Is Canada's Immigration System Ideal?

[Cutlass]

Because one nation making a great leap forward to more advanced weapons systems than any other always works out so well?

Again, if the "object" is to produce some "pinnacle society" that leaves the rest of humanity behind but advances some sliver at the maximum possible rate, then yeah, you're absolutely on the right track. But is that really the object?

I'm going to agree with Commodore here. While it's true that Einstein, and a bunch of other immigrants as well as some Americans, were key in the development of the Bomb, what else where they key in the development of? GPS for one, which is a really big thing for improving the lives of, not just Americans, but people around the world.

When we say that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle, that doesn't just apply to the world destroying genie. It also applies to invent the wheel genie. Technology has to come into existence before it can diffuse across nations. If allowing more top minds into nations with the best opportunities means that those nations get the lions share of the benefit in the short run, it also means that those benefits are available to the rest of humanity in the long run.

__________________________________________________________


Last week a girl who's father is an immigrant from Korea won a gold medal at the Olympics for the United States. How are we Americans not better off letting this man come to the US and have a family here?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

a hallmark of the oil-sheikhdom that is Canadia.


You can't expect that everybody changes their universities to be like Canadia's universities (i.e. expensive and mostly useful if you need some femi-fascists to compare you some literature) and change their tax code to be like Canadia's tax code (i.e. dystopian and unworkable - unless you're well, an oil-sheikhdom).



If you were to leech like Canadia, for example, that would be a bit much. European and South Asian countires would stop the brain drain on their end (say by increasing the conditions on handing out all that free tertiary education).

I suggest you relocate to Monaco.
Or Singapore. Or Canadia.

I'm beyond tired of your "Canadia" BS. If you want to have a serious discussion, how about some basic respect for the countries you're talking about?

 

[Synobun]

I feel like in @metatron's youth he mixed up the Third Reich with Canada and believed it for so long that the idea of correcting the mistake simply bore too much anxiety. It's rare that I can read someone's perspective on a nation and genuinely consider every part of the statement to be pure fabrication or fantasy. Usually there's a kernel of truth, even in the wildest of conspiracy theories, but Canada being a fascist dystopian oil sheikdom with sub-par education and low quality of life is pretty far off the reservation.

Or maybe his misspelling is intentional. Maybe he read about a land called Canadia some time ago. Who's the author? I might want to check out the book.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I feel like in @metatron's youth he mixed up the Third Reich with Canada and believed it for so long that the idea of correcting the mistake simply bore too much anxiety. It's rare that I can read someone's perspective on a nation and genuinely consider every part of the statement to be pure fabrication or fantasy. Usually there's a kernel of truth, even in the wildest of conspiracy theories, but Canada being a fascist dystopian oil sheikdom with sub-par education and low quality of life is pretty far off the reservation.

Or maybe his misspelling is intentional. Maybe he read about a land called Canadia some time ago. Who's the author? I might want to check out the book.

I think we're both capable of recognizing deliberate rudeness. Of course his misspelling is intentional and it's not because he's confused with some other place.

1. People use the term "Murica" all the time.

I don't. I never have. I try to be respectful of countries' names and/or abbreviations.

2. I'm from the Federal Republic and the Anglospherian yellow press exists.

That's no excuse for rudeness.

3. Canadians on this board commonly have their noses way up with that immigration system, with little cause.

When did I ever claim it was perfect? Of course I don't have first-hand knowledge of it as warpus and Lemon Merchant do, and it's been nearly a century since my grandfather immigrated. Things have changed since then.

At this point it would help if Trump would stop scaring people so they feel their only choice is to cross into Canada illegally.

You don't have oil? (Never mind the other ressources.)
Your taxes are not lower than in continental Europe?
Tertiary education isn't more expensive than in continental Europe?
Tertiary education isn't leaning more towards pursuits of arguably high intrinsic value but low economic utility compared to continental Europe and/or what the immigrant community brings?

You do realize that we don't wake up every morning and say to each other, "How can we piss off continental Europe/Metatron today?", right?

Oil is both a blessing and a curse. It's a huge part of what keeps my province's economy going. It's also a huge part of what is destroying large parts of my province's environment. Over the past few weeks there's been a spat going on between Synsensa's province and my province over a pipeline, and the premiers have been doing some tit-for-tat squabbling.

Canada being fascist? Didn't claim that. Your "feminists" are a different matter.

I hardly consider myself a fascist. And while there are times when I want to ask the Prime Minister, "WTF were you thinking?", I don't think he's a fascist either.

