Is Canada's Immigration System Ideal?

[warpus]

Wow that's far less than I thought

 

[Syno]

Wow that's far less than I thought

It's tough to see America as anything other than a post-apocalyptic refugee camp if you listen to all the Republican soundbites.

 

[warpus]

No I mean the U.S. has 10x as many people as Canada, and is a more desirable destination for immigrants than Canada is still (I think). I expected them to take in more for those reasons

 

[Farm Boy]

By the raw quantatatives. First table. Assuming Wiki is right. You can sort by % of population as well as by totals.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I ask because a segment of the Republican party wants to emulate it in the US.

Please correct me if I'm wrong on anything, but the way immigration into Canada works is based on points. You get points based on educational attainment, employment status and a few other things like language proficiency (someone fill in the details please).

According to random people on the internet, some of the net effects of this system is that wages on the lower end (service sector workers and laborers) are boosted because the country does not allow a lot of unskilled immigrants into the country. Wages on the upper end (professionals like engineers and doctors) are suppressed as highly qualified immigrants are allowed into the country.

Additionally, the system does not allow for (or at least is not generous) families to come over just because one member has successfully immigrated and established themselves.


The US system is based (IIRC) mostly on family ties. The Republicans have re-branded this as 'chain migration' to add to their repertoire of dog whistles. Claiming you want to end chain migration certainly is more palatable than saying you don't want immigrant families to come over. This effort to set up a points-based system could hurt employers in the service and labor-heavy industries while helping those in technology and medicine as wages will be depressed in those sectors. Given the rampant abuse of the H1-B program we already have, I'm not sure these tech employers really need the help.

So...what have I got wrong about these two different immigration systems? Which one is the better model to follow?

It's ideal on paper.

The reality is messier. Sure, people with degrees are welcome, but it can take years and years for them to get those degrees recognized here so they can find a job in whatever area they specialize in. In the meantime, there are immigrants with doctorates who work as taxi drivers because the government is so slow to recognize their credentials so they can get work in their real field of expertise.

Sometimes it's a matter of requiring them to take additional training or extra language training. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, as the math instructor I had in college was an immigrant from India... and I could hardly understand a word he said. Yes, I'm math-challenged and only took the class because it was a requirement for the B.Ed. program, for elementary ed. students. But his accent was like he shoved a bag of marbles in his mouth every time he spoke to us. There were no other choices, no other instructors teaching this class, so we were stuck (I'm not the only student who complained about this).

So he was one of the immigrants who could have used some additional language training. And don't anyone accuse me of bigotry toward people from India; I've met plenty of others who were perfectly understandable.

The language requirements for immigration are that the person be fluent in either English or French. Knowing French but not English pretty much guarantees that the person will only be employable in Quebec, unless they find some French-speaking enclave elsewhere in the country (there are even a couple here in Alberta).


There is a "family reunification" process that allows immigrants here to sponsor immediate family (parents, children, siblings), but only if they can support these people's needs until they are able to support themselves. This is in the process of being changed somewhat, as the current government considers it "un-Canadian" to not allow disabled people into the country even though there will be additional demands on an already overworked and underfunded system of health and social supports for some of the prospective immigrants.

At this point I can't really blame the current citizens for being worried and even angry that people who are not citizens would be allowed to come in and access social programs that the rest of us sometimes can't access before languishing for years on a wait list. That's why there's some backlash against the Syrian refugees and those who illegally crossed the border from the U.S. into Canada last year (over 15,000). People are upset that someone who just entered the country gets handed an apartment and free this-that-and-lots-of-other-stuff right away, when there are homeless people and others who are in desperate straits who are expected to wait, for however long it takes to reach the top of the waitlist. Some have been on housing subsidy waitlists for 5-10 years. Of course they're angry when they see people getting off a plane and being handed everything after only a couple of weeks.

In an ideal situation, we could take everyone and have a place to put them. But housing in some cities is basically unaffordable and not all cities have the social agencies and supports that people may need. Red Deer has those for both refugees and immigrants - we're a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic city and are becoming more so every year. At a guesstimate, I'd say that maybe a third of the building I live in has either immigrant or refugee tenants.

So as long as the support system works and there's adequate funding, things generally work out. When they don't, they can sometimes fail spectacularly. Where do you find anywhere affordable where you can legally put a family of 11 people who can't be, or don't want to be, separated into more manageable numbers?


