Item — HN Reader

The Canadian government has been targeting increased immigration for the past several years [0]. There has been a lot of bipartisan lobbying in support of this by the Century Initiative [1]. Imo the Canadian immigration system is a pretty streamlined system that the US could take a couple pages from, while also keeping the INS's strong background checking infrastructure. Sadly I know a number of people who abused the system (fake asylum claims, fake documents), but Immigration Canada doesn't seem to take background checks as seriously as the US.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-14/trudeau-p...

[1] - https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/

1 comments

But if the population growth is a problem, why?

In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party.

The Libaral party (which is actually the moderate of the three parties) pushes for immigration.

Immigrants are a source of cheap labour to be exploited. There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage.

Immigration raising the population is good for the housing investors who want to see prices continue to climb. Many of our politicians are either real estate investors or have ties to real estate investors.

Canada is a huge country but most people live along the southern border. Services and infrastructure even a few hundred kilometers north are bare to non-existent. Much of the land in Ontario, for instance, is flood plane, conservation controlled, native land or greenbelt farmland which cannot be divided (until a mega rich development company somehow manages it). This means crowding.

Most people think Canada has no corruption and is stable, well that is not really true. Corruption here is just at a much higher level.

> In Canada immigrants vote for the Liberal party who are currently in power. It doesn't take long before many of those immigrants forget their past and vote against their best interest for the Conservative party

I suspect these folks know what’s in their own best interest, and the problem is instead that you fail to perceive that brown people aren’t all the same and don’t all have the same interests.

Yep! There are a lot of other internal concerns at least among Punjabi Canadians back in BC. One interesting thing I saw though was that Jats tended to lean Liberal or NDP, but Chamars tended to lean Conservative. We have our own internal politics from the insurgency in the 1980s-90s that never got resolved and continue to fester.

The GP rayiner himself, immigrated from Bangladesh, was liberal and has now forgotten his past to oppose immigration now and vote conservative.

> There is a real shortage of jobs here that pay a living wage

This is a strange sentiment to hear about a country that has among the highest GDP per capita and HDI in the world. What countries would you describe as having an abundance of jobs that pay living wages?

The average median household income is ~$75k the average house in Canada is $700,000

Mostly because despite the massive growth in population and immigration, there isn't the equivalent in housing or jobs. Salaries still suck back in Canada, and if you're a White Collar Canadian citizen, it's better to just work in the Bay Area or Seattle indefinetly on a TN Visa (clearly you can see which part of Canada we used to live). The US can easily absorb the amount of immigration Canada is seeing, but a country that has around 10% of the US's population and a GDP that's around 5-10% of the US can't