So you have nary a leg to stand on - but character attacks on offer.

You just called Canadian feminists fascists. Go look in the mirror, because you're the one throwing out the character attacks.

 

[Commodore]

I feel like in @metatron's youth he mixed up the Third Reich with Canada

Wait...Canadia's not the Third Reich? Then who did we fight in WWII?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You should.

Well that answers your own question and ends the thread.
Because that is what their immigration system is.

It's also disgusting and a caricature of any worthwhile view of the human condition,
a hallmark of the oil-sheikhdom that is Canadia.


You can't expect that everybody changes their universities to be like Canadia's universities (i.e. expensive and mostly useful if you need some femi-fascists to compare you some literature) and change their tax code to be like Canadia's tax code (i.e. dystopian and unworkable - unless you're well, an oil-sheikhdom).

Wow. This is like deep. You've completely changed everyone's mind.

 

[luiz]

The United States became a power in part by taking in poor people from the "[stuff]hole countries" of their day. Some of the people who criticize today's illegal or quasi-legal immigrants like to say "My ancestors came here legally, why can't yours?" What those people don't realize, or perhaps just fail to mention, is that back then the US had the wide-open borders they're so afraid of now. There was no illegal immigration to the US until the late 19th Century, I think. Of course that was then and this is now, and it's always a question whether and how history is applicable to the present or the future, but worries about immigration in the US have always been tied up in bald-faced racism and religious intolerance. I don't know if Canada has to carry the same baggage. I'm not saying other countries don't have racism, but US policy needs to deal with US issues and history, not someone else's. I think any American trying to restrict or amend immigration policy in any way bears the burden of explaining, clearly and in detail, how their concerns and/or proposals are not racist or religious. Our starting point, our baseline, is always - and always has been - intolerance. Like it or not, our car drifts that way, so if you want to steer in the other direction, you need to pull harder on the wheel.

Also, obviously-wrong claims about immigrants just make me swerve the other way. I live in a city with a lot of Haitians, in a neighborhood with a lot of Dominicans, my landlord is from East Africa, and my ancestors came from Ireland and Russia in the early 19th Century. So, please Mr. President, tell me more about "[stuff]hole countries" and how Mexicans are all rapists and drug-dealers while I watch a Guillermo Del Toro movie and eat some chicken with mole sauce.

The purpose of a nation's immigration system is not to showcase how non racist said nation is, though. It's to serve the interests of that nation's citizens. If a system like Canada's would serve the interests of Americans better than the current one (and I think it evidently would), then that's a perfectly good argument to pursuing it. And note that while it's also not the purpose of an immigration system to promote "diversity", Canada's system is certainly doing that as well. Probably much more than the American system, which is resulting in a disproportionately high Latin American (and specially mexican) immigrant population. Toronto or Vancouver are diverse - El Paso is just Mexican, even though in American jargon it's a "diverse" city.

Anyway. The American immigration system still works much better and serves national interest far more than the French one.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Oh right, evil Trump subjecting you to immigration of the kind that basically every other developed country gets.
People. They just show up. You don't get to rate them with points first.
Goodness.

You do realize that some of these people "just showed up" in the middle of winter last year, suffering from severe frostbite, and there was one guy who lost his fingers as a result? And last spring they found a woman's corpse in a field; she'd died of hypothermia. The most tragic part about her death is that she was one of the people who did have the proper paperwork to have entered the country legally at a proper border crossing. She didn't need to try to walk across a farmer's field in Manitoba and freeze to death.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

You do realize that some of these people "just showed up" in the middle of winter last year, suffering from severe frostbite, and there was one guy who lost his fingers as a result? And last spring they found a woman's corpse in a field; she'd died of hypothermia. The most tragic part about her death is that she was one of the people who did have the proper paperwork to have entered the country legally at a proper border crossing. She didn't need to try to walk across a farmer's field in Manitoba and freeze to death.

Well, the fact that she was trying to get into a country where you can freeze to death walking across a farmer's field indicates that she wasn't all that bright in the first place.

It's surprising that Canada can exercise a "brain drain" type immigration system at all, actually.

 

[Synobun]

It's surprising that Canada can exercise a "brain drain" type immigration system at all, actually.

That's because we don't.

 

[El_Machinae]

My tolerance for pursuing the nuance in a discussion when people choose to conflate 'refugee' with 'immigrant' is limited. They're vastly different things, and require very different processes.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

From where i am sitting Canada barely accepts any refugees at all.