As for the "brain drain" I honestly don't care. The U.S. has been poaching Canadians for decades, and I don't just mean William Shatner, Justin Bieber, and Celine Dion (you're free to keep the latter two). Some really skilled people left Canada for the U.S. because the money is so much better.

On the other hand, some Canadians come back. One of the nursing student clients I had in the '90s completed her degree, discovered that she couldn't get a decent job here in Red Deer, or even in Alberta. That was a time when there were far more nurses than nursing positions, and a lot of them left not only the province, but the whole country. So this person went to Texas for a job. She came back a year or two later, though (I found out when I got a phone call: "Hi, I'm back, do you have time to do a new resume for me?" She came back because she couldn't stand how money-money-money the health care system is in the U.S. and how short of actual caring and that she didn't have time to do everything that should be done.

I can't confirm or deny, but I do know that it's pretty hard to immigrate to Canada. We seek out people with jobs and skills that we need in our economy, such as doctors. So if you're a Cambodian carpenter, you might have a hard time getting in.

Unless you happen to be a refugee. I ran across such a person while doing the municipal census back in the '80s. It was a difficult time, since he spoke basically no English and all he understood was that here's somebody from the government, asking questions. So he handed over all the papers - for him and his kids, I got as much of the information as I could, and it wasn't until later that I found out from my supervisor at City Hall that I could have asked for an interpreter.

It's true, we don't, but we do let a lot of foreign low-wage forkers into the country to do menial work, such as selling coffee at Tim Horton's. Companies have to n theory offer these jobs to Canadians first, before they are offered to TFW's but.. this is all pretty controversial right now and I'm not 100% on the details.

TFWs (Temporary Foreign Workers) are an outright scam in far too many cases. The would-be employers think, "great, the government will subsidize their wages so I won't have to pay as much as I'd have to pay a Canadian" so they lie when they swear up and down that they really did try to hire a Canadian for the job but there were either no applicants or no suitable applicants (when they offer such piddling wages or an insufficient number of shifts that no Canadian could possibly afford to work there, of course their only alternative would be subsidized TFWs - anyone got a violin for these scammers? ). Some Canadian workers have gone public with complaints that they were actually fired so TFWs could take their jobs.

On the flip side, some TFWs have been scammed themselves by unscrupulous employers, or agents who said they were setting up jobs for them but when they got to Canada the jobs were either nonexistent or a different setup than they'd been led to believe.

True, but we do have a problem with rich foreigners buying up properties here as an investment. So parents will send their kid here, buy him/her a house or apartment, and anchor some of their wealth in this country, so that when their country goes to crap (or the family has to leave or whatever) they have a bit of a nest here in Canada. A lot of people also do this without any kids involved at all, they'll just buy up a property in Vancouver as an investment, and it will sit empty. It's been driving up housing prices and driving out Canadians from some cities from being able to own their own homes.

Vancouver did start cracking down on that... slightly. There was a student whining in the news that she couldn't have the house she'd wanted because of the extra fees brought in to discourage such obvious real estate money laundering and other schemes. I don't feel even remotely sorry for her. Plenty of university students have to share apartments or <gasp!> get a dorm room.

Canada is a country of immigrants and IIRC we see about 250,000 new immigrants each year. We don't border a poorer country though, so we can afford to be a lot more selective about who we let in and who we don't. It's a lot easier to control if the only land border you have is with the U.S. After Trump got elected a bunch of Haitians and others tried to cross the border into Canada, but IIRC we only admitted 5% of all those people crossing the border to find a new life. It's a completely different situation in the U.S. with a long border with Mexico and all

Yes, we only admitted a low number of them, but most are still here nevertheless. Some are appealing their cases, while others fall into the category of people who can't leave for lack of money for the plane ticket back to their country of origin. Just a day or two ago there was a story on CBC about the federal government actually paying for these people to go home - "to help them with their new lives."

What?! Since when does Canada owe people who crossed illegally a "new life" in their home country? So help me, I used to be a more generous-minded person, but there comes a time when that runs out. My dad was denied funding for portable oxygen, forpetessake! So I really don't have much sympathy for people complaining about things that aren't as basic as breathing. At least Canada finally asked the U.S. to be on the lookout for people with visitor's visas who were likely to just be passing through - land at an American airport, make their way to the Canadian border, and walk across.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I always thought that the primary immigration control in Canada was that it is, as the Labatt Blue Bear inaccurately points out, an entire country that's north of Buffalo.

