Further, since birth rates are dropping everywhere, aren't you just buying yourself a few years?
No. Look at the age pyramid of Germany. We have to overcome the baby-boomer generation.
> and their home countries will be in horrific shape because you've sucked away all their talent. What happens then?
In the past, Germany had deals with the respective Governments called "Anwerbeabkommen." The other state often had a high rate of unemployment. Also, they haven't been skilled workers, mostly. But yes, I think now it is different. And I heard, they are already pissed at us today.
But it's also a totally different argument. And the Nazis on German streets definitely don't care about effects in the home countries. They just want ethnic homogeneity without the consequences.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/12/19/americans... [3] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/14/around-the-wor...
Everyone has this problem. Birth _rates_ are declining everywhere. Different countries are just in different parts of the decline. Even if this is your reason for importing immigrants and you think it’s worth any negatives, you are simply helping the boomers and doing nothing to help later generations. In addition, you are making the situation dramatically worse for migrant origin countries as their young people leave to be workers somewhere else.
I do think it’s also worth asking, if you keep this policy up, what you mean by “Germany.” If it’s an economic zone defined by arbitrary borders, all well and good, but if you think anything more of it than that, then obviously importing immigrants to create a square or non-inverted population pyramid means that at some point in the next century, German culture, norms, morals, and ethnicity will be a tiny minority in Germany the economic zone. If you’re okay with that tradeoff then alls well, but it seems worth acknowledging. I did some rough calculations with Canadian demographics for example, and in 80 years Canada will be totally unrecognizable as it will have had near-total population turnover via migration. Unless birth rates suddenly skyrocket instead of declining, or immigration comes to a screeching halt.
The future is never really predictable, but it’s looking like the future of a lot of Western countries is that they’ll end up basically satellites of countries like India, China, or Turkey. (Of course they’re facing their own declines, particularly China, but there’s a lot of quantity involved.) It’s also unclear to me that voting blocs of young voters will continue to fund entitlements. It will be pretty interesting to live through. I think the closest historical parallel is the total collapse in the Roman population during the early empire.
I did not disagree. But I also think this is a whole other argument.
> German culture, norms, morals, and ethnicity will be a tiny minority in Germany the economic zone.
Ethnicity I really don't care about. Why do you? I'm also fine and actually glad about people bringing along their culture as long as it doesn't get in the way of life of other people and most importantly respects everyone's human rights. The other ones are a question of integration. There is certainly a lot of room for improvement, but making it sound like they come here and will replace German culture is a big stretch. If anything is killing German culture, it is increasing cost of living and it being somewhat outdated, e.g. a lot of meat in cuisine, outdated values from Christianity and alcohol consumption. If any culture is replacing ours, it is US/consumerism.
Is it racism if all Canadians en masse, just up and moved to, e.g., El Salvador and totally swamped their culture and wrecked their identify and then started abusing them in their own homes?
Why is it always only the trigger word “racism” when people complain about abuses, but it’s not “racism” when the abusers abuse the victims, the local indigenous population that is being assaulted and abused?
If you are in Canada and you have a problem with immigration, uhhh.. sorry, but you might want to figure out how to accept it.
"According to the 2021 Canadian census, immigrants in Canada number 8.3 million persons and make up approximately 23 percent of Canada's total population. This represents the eighth-largest immigrant population in the world, while the proportion represents one of the highest ratios for industrialized Western countries" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada
FYI, an extremely well-funded lobby group wants to bump Canada's population to 100 million by the year 2100: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative
Not just in the US. Canada has its own shameful history of that sort of thing during WW2.
I binged watched a bunch of videos on Europe's various countries' backlash to immigration. An example was a Sweden reversal of attitude on immigration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmBOqfxPc90
Maybe the statistics in that video was cherry-picked and distorting reality. I haven't been to Sweden in 20 years to know the facts on the ground. Either way, the comments on that video are interesting.
I remember thinking 8 years ago that Trump's rhetoric of "build a wall" was insane. But now seeing the negative attitudes in every country that accepted a mass influx of immigration, it turns out he brilliantly tapped into a frustration that no other high-profile politician running for President was brave enough to say bluntly. It helped him win the election.
Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the 1920s-1940s again, if it learns anything at all that is.
Every 3rd generation, the cycle starts over. It's the circle of strife. The last generation that saw war on an industrial scale has almost completely died out.
