> I thought you were implying that if Canada had an immigration policy like the USA then it would also have 12% black population
I was implying Canada would have far more black people today than a mere 2.x% of its population, if its immigration policy wasn't extremely exclusionary. There is a six fold gap in that percentage with the US. There is a ~15 fold gap in the hispanic percentage.
I would like to see you explain how the Americas can be ~72% hispanic, while Canada is 1.x% hispanic, while the US has allowed in vast Latin American immigration over the last 60 years, if it's not due to Canada being anti-diversity. The touted diversity premise doesn't make any sense given the demographic facts of Canada and the facts about its immigration policies.
If Canada is pro-diversity, why aren't the hispanic numbers dramatically higher given the context in the rest of the Americas? Why doesn't Canada abandon its regressive skill & education based immigration system and allow in millions of Latin American immigrants?
> Something like 60% of hispanics in the US are originally from Mexico
Since you want to talk about borders. The question then is, since the US borders Canada, why hasn't Canada seen vast immigration from and through the US, from poor black and hispanic communities, that would obviously benefit massively from Canada's strong society safety net and universal healthcare system? Why aren't millions of hispanics choosing to pass right through the US and immigrating into Canada?
The US has somewhere around 13 to 15 million undocumented immigrants. Why don't they just pass through the US and seek citizenship in Canada, given the obvious upside (Canada's social system would benefit poorer people far more than anyone else)?
They can't. Canada's immigration policy won't allow it. That's the crux of the discussion that you can't avoid.
People will risk life and limb to go from Syria to Germany (about the same distance as Mexico to Canada). Millions of poor Latin Americans immigrated into California over 40 years, and eg NY is about 28% hispanic, but your premise is that Canada is just too far away because it doesn't border Mexico. That's absurd and it poorly attempts to evade the real problem: Canada will not allow in large amounts of low skilled, low education immigration because of its immigration policies, and the US by contrast has historically. That's an unavoidable fact backed up by immense immigration data. I find it incredible you're even attempting to counter argue that, it's a direct result of the system that is in place in Canada right now.
Your 60% figure is close. There are around 70 million hispanics in the US, including the large undocumented immigrant population (equal to 40% of Canada's entire population). Of that, at least 33 to 35 million have origins in Mexico:
> Saying the Canadian [black population] rate is 6 times less is meaningless without accounting for that starting state
Canada's black population percentage is extremely meaningful. The six fold gap between the US and Canada, indicates exclusion, as the poorest demographic in the US is black people. They are the worst off, and would logically be the most likely to want to immigrate for a better life, which surely Canada's admittely superior social safety net and healthcare system would provide. And yet Canada is seeing almost non-existent poor black immigration from the US (hint: Canada won't allow it, because it uses a skill & education restriction system on immigration). The US black population is larger than Canada's entire population, which makes the point extremely well.
> "The provinces of Canada with higher ethnic diversity and immigration"
What kind of immigration? The USA has the unfortunate status of being home to a huge population of generally impoverished immigrants, thanks to its over-focus on family reunification and humanitarian immigration paths, the ease/prevalence of illegal immigration, and combined with a complete ignorance of skilled immigration.
This is the opposite of Canada, where the immigration policy has for decades strongly favored skilled immigrants - and have let them in in far greater numbers (and greater ease) than humanitarian immigrants. Similarly, Canada has for the past decade or so slowly shut the door and raised the bar on family reunification. It should also be no surprise that illegal immigration is a substantially smaller problem here than it is in the USA.
The somewhat inconvenient and blunt way to put it is: Canada has, for the most part, received a socially desirable demographic of immigrants, and the USA has not.
On top of this, America has to deal with the legacy of slavery - which has created a huge population that continues to be marginalized (despite advancements) to this day. You can't oppress and systematically destroy a population's chances of success for nearly 200 years in a row and then magically expect them to pick right back up a mere 4-5 decades later. This race dynamic drives a huge part of American demographics, and in Canada this issue may as well not exist.
The issue of race in the US is a labyrinthine beast that the vast majority of Canada could not even begin to imagine. And for that Canadians are lucky.
>that Canada should accept dramatically more immigration if it wants to maintain an independent presence in North America.
I fully agree with you, but you have to see the irony in that statement: the more immigrants you take in the less independent you are.
Canada already have 20% of its population being forign-born[0]. Dramatically more immigration would mean that percentage rising to 30 or even 40%.
I'm a panhumanist and an immigrant myself, so I have zero problem with this, but I can understand why some native-born Canadians might be worried when that percentage rises too high.
> Canada has an immigration rate 10x the rate of the US but any discussion of lowering this is considered racist
...or maybe don't compare Canada's rate to a country with one of the strictest immigration policies available, just because doing so fits your inclinations...?
> It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far that is actually using facts.
Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if the immigration policy was relaxed? I see no facts at all around that assertion, which is the one I was calling simplistic.
> What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the country?
You said (paraphrasing):
>> Why are there no hispanic people in Canada, relative to the US
I said:
>> Because it's not bordered by Mexico
(And, by the way, Mexico is the #1 source of immigrants for the US).