 

[warpus]

With universal healthcare and other basic infrastructure that Buffalo & Co. lack.

 

[Syno]

It's ideal on paper.

The reality is messier. Sure, people with degrees are welcome, but it can take years and years for them to get those degrees recognized here so they can find a job in whatever area they specialize in. In the meantime, there are immigrants with doctorates who work as taxi drivers because the government is so slow to recognize their credentials so they can get work in their real field of expertise.

Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this. Many degrees aren't valid when you move to Canada. This was the case for my mother. She was trained and educated in Belgium to take care of disabled people but the credentials weren't recognized by the Canadian government. She would have needed to undergo retraining to get an equivalent degree here. At the time (1996) that was to the tune of over $7000, something we couldn't afford. She instead made her way in Canada as a maid.

I always thought that the primary immigration control in Canada was that it is, as the Labatt Blue Bear inaccurately points out, an entire country that's north of Buffalo.

The barrier for entry in Canada is far more restrictive than in the US, I think. You have to meet all the right conditions to succeed here and there's less opportunity to just pick up and go elsewhere. Partly because of our winters but also because of the sheer distance between major population centers. Our GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and GVA (Greater Vancouver Area) are exceptions to that, and to an extent so is the trio of Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer, but most other parts of the country are defined by great distances of nothingness. And then when you do reach a settlement, it's probably rural in nature with not much going for it. If you're a poor foreigner, or someone who came here due to a skilled profession, that doesn't leave a lot of room for you to really succeed or go anywhere. A neurosurgeon is going to crash and burn if they can't live in the areas I listed above.

So in practice, we have a short list of places that immigrants can realistically go to, and these places can't handle any more than they take in. We have land but we don't have what's necessary for people to succeed in this society. This limitation isn't as big of a deal if the climate is accommodating. Then you run into the problem here where, in many parts of the country, you are essentially locked into your local town or area during the winter months. Something like moving an hour and a half outside of a city and commuting in for work is doable, barely, if the climate supports it. Where I grew up in Ontario that wouldn't have worked since there'd be several days every single year that the only highway to the city was shut down.

 

[Lexicus]

Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this. Many degrees aren't valid when you move to Canada. This was the case for my mother. She was trained and educated in Belgium to take care of disabled people but the credentials weren't recognized by the Canadian government. She would have needed to undergo retraining to get an equivalent degree here. At the time (1996) that was to the tune of over $7000, something we couldn't afford. She instead made her way in Canada as a maid.

I wonder why this happens. I suppose it's easier (or it was easier) to just make people retrain in Canada than to look into the accreditation systems of every other country potentially sending immigrants to Canada.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

With universal healthcare and other basic infrastructure that Buffalo & Co. lack.

Well, yeah...the US is certainly working to match the lack of attraction. Heck, I'm working on bailing out myself.

 

[Syno]

I wonder why this happens. I suppose it's easier (or it was easier) to just make people retrain in Canada than to look into the accreditation systems of every other country potentially sending immigrants to Canada.

Belgium has a dramatically different education system from Canada/the US. I'm not sure if it's still the case now where certain degrees need to go through review. Perhaps there's more of an understanding between systems today. I have not looked into it, and only know what I know because of personal experience.

As far as I know the work involved in getting the degree transferred was nowhere near the amount of work it took to get the original thing. But it was still a huge investment at the time, especially financially.

 

[warpus]

You're always welcome to go through the process and become a Canadian, Tim. Although you might not enjoy the winters.

About degrees, yeah, my parents both have physics degrees from Poland. Neither were recognized by anyone when we came here. It was so much work to get them acknowledged that my parents just didn't do it. My dad started the process, but he would have essentially had to repeat his education. Considering that university in communist Poland was a lot more intense than what we have here, he was done with school. I think he went through one term and them moved on to other things. The institutional and cultural differences didn't help him get settled either

I am all for being strict which degrees from other countries are accepted and which aren't, but my parents' degrees definitely should've been accepted. It's so depressing to think that there are doctors getting their degrees somewhere in the caribbean, cheating their way through the system, and then moving back and making the big bucks.. all while my parents' education was pretty much ignored, for whatever reason, even though the level of schooling was higher in Poland at the time. Yes, different standards, but what happened still doesn't sit well with us. It's one aspect of our immigration experience that we thought was completely backwards.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You're always welcome to go through the process and become a Canadian, Tim. Although you might not enjoy the winters.