What % of the Reddit userbase is non-legitimate, what is the source of the illegitimate users, and what is the source of your knowledge on this matter?
The platform is virtually designed to be manipulated now, awards being an egregious example. Here’s an article about one such astroturfing campaign from folks who do not share my political tendencies: https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...
To be clear: I am not surprised when bias exists in hallucinations, it's kind of a defining characteristic.
Unsatisfied with the natural fantasy world we live in, it seems we are now amplifying it on our own...and imagine how much Reddit/etc content is produced by the FBI, CIA, etc.
Westerners deserve all the pain and suffering we get, hopefully it gets even worse out there.
If this wasn't bad enough, Canada has the 1st world's most regressive housing system. This double whammy has made it impossible for Canada's millennials to buy houses, while boomers and gen-Xers get free asset appreciation and cheap labor. It's geriatric wealth transfer at the expense of this generation of Canadians.
Canada should join the EU, because both entities have spent decades taking bureaucracy-led self-destructive actions in the name of faux diversity & expert-led consensus.
I used the phrases 'low-skill-low-virtue underclass', 'slice' &'subgroup' for reasons of being precise, not as dog-whistles.
'Subgroup and slice' because Canada definitely imports some elite human capital from India. Those numbers haven't changed over the last decade. It's the 2nd type of immigration that's exploded and is worth talking about.
As for your implication, I didn't call them Sikh because they aren't all or even majority Sikh. For the ones that are Sikh, their religion has very little to do with being low-skill or low-virtue. They're low skill as a matter of fact. A person doesn't chose to move to a bogus diploma-mill without basic competence in English, if they had meaningful skills. Low virtue because it involves actively abusing Canada's immigration system and closes your door to most respectful careers. It isn't endemic to the religion or the people. It is endemic to post-1980s Punjab. Now yes, being Sikh does make them more susceptible to being drawn into gangs once they're in Canada. But, there are enough non-Sikh gangs for the rest of them as well.
If your sieve preserves pebbles, then you'll get pebbles. Canada created a system that actively imports 'low-optimism, low-skill & young Indians; with no opportunities back home; low attachment to the homeland, and a propensity for using shady methods for immigration'. Smart Sikhs & Indians alike are staying back home or working in the US, where wages and opportunities are plentiful. There is ofc the aforementioned steady stream of high-skill Indians moving to Canada, but their numbers have been outstripped over the last decade.
If Canada had focused on expanding their high-skill pool while stamping some unsavory backdoor loopholes, then they could've had an excellent decade of productive immigration. Instead, they laid a red-carpet by the backdoor, added a 8 lane highway and now it's getting overwhelmed by unsavory backdoor users.
_______
I acknowledge that low-virtue might not be the best way to phrase it. It's just that this group is desperate for survival. They have no time or concern for integration, Canadian culture or the west's conception of civic sense. While it manifests as low-virtue optics, it is primarily about individuals who refuse to give up extractive 3rd-world-surivivalist zero-sum mentalities.
I'm an Indian who has lived in Canada for a decade now, and I haven't seen or heard much about Indian immigration specifically for joining gangs or anything like that.
If anything there's more evidence that Canada's immigration crisis is a result of ridiculous barriers for high skilled workers if they don't have a degree from a North American university. Countless tales of medical professionals having to redo certifications because Canada doesn't accept their pre-existing education.
Canada tries to hide it in official statistics, but it still peeks through. Despite being a model minority in every other nation, ethnic-Indians have the 2nd highest crime rate by race in Canada[2]. Gang violence is primarily intra-race, and the over-representation of ethnic-Indian in homicide victims points its prevalence [3].
Canada's Indo-Canadian crime are limited to ethnic-neighborhoods and townships. Irishmen & italians on the west-coast would have been blissfully unaware of their respective mafias on the east coast. Similarly, unless you live in these neighborhoods, you won't notice it one bit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Canadian_organized_crime
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351002...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351002...
Even if we go with your premise (which in itself makes a whole bunch of assumptions), South Asian homicide victim rate per 100,000 people is comparable to the total rate (and for some years significantly lower):
2019: 1.77 vs 1.84 total
2020: 1.21 vs 2.01 total
2021: 1.69 vs 2.09 total
2022: 2.35 vs 2.27 total
2023: 1.38 vs 1.94 total
So even if your argument was valid (in inference, which I'm absolutely not convinced about), the data doesn't even back it, so it is at the very least unsound.