> The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.
Out of those 6 countries, one would qualify as contributing to the Hispanic or Black population in the US (the groups we were discussing).
Out of the top 10, none are from countries in Africa or the Caribbean (which we might also consider to be a "black" population).
So we can agree then, that the US's diversity w.r.t. black people has nothing to do with immigration?
> See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.
Those are also states that have heavy immigrant populations because they're attractive for skilled workers or close to natural entry points. You'll have to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is from internal movement.
The US as a whole is fairly close to replacement rate births, so we would actually expect populations to remain stable.
The responsibility of an immigration program to its citizens isn't necessarily to maximize diversity. It's to maximize the benefit to the country. A points-based immigration program would allow the country to optimize along any number of axes: under-represented minorities, skills, etc.
> The problem is that the number of green cards is relatively fixed, so there has to be some way to distribute them that prevents two nations from taking almost all the spots.
Is it? Canada brings in 3x as many immigrants per capita as the US does. It's brought in 1% of its population each year for roughly the last 100 years - so the equivalent of 3-4M green cards per year. I think there's probably a lot of wiggle room.
> But Canada afaik does not have multicultural immigration
This is not correct. Toronto is 52% visible minorities. Even mid-sized cities like Calgary have big immigrant populations from Asia. When I visiting the wilderness of BC I actually ran into a guy who owned a fruit orchard who immigrated from India a few years back.
>...Canada a population of 40M bringing in 1M population in an year was a terrible move.
Do you have a citation for that number? Most sources say Canada takes in about 1/2 that:
>...Currently, annual immigration in Canada amounts to almost 500,000 new immigrants – one of the highest rates per population of any country in the world. As of 2023, there were more than eight million immigrants with permanent residence living in Canada - roughly 20 percent of the total Canadian population.
> This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does.
> This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does.
You assert this as though it's just automatically a good thing with no actual analysis as to the impact on Canadians. What happens to the cultural cohesion, wages, and living standards of Canadians when immigration is at such a rapid pace? Is this not a factor? Or is the sheer availability of cheap, undercutting labour just a natural capitalist good that we should accept regardless of the hard to measure, intangible impacts?
> historically Mexicans have been in the US forever
As recently as 1940, Hispanics made up only 1.5% of the US. Population. As of 2010, they made up 16.3% of the U.S. population (about 50 million people). As a point of reference, Canada has a population of about 37 million people and the UK has a population of 63 million people. So we have imported roughly an entire Canada/UK's worth of people from Latin America. As far as I am aware, immigration of this scale is basically unprecedented in human history.
>Canada has an immigration rate 10x the rate of the US but any discussion of lowering this is considered racist.
Those who consider immigration a race issue are often those who view everything as a race issue, and view reality through a warped lens of race. Even worse are others who have ulterior motives (political, economic) for favoring increased immigration and use the race card as a weapon to smear opponents and prevent substantive debate.
>I don’t see as many exploited illegal immigrants in Canada.
There is not a large land border with Mexico in Canada, but Canadians are happy enough to exploit what they call temporary foreign workers who do jobs they don't want to do and have rights which fall short of a citizens on paper and in practice.
This difference seems less due to Canada's superior nature than it seems due to Canada being surrounded by oceans on three sides and by a wealthier country on the fourth side. In fact I think Canadians would do well to keep in mind that they don't face the same issues that other countries do before passing judgement on immigration issues. Almost all immigrants to Canada are immigrants Canada explicitly welcomed to the country who met every qualification.
If you want immigration due to diversity (which Canada dos) then it would make sense to limit based on country of origin, no? Otherwise you wouldn't get as much diversity.
> Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.
I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains. "Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.
I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?
> In a free nation, demand can only be controlled through restriction on immigration and birth rates. For the USA that means demand is a national policy issue.
And since that topic is associated with race, good luck having an objective discussion in a Western country. In Canada, if you even suggest there is a discussion worth having, a huge percentage of the population will immediately assume you are a Trump supporting racist. More subtler topics like the obvious fact that some segments of immigrants are not contributing to the economy via income taxes while massively increasing housing demand are completely beyond discussion.
> These are exactly the kind of immigrants any country should be desperate to have.
People of often having a cultural, religious and moral background completely different to more-or-less original value Canadians? How will that work?
Oh i guess by appeasing everybody to create that multicultural society with less & less identity of its own, just the same bland globalized aftertaste. The major Canadian cities beside Montreal and Quebec are already taken.
I was implying Canada would have far more black people today than a mere 2.x% of its population, if its immigration policy wasn't extremely exclusionary. There is a six fold gap in that percentage with the US. There is a ~15 fold gap in the hispanic percentage.
I would like to see you explain how the Americas can be ~72% hispanic, while Canada is 1.x% hispanic, while the US has allowed in vast Latin American immigration over the last 60 years, if it's not due to Canada being anti-diversity. The touted diversity premise doesn't make any sense given the demographic facts of Canada and the facts about its immigration policies.
If Canada is pro-diversity, why aren't the hispanic numbers dramatically higher given