Thanks, but unless things have changed I'm not even allowed to visit, much less become a citizen. And, as already noted, the Labatt Bear argument is more than sufficient for me. I'm more of a Caribbean nation sort.

 

[warpus]

You're banned from Canada? What the hell did you do? Not even Trump is banned

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You're banned from Canada? What the hell did you do? Not even Trump is banned

Any American that has a felony conviction on their criminal record may not be permitted entry into Canada unless they have received special permission from the Canadian government. Even if the conviction happened 20+ years ago, foreign nationals with a felony may never be deemed rehabilitated by the passage of time and risk being denied entry at the Canadian border even decades later. The Canadian border has full access to all the criminal record and DMV databases in the United States, so anyone who has been convicted of a felony will very likely be flagged at the border.

Give Mueller time and hopefully Trump will be banned.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Well, I was looking at the whole 20th Century, not just today, but sure, short-term effects and long-term effects are both worth looking at. Claims about immigrants stealing jobs, imposing religious law, and committing acts of crime and terrorism are all assertions of short-term effects. I assume that stuff falls outside the realm of reasonable concerns, but I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth. So what are the reasonable short-term concerns that you don't want to see where you live?

No no, the US is full of long-term consequences. Really, the whole US is kinda a long-term consequence Short-term consequences are most of all related to indeed the labor-market (it is of course not as easy as "They steal our jobs" - but they are most assuredly effects, depending on the vocation, warpus said as much about Canada) and social security. Basically, how does changing the structure of employees change things for the individual and the state? That is, IMO, the short-term question.
Now social security isn't that big of an issue in the US as elsewhere, IMO not by accident, and this gets me to directly answering your question:

Basically, the US is IMO missing this whole fuzzy spirit of being a group of solidarity. Which works great for immigration, because people neither need to adapt to such a spirit, can not feel excluded by it and last but not least, solidarity costs money, a lot of money, and hence immigrants cost money, a lot of money, unless they are excellent immigrants. The USA does not have those problems with immigration. Because, I say, it is a nation build on immigration. But you know, it has all the problems that come with not having that ingredient of togetherness and solidarity. So let's see:

[NOTE that those problems are not unique as such to the USA; but unique in their extend and depravity when compared to other countries with similar (often even smaller) wealth]

Ghettoization
Gentrification in general living conditions, living place of course, education (a big one), you name it.
Poverty and all kind of fracked up misery
Bad labor protection
Terrible social security
A culture heavily building on superficiality
A culture heavily building on an egocentric ideology.

In a nut-shell: All the bad developments we can see through-out the Western world, the US has on steroids. (except unemployment and economic contraction, there the US is doing pretty alright, I guess)

Now I readily agree that this is not all the result of immigration, for sure no short-term effects. The sheer size of the USA has some influence, also the sheer size of financial interests involved, I think, than there is plain historic circumstancialism and so on and on.
But, I think, it also kinda is. I think each of those things are natural outgrowths of a society geared towards immigration. American textbooks will call this The Great American Spirit or whatever. I call it a horsehockey Western nation.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The barrier for entry in Canada is far more restrictive than in the US, I think. You have to meet all the right conditions to succeed here and there's less opportunity to just pick up and go elsewhere. Partly because of our winters but also because of the sheer distance between major population centers. Our GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and GVA (Greater Vancouver Area) are exceptions to that, and to an extent so is the trio of Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer, but most other parts of the country are defined by great distances of nothingness. And then when you do reach a settlement, it's probably rural in nature with not much going for it. If you're a poor foreigner, or someone who came here due to a skilled profession, that doesn't leave a lot of room for you to really succeed or go anywhere. A neurosurgeon is going to crash and burn if they can't live in the areas I listed above.

Speaking of neurosurgeons, it looks like we may finally be getting a second hospital here. Red Deer has over 100,000 people and also serves a lot of surrounding towns, as well as Lacombe (a smaller city but it's part of the economic hub known as Central Alberta - at which Red Deer is at the center).

So in practice, we have a short list of places that immigrants can realistically go to, and these places can't handle any more than they take in. We have land but we don't have what's necessary for people to succeed in this society. This limitation isn't as big of a deal if the climate is accommodating. Then you run into the problem here where, in many parts of the country, you are essentially locked into your local town or area during the winter months. Something like moving an hour and a half outside of a city and commuting in for work is doable, barely, if the climate supports it. Where I grew up in Ontario that wouldn't have worked since there'd be several days every single year that the only highway to the city was shut down.