Did you confuse Indians with Southeast Asian by any chance? That group has a little higher rate of homicide victimhood, though only marginal. SE Asian people include Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Philippine etc nationals, not Indian/Pakistani/Sri Lankan.
Our GDP per capita has gone down every quarter for what, at least 2 years?
Medical care, cost of living, everything is the worst I've experienced in my lifetime. When I was in university our dollar and average income were both higher than the US', now our dollar is at 70 cents USD and our average income is 40% lower...
https://archive.is/UdixF/ec46ebf7fe812cd5e9432f45f68bd142e6c...
BC's GDP per capita is lower than Idahos. Ontario and Quebec's are lower than West Virginia's.
https://brilliantmaps.com/us-vs-canada-gdp-per-capita/
This would be unthinkable not too long ago.
i think canada have the potential to receive far more immigrant (and i think it should, to realize its full potentiel)
but little is being done to help with their integration, two thins should be done
1. build more home
2. support startups and small businesses“I really like coming back to [jmb99’s hometown], it’s all white people. Nice change from Toronto.”
Definitely a common sentiment.
Little did I know that you now have to register online to book your visit. You used to just go and pay cash at the entrance and that's it. This time you had to have an account and prove identity by logging in through your bank account for example, before they'd even let you purchase said ticket.
We didn't really think much of it until later on but then it struck us: All, and I mean, literally all of the people we saw looked "Indian" (some may have been Pakistani etc. but you get what I'm trying to say). We were actually taken by surprise at one place, when we saw a bunch of (non-Indian) Asians in one of the parks. And once we saw a white couple. The Algonquin was completely booked and overflowing. Like you wouldn't even be able to just park and hike illegally.
All of the Parks Canada staff was White or (non-Indian) Asian.
Many organizations simply refuse to give up the "convenience" of having people booked in like that. Also the numbers have continued to be hard for these places to manage.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is.
I live in Vancouver and I'm apalled to hear some of the things my Chinese friends sometimes say about Sikhs in Surrey.
> Europeans could learn from Canada how to allow immigration in a fashion that the population embraces rather than tolerates, though a housing crunch has frayed that consensus of late.
Far from sounding ignorant, the author sounds well-informed.
In the real world, yes there are places teeming with immigrants and international students, but you drive a block and turn a corner, and "it's Canada again". You lose that nuance in the online world where all you see is 10 seconds of a 120 degree window into some parking lot somewhere where immigrants happened to have gathered.
If you watch a video of the Embarcadero in SF on a Sunday, you're gonna think no one actually lives in SF, there's only tourists.
However i don't think its because people hate immigrants. I think its because conservatives managed to link it to the housing crisis, which is something canadians care a lot about, and neither liberals or ndp have had an effective come back to that.
The comment you're responding to gives credit to the author for acknowledging recent anti-immigration sentiment in Canada.
Failing to do so has screwed over so many people due to housing costs that went up due to mass migration. This was all predicted though if that makes anyone feel better.
For whatever reason this step has been deleted from the usual policy matrix, and as a result we've been running a great experiment over the last 20+ years in Canada, Europe, and the US.
Canada / India tensions is definitely a pretty core driver of the immigration sentiment in Canada.
Unfortunately in many ways Indian TFW have been linked to a large number of national crime stories in the past ~5 years that have caused a lot of anger in Canada.
* State sponsored assassination
* Gang bombing / shootings related to showing of Indian movies
* International student slaying entire family at their home
* Stolen car driving wrong way down highway killing entire family
* Country wide car theft ring
* Trafficking of narcotics across CAN-USA border
* Mass immigration / employment fraud
* Violent clashes outside of Mosques
These were literally off the top of my head and every story is specifically linked to Indian TFWs. Having grown up in Canada these types of stories were not common growing up and definitely weren't so specifically concentrated.
I always find it slightly bizarre. I have tried to explain that culture and economy are interlinked. India's inequality and superstitious beliefs will keep the population poor.
These arguments are... unreliable to say the least. Back when east asia was poor, people made similar "culture and economy are interlinked" claims. Specifically, that confucianism was holding them back and keeping them poor. After the east asian miracle happened, people did a 180, and confucianism was a good thing led to their rapid growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Asian_Tigers#Cultural_bas...