1. There are not than many of them compared to the actual immigrants.
Polemically i may call them a rounding error.
See, your (plural) point here is that 300k immigrants is a lot, for the size of Canada.
And we heard you. I did and i think the Americans did too.
My point is that refugees of the kind that say Sweden, Austria and Germany take in are in your statistic, probably mostly "Protected Persons" and probably only a subset. But let's take all and let's add GARs - anybody "sponsored" is out (not that this changes the order of magnitude or anything).
That's what right now? Twenty thousand per year? Thirty with the sponsored?
My point is that out of your 300k immigration you could alot more to actual refuge, particularly unsponsored, or unselected immigration, rather than your economic self-interest.
And you guys are not hearing it.

2. As far as international game theory is concerned refugees in Canada are arguably in some hybrid state. They're not proper refugees anymore.
Having quotas and caps on refugees is bad enough, but certainly understandable.
But once you select refugees for age, sex, marital status, you are in my view not properly accepting refugees.
The refugees still are just that on their end, you on your end though are actually, once again, selecting immigrants. In a way. Effectively anyway.

This is why i got little pulsing veins on my forehead whenever vain, smarmy centre-left politicians in the US tried to sell this whole "highly vetted" business.
You don't get to "vet" refugees.
It kind of defeats the point.
You just take them.​

Did you try to cross the border here at some point and were turned away? Did you know someone who tried and was turned away?

Otherwise, I don't see where all this snide 'SPLAINING comes from.

One of the hopes regarding the refugees (ie. the Syrians, among others) is that they will want to stay here and eventually become productive citizens (real ones, not Canadians of Convenience) and add to our multicultural mosaic.

The practicalities of this is sometimes very different. If you get a family of one set of adults and 9 children, how do you house them in any affordable way? Houses are too expensive, and there's not an apartment building in the country that's both affordable on the first-year stipend refugees receive and that can legally house 11 people. It might be doable if one adult takes half the children, but that's still putting 6 people in one apartment and depending on that province's residential laws concerning the ages of children and the number of bedrooms, they could run up against a situation where opposite-sex siblings aren't allowed to share a bedroom if the oldest is older than 5.
​

Let me be clear

Said Stephen Harper, every time he was about to say something typically Reformaconish:

It is quite possible that in the near future the US or the EU will act like this, too. This is arguably the source of my horror, promoting me to lay it on that thick.

Horror?

Now I'm reminded of the Reformacon posters on CBC who routinely whine about everything from Liberal policy to the latest mention of Justin Trudeau's socks: "I fear for my country." They're a very fearful bunch.

See above. She's a refugee. She doesn't need paperwork.

WHOOSH!

She HAD paperwork. She HAD what was necessary for her to walk up to any official border crossing and enter Canada, legally.

The reason she crossed illegally and died in a farmer's field is that nobody had told her that she could cross legally. She died because of something she didn't know.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

She died because of something she didn't know.

Good thing that isn't catching, eh?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm telling you people that you accept too few refugees, are too selective - and frankly selfish - about your economic immigrants and that your system only "works" because a) you're a small country and as such a small bother, b) because your only neighbor is the US and c) because you're insanely rich, entitled and privileged.
I am also vocally suspecting that as a function of these privileges you people are incapable of perspective on these matters.

I was unaware that this is a set of Consevative claims.

I listened to ten years of Stephen Harper and his "let me be clear". It's one of his verbal tics and he passed it on to the members of his cabinet, many of whom sit in opposition now.

It's gotten to the point where, if any politician says "let me be clear" (or some variant), it just makes me roll my eyes and not take them seriously.


Actually we do have a couple of other neighbors, but they're across an ocean and far enough from the main part of their countries that there isn't usually a lot of strife that goes on.


Funny, I don't feel "insanely rich." The only one in this thread who has admitted to that is El Machinae. So if you're going to rant about Canada being selfish, rant at someone who has the means to do something about it. As someone who is disabled and has to deal with various agencies every week - and some of the people don't understand that I can't just jump through every hoop yesterday, I really don't have the energy to give much of a damn about the family of refugees with 9 kids (seriously, where did the government think these people were going to live?), or the man who griped and whined and complained that the apartment he and his family was given wasn't equipped with its own personal laundry room. Maybe he'd be happier back in his tent in Syria? Or if he had an apartment there, did it have its own laundry room?

 

[El_Machinae]

From where i am sitting Canada barely accepts any refugees at all.