My geography instructor did a daily commute from Edmonton to Red Deer and back. I guess he figured it was worth it (I'm glad he did, since his classes were among the most interesting and fun ones I ever took).

Yeah, the highways do get shut down in winter when it gets really cold or there's too much snow - or when there's an avalanche in the mountains or somebody has an accident. I've traveled through the Rockies in the winter, and it's not an experience I'd care to repeat. But people do continue traveling through there and making the best of it. Sometimes places get literally snowed in. I remember reading in the news several years ago about how Field, B.C. got so snowed in that people had to resort to creative solutions to get food and other supplies to the people there. It's a pretty little mountain town (or at least it was when I was last there), but you need to be resilient to manage winters in the mountain towns.

It's not a big deal here when the highways are closed, unless you happen to actually be on the highway and are a long way from any town. The worst emergency I can remember was in May of 1986. We had a humongous dump of snow, it got quite cold, and most of the city lost power. My dad promptly went to one of the hardware stores and bought propane for his campstove; we already had lots of candles and matches, so my family was fine. The furnace decided to go on the blink as well, so I figured the only sensible thing to do would be to go to bed. The cat crawled under the covers with me, and we just snuggled down and slept. After the storm was over it was well into June before everything was cleaned up (this whole thing started on May 29).

That was the first year I'd heard of El Nino.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I don't remember much of my immigration experience. All of it was handled by my parents and my father's company, who transferred him to Canada. I had not quite turned 18 at the time, so I was still a minor. All I remember was when I turned 18 I got my landed immigrant status in my own name, with my paperwork, and I was oh so proud.

And it meant that I could go to university without being considered a foreign student, even though I still sounded like one.

And now I'm an actual citizen, (though I retained my Irish citizenship for special reasons), so they can't kick me out anymore!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

How would you suggest they go about doing this? What tools are in the box?

Considering most big issues take place on smaller scales which possess most of the same features - let's look at this domestically: We're happy when kids from our poorest neighborhoods succeed. We're glad when they become doctors, and professors, and bankers, and businessmen. That's a success. But the big winners that come from those places, do they tend to stay there? Does sending the smartest and most driven 2% out of Ford Heights early in life to send home money that helps pay nearly minimum wage cops, is that a win for Ford Heights that can leveraged by the local governments and organizations of Ford Heights? It might be, but I could use help seeing it, I think.

It's certainly fair game to talk about but I personally don't know how poor countries stop the brain drain. I don't know enough about any particular country to have useful input - sure I could point out a few things about a few particular countries that might help but given how uninformed I am anything I'd say on it would likely come across as judgemental and naive.

For a window into my thought process/motivations - I feel absolutely no guilt whatsoever about leaving Missouri and could care less about how they might go about keeping educated people within their state. I have a soft spot for Illinois but when U of I didn't want me I had to move on. I have family there but that doesn't pay the bills and there isn't a lot that state could do that they already don't do that could bring me back.

 

[Cutlass]

Let's open it up more! Immigration is a net win for everyone. And yes, that includes the brain drain. Do that too.

On the subject of chain migration: It makes it more attractive to high skill immigrants if they can reunite their family in the new nation.

On the subject of brain drains: The immigrant will be better off, the new nation will be better off, and the brain that was drained frequently remits enough money to family members back home so that they aren't really worse off either.

On the subject of points systems: Some immigrants obviously do have a higher return on investment than others. And we should make room for them. But that shouldn't come at the expense of excluding others. In the US, for example, the very lowest of low skilled jobs have gone begging for workers since the crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Specifically seasonal farm labor and fishing boats.

On the subject of just how many a nation can accept in any given time frame: I haven't been able to get much information on this, or been able to start this conversation with economists that I know. But my feeling is that in any given year a nation can take in immigrants equal to roughly 1% of the national population without undo bottlenecks. So for the US that would be increasing immigration to some 3.2million people a year.

On the subject of refugees: Refugees are a net cost to the host nation for the first decade or so. But it averages out to being a net benefit to the host nation after ~20 years. So it's a long term investment, but it pays off.

Economists are very strongly in agreement that immigration is a very big positive for the host nation. How big? It's like a trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk, just waiting to be picked up.