The only place where immigration worked I can think of was the USA, in the old times.
The recipe for successful immigration is very simple: no benefits, import only people with some money and with skilled jobs qualifications, hard stance against illegal immigration.
Anything else is a recipe for disaster.
Canadians are suffering due to decades on decades of poor housing policy and a continued reluctance to seriously engage in the problem. Suddenly immigrants are to blame.
Never mind the fact that long ago, before this government even touched immigration numbers, or were even elected, Toronto and Vancouver were already experiencing housing crises of high prices and severe shortage.
How did they even manage to end up in a housing crisis?
1. Canadian household size is decreasing as more people are staying single, and people are living longer and becoming widowed. So even if population was completely flat Canada would need more homes over time.
2. Of course Canada has always had immigration and the population has thus always been increasing regardless of the birth rate. This is not a remarkable issue and easily accommodated by building more housing, but the severe systemic barriers to creating housing has made it more scarce and expensive than it should be. This was already the case in the major cities all the way back to the mid 2010s and the last government. The dominant problem here is bad housing policy dating back to the 1990s, not a sudden increase in immigration numbers in the last two years.
Leaving the social issues aside, this was very poorly planned and average Canadians, especially young ones are feeling the pressure as a direct result of these policies.
Of course there are other factors but to argue that this is "sudden" and misplaced is not genuine.
Every Canadian I know who emigrated there is sick of immigration.
And no. That's not a joke (i.e. they want do say that) but a bit of irony.
Presumably a bunch of Canadians would leave Canada in favor of higher US salaries, or cheaper housing. The idea that Toronto real estate pricing is so geographically close to Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh is interesting.
Then again, presumably a bunch of people looking for affordable healthcare would be moving up to Canada.
Or perhaps not all that many people would go anywhere permanently and they would just have an easier time going on vacation in either direction.
Not sure what that would do with Canadian economy. IMO it would be even more desirable target for emigration than the UK when it was in the EU. I know I would certainly consider it, being a software engineer.
Domestic trained talent tends to leave for the US. Because under NAFTA it's trivial to do so.
Manual labour, yeah, that's another story. NAFTA doesn't grant free movement of unskilled labour at all.
Now there's a surplus of talent in the US, so no need.
Source: Canadian working in FAANG in Canada
>those non-Canadians who cannot (and often will never get) a US visa
(I've been in that boat myself, and every single person I worked with in the office in Canada is in US today.)
As a Canadian, the #1 reason I wouldn't want to join the EU is that the Schengen Agreement almost seems purpose designed to force destructive mass migration, diluting cause and effect just so much that no one in particular can be accountable and put a stop to it.
Meanwhile, in Europe, self-inflicted wounds from austerity, corruption, and years of ineffective policies continue to mount – and as usual, immigrants are the scapegoats. When the euro was introduced, the conversation was about harmonizing taxes, social welfare, pensions, and wages. Now, the EU celebrates forcing iPhones to adopt USB-C, as if that matters – and they pat themselves on the back for it.
Big corporations avoiding taxes in Ireland? Silence. German companies suppressing wages by threatening to relocate to Poland? Why not raise wages in Poland and create a fairer landscape?
These days, the EU feels more like an extension of NATO than a representative body. Its survival so far seems like a miracle, but I wouldn’t place bets on its future. The normalization of parties like AfD, pushing to exit the EU, adds to the uncertainty.
It's not really factually correct though.
Canada has a housing price inflation problem, at a level I don't think most Americans can really grasp. It is definitely connected with high legal immigration, but not exclusively, as the exponential growth curve in prices began a long time ago (like 20 years ago) and is definitely connected with fiscal policy choices and legal aspects of how the property market is managed.
Canada's housing is completely disconnected from reality and has a wide range of reasons, but right now we have a housing crisis, not just a price crisis, because of unchecked, outrageous migration through a thousand different programs and venues. Hospitals are clogged. A substantial percentage of housing transactions over the past couple of years -- fuelling the massive spiral upwards -- was predicated on hosting a number of international students in the basement.
Highways are clogging. Everything is at crisis levels. Canada has 5 million visa holders in country who are expected to leave over this calendar year. The vast majority have no plans on leaving.