Hey, no disagreement. I think there's a bit of game theory to be engaged in when it comes to accepting refugees, but you'll rightly notice that it's not zero-sum even. It's less than zero-sum, because the country and the refugees that 'loses' the game then suffers vastly more than they need to.

I view the response to refugees as a moral and a political obligation. And I am quite vocal on this front, in my private life. I will take people to task, and I try to walk-the-walk.

But I don't view immigration the same way. Immigration is going to contain a bit more game theory. Any time someone couches immigration in terms of charity (or the response to refugees in terms of game theory), I wonder how fall we will need to go 'back to the beginning' to figure out their base values.

 

[Arwon]

The US system is based (IIRC) mostly on family ties.

Nah you have employment sponsored green cards and a green card lottery, too. And family migration is surely a thing in Canada too.

I should also note - the population of the US is also quite a lot less foreign-born than than the population of Canada.

So the level of migration to the US must be quite a bit lower overall. In spite of its historical reputation as an immigrant nation that's not especially the case any more.

I wouldn't suppose that the nativists proposing Canada's migration policies because they are restrictive are also proposing upping the total numbers of migrants as well.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Nah you have employment sponsored green cards and a green card lottery, too. And family migration is surely a thing in Canada too.

I should also note - the population of the US is also quite a lot less foreign-born than than the population of Canada.

View attachment 489594

So the level of migration to the US must be quite a bit lower overall. In spite of its historical reputation as an immigrant nation that's not especially the case any more.

I wouldn't suppose that the nativists proposing Canada's migration policies because they are restrictive are also proposing upping the total numbers of migrants as well.

We do have employer sponsored green cards but it's my understanding that that is not the primary route for immigrants to this country, which is what Trump wants to change.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The purpose of a nation's immigration system is not to showcase how non racist said nation is, though. It's to serve the interests of that nation's citizens.

That's true, but we (the U.S.) have to pass laws - not just immigration laws - that are demonstrably not racist or otherwise biased against a "protected class." Unfortunately, racism and religious intolerance is in our proverbial DNA. It's not just our history, it's today, right now. Just a week or two ago, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the President's proposed travel ban on the grounds that it discriminated on the basis of religion. It didn't even discriminate against Americans, but the US Constitution isn't just protective of American citizens, it's also prescriptive of our behavior. I think this was the 3rd time the president's travel ban has been so blocked, incidentally, I believe by three different courts. So, yeah, unfortunately, any time the government wants to pass a law, it kind of has to be scrutinized for bigotry, whether it's deliberate or accidental (being "a bull in a china shop" doesn't mean it's alright to go ahead and break everything, it means you have to work extra hard not to be a klutz).

If a system like Canada's would serve the interests of Americans better than the current one (and I think it evidently would), then that's a perfectly good argument to pursuing it. And note that while it's also not the purpose of an immigration system to promote "diversity", Canada's system is certainly doing that as well. Probably much more than the American system, which is resulting in a disproportionately high Latin American (and specially mexican) immigrant population. Toronto or Vancouver are diverse - El Paso is just Mexican, even though in American jargon it's a "diverse" city.

Anyway. The American immigration system still works much better and serves national interest far more than the French one.

Sure, a different system - Canada's or another - might be a good model for the US to examine, but we bear a burden that another country might or might not, is all I'm saying. afaik, Canada (and New France before it) doesn't have the same history of slavery, Jim Crowe, displacement, internment and general mistreatment of ethnic and religious groups that we have. I'm sure Canada - and France, as you point out - has its own warts, but US policy needs to address US issues, not someone else's. And yes, the US system could be worse; our President is trying to make it worse, but so far the courts have gotten in his way.


EDIT: Literally seconds after I posted this, I hear on the radio that the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the Administration's appeal on the block of their repeal of DACA that was put in place by a lower court.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Nah you have employment sponsored green cards and a green card lottery, too. And family migration is surely a thing in Canada too.

I should also note - the population of the US is also quite a lot less foreign-born than than the population of Canada.

View attachment 489594

So the level of migration to the US must be quite a bit lower overall. In spite of its historical reputation as an immigrant nation that's not especially the case any more.

I wouldn't suppose that the nativists proposing Canada's migration policies because they are restrictive are also proposing upping the total numbers of migrants as well.

Of course that doesn't count illegals, something which I don't think Canada has much of.....

 

[warpus]

That's an unreasonable demand.

How is that a demand? It's a suggestion. You can try to make your country better, and more people will stay. Or you can not do anything, and less people will stay.