There are legitimate problems with the housing market, but the moment someone makes the outrageous claim that migration is just "rhetoric", they're either grotesquely misinformed, or they're outright lying.
Canada has a massive program of legal immigration, and if you'll note above I did say it plays a part in housing price inflation here, which is bonkers. In particular our legal immigration program targets almost exclusively wealthier / skilled people from abroad, too, whereas the US system is... more complicated. People come here with money to spend. On houses.
But do go go back and look at the housing price inflation since the last crash, end of 90s. Through multiple federal gov'ts, with multiple immigration rate eras, multiple economics situations. It's basically following an exponential curve.
There are deep systemic issues here beyond just "we let too many people in"
But if we must talk about illegals, yes Canada has an enormous number of people who technically aren't allowed to be in country. They came here legally -- given that this government is so set on not being racist that they removed virtually all checks and restrictions -- and just...didn't leave, for instance it's incredibly common for legal temporary residents to bring their parents here to "visit", where visit means live here. And anyone thinking the five million with expiring visas are going to leave is deluded.
As to housing, it basically hit peak insanity in 2016 on its natural curve and stagnated through to 2020 (literally - 2020 was slightly below 2016, inflation adjusted). So this government juiced every immigration channel to the max, leading to a massive inflation in housing. Yes, it was immigration that caused that, as something where demand closely matches supply is going to be massively out of balance when suddenly demand vastly exceeds supply over a short period of time.
One of the parent posts lamented people "blaming immigrants". I don't blame immigrants. I do blame immigration, however, and a government that turned a blind eye to the catastrophic effects, buying as much time as they can by just telling everyone that it's racist to dare question mass migration or its effects. All of Africa, South Asia and the Middle East can't just move to Western countries. That isn't rational or sustainable.
"targets almost exclusively wealthier / skilled people"
Have you not updated your priors since 2003? Wealthier/skilled people make up a very small minority of Canada's new residents. An absolutely tiny proportion. Which is a big reason Canada has had multiple years of GDP/capita contraction. We have millions of doordash drivers and Tim Hortons workers imported from abroad.
This isn't really the case, and especially not so in the Trump era.
If anything I'd say it's the reverse - i.e. voters and even more so politicians specifically talk about "illegal immigration" with an emphasis on "illegal", but once you start digging into it, it becomes clear that they really have a problem with immigration in general.
I mean, the fact that his name is spoken about in public as if this is a serious leader capable of managing a nation's affairs is evidence enough of, yes, broken US.
Situation in Canada isn't awesome. But if there's anything that would bring Canadians together it's listening to blowhard Americans pretend some level of superiority while they elect a game show host and felon to the highest office in their land.
Someone living alone in a cabin is (economically) poor. Someone in a small town may have customers, but not many, and it's going to be hard to expand. What you need is more people - more people buying, more people to work for you.
Nobody is willing to go “long” on housing when the government can go “short” on supply at any time.
So you have to normalize that somehow, and since the government controls immigration levels, it should subsidize housing construction to match, somehow.
In what sense is the government controlling immigration levels? If they could, it would be much different.
> Nobody is willing to go “long” on housing when the government can go “short” on supply at any time.
How does the government go short on supply?
In my experience, local policy and law changes much faster than federal, especially with GOP opposing everything on the federal level. The GOP shot down the immigration deal they negotiated last summer. Locally is where I see solutions happen (and then state GOP parties, where they have power, will sometimes undermine that).
> Know what changes quickly because it's done at the very top level? Immigration rate.
How is immigration rate "done" at the federal level? With federal inaction, it's mostly an organic outcome of economics and politics in other countries.
But also, for all practical purposes, the migration rate to all rich Western countries is limited only by their respective laws and regulations governing immigration. For all of them, there are more people who want to get in than the quota allows (whether explicit or implicit via point systems etc). Any country that would fully open its borders would see millions coming in from Asia and Africa. People generally want to move where the life is better when they can.
If those laws and regulations were that powerful, the US and Europe wouldn't have so many illegal migration problems.
> People generally want to move where the life is better when they can.
I wouldn't say 'generally'. The vast majority of people want to stay where they are.
Assuming policy and law at higher levels are more responsive, if there is a broader problem due to common and inflexible municipal policy, this can be resolved by changing the policy at the higher level to change the scope of municipal options and/or the applicable process so as to either steer it in the desired direction or make it more responsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
This is overstated. The alarm was sounded on this 2 decades ago for several east Asian countries, but they're not on fire. They're fine. Old people die.
If the fertility rate mattered that much, they'd have scrambled to make any number of policy changes including better work-life balance (see: Japan, SK, China), or plain ol' immigration, but they don't because it simply does not matter. All the efforts have been completely half-assed (like tax benefits, cash).
Japan enacted new immigration policies last year to allow more migrants as well as improved parental leave.
South Korea has been in political turmoil for last year but lots of work is being done on immigration.
A wad of cash isn't going to help you of bed. Yeah they are going to die, but if you're not careful it's going to be a lot quicker and a lot more painful than you had hoped.
Wired: greenland should pacman defence[1] the USA
I miss the wired/tired/expired lists greatly. Wired from 2000-2010 was a high-quality publication.
Of course it will never happen for a multitude of reasons
And then if you and ~30k other citizens all agree to sign for a specific representative then they're in the house but you can't vote for a different guy in the normal election.
You'd generally have to have the urban areas be one state, and everything else another. But those areas still have large numbers of people aligned with the other party, so those people will be even more disenfranchised.
And if a county "flips" parties in one election, do you then move it between state lines?
Just seems really unworkable.
Expired: Wired subscription
Cyprus is geographically located in Asia but has been successfully been admitted to the EU after satisfying other (non-geographical) conditions for EU membership.
Armenia and Georgia have also been determined by the EU to be eligible for membership despite being entirely located in Asia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia%E2%80%93European_Union...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Georgia_to_the_Eu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco%E2%80%93European_Union...
Canada is a longstanding liberal democracy with a distant and purely symbolic constitutional monarchy. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which (until recently at least) the monarch played an active political role, there is still a widespread expectation among the population that he ought to do so, multiparty democracy is young and weak, and security agencies engage in repressive behaviour. [0] So there's political reasons too.
If Canada really wanted the EU and the EU really wanted Canada, they'd fudge the whole geography issue–probably won't happen but not completely impossible. But no way the EU is going to want Morocco any time this century, so they won't do it for them.
[0] https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/2023/07/morocco-a-brewing...
Reducing the degree of dependency on the US would be one obvious reason.
It's par for the course for Charlemagne (the column in The Economist). It's not meant to be an actual realistic analysis and reporting (the way their non-columnist articles are, even if they all have an editorial streak). Mostly it comments on the topic of the week/month in some irreverent way[0], or entertains a modest proposal[1] like this one, in a "ha ha wait a minute" sort of way.
[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/12/19/we-need-to-talk-...
Cyprus would like to have a word.
As well as potentially Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
The French and their globally disconnected departments ...
(French Guiana is governed by EU regulations, after all...)
Or to be a bit more precise, the rule says any "European state" can join, but there are no set-in-stone definitions of what that actually means.
People here are mentioning Morocco as the example of a country rejected for not being European, but that's not quite accurate: Morocco got rejected from the European Communities in 1987, six years the Maastricht Treaty officially established the EU. Maastricht Treaty specifically put the European Commission in charge of figuring out which countries are considered to be "European", but as far as I know, they never said no to anyone. They did say yes to Cyprus, Georgia and Armenia.
Redefining Europe to include Canada would be outright ridiculous. The Union would have to redefine its own identity if it wanted to admit Canada.
Would the that be a discussion point if Turkey had a well functioning democracy? Solid economics? Didn't have the death penalty? Found some sort of resolution to conflicts on its borders?
Turkey has a functioning democracy it's just that most of the population loves populist rhetoric. Erdogan's party lost mayoral elections in all the major cities.
> Solid economics
Turkey had a GDP PPP of $3.45 trillion in 2024 (12th in the world)
> Didn't have the death penalty
Turkey doesn't have the death penalty.
> Found some sort of resolution to conflicts on its borders
The conflict in Syria is resolved in Turkey's favor. The potential conflict with Greece is a different issue though.
I don't think Turkey's EU application being in limbo is because of whatever excuse EU politicians can conjure up at any moment in time. It's because Turkey, if accepted into the EU, would be the most populous country, the biggest country by landmass, the most powerful country militarily, and the youngest country in the EU. Turkish agriculture and manufacturing would be a lot more competitive compared to EU products.
Is it? The SDF is still there, and was always one of the biggest reasons why Turkey got involved.
Now, that one, Turkey might still resolve yet... but if it does, that will likely come in form of another genocide. Which would hardly improve its chances of getting acceptance.
Turkey certainly has some economic issues with inflation, etc.
Yes, Turkey has democracy, but what was the coup thing going on a few years back?
----
But yes, high population == more votes, could also be a concern.
But maybe in a few decades the EU will have labour shortages and willing to take on a new challenge, who knows? :)
This fact probably counts -against- the argument that they deserve to be in the EU...
But just because you’re at least partly in Europe isn’t enough in some cases depending on who you are, and this was used in the aughts as a way to defer any potential membership by Turkey (which at least started the process of joining back then) and Russia (something European politicians didn’t want to even consider) by pointing out how much of their territory is in Asia. Morocco’s self-proclaimed justification was that Spain has a couple of cities in Northern Africa wholly surrounded by Moroccan territory, but Morocco still doesn’t make the cut for EU politicians.
However the Republic of Cyprus is entirely on continental Asia, not wholly in control of the island it claims as its sovereign territory, but considered “culturally European”, so it got in.
Canada is probably more of a Morocco than a Cyprus in this case, not physically in Europe, not even physically proximate to Europe the way at least Cyprus and Morocco are, and probably not considered European-enough.
If this all sounds like crazy EU politics, that’s kind of what it is, but in defense of the crazies here, you have to be a bit crazy when you’re trying to build some kind of weird supranational cultural identity in a place like Europe.
In either case, if a well functioning oil producing nation wanted to join the EU, I think we should accept them.
In fact I think we should accept any wealthy democratic country with strong institutions, free press, etc.
I would wager that the issue with Marroco and in particular Turkey is more the lack of human rights, death penalty, corruption, weak democracy, unwillingness to acknowledge historic genocides, etc.
If anything, I don't think people want another Hungary in the EU. That said, eastern Europe was probably a project the EU had to undertake.
The entire idea has been deader than disco even on the Turkish side since Erdogan took power, but that was part of it, however I would turn your attention to former French President Nicolas Sarkozky’s comments on the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/world/europe/25iht-union....
That said, you are also not wrong the issues around the Armenian Genocide were part of why member states campaigned against Turkish membership, as well as the issues around Cyprus and North Cyprus. The differences in law are less pressing though, and things you address during the negotiations for admission, but the process was halted long before it really got to that stage over political issues.
As for Morocco, the reason was much much simpler:
> The application was rejected on the grounds that Morocco was not considered to be a "European country" and hence could not join. This geographic membership criterion has been part of the EU's and its predecessors' treaties since the Treaty of Rome (Article 237 of the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community) and was later also included among the Copenhagen criteria. The rejection was expected as the King had sent feelers two years prior and received such a response.
So going back to your lead-in:
> Greenland has the option to join the EU. French Guiana is in south America and is part of the EU.
The EU has not made any of this black and white, but at least in the case of French Guiana, the fact that you are referring to it as a mere territory is reflective as to why it is complicated and negotiated through the core treaties that form the EU and the ascension treaties of new member states.
Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark and its citizens are Danish and EU citizens, but the country itself actually voted to leave the European Union after it was afforded a higher degree of autonomy and self-government by the Kingdom. French Guiana on the other hand is an overseas département. It is physically located in South America, but its status as a département puts it legally on par with any département in France. It is considered as integral to the French Republic under French laws as Paris, and this applies to the other four overseas départements as well, but does not apply to all of France’s territories. For the Americans reading this thread, consider the detached nature of France’s overseas départements to be more similar in legal status to Hawaii or Alaska than to Puerto Rico or Guam.
The nature of these territories is also why Ceuta and Melilla are able to be admitted to the EU under Spanish sovereignty despite Morocco which wholly surrounds them being rejected and between the Danish, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, even Norway and formerly under the British when the UK was a member, there’s a lot of external territories that are or were considered part of the EU to varying degrees from wholly part of it to having no real part in it at all, although its people might still be considered EU citizens since they’re nationals and citizens of member states.
The importance of the Arctic becoming viable for trade routes should not be underestimated.
(Even more so, on a longer timeframe, if equatorial locations become uninhabitable because too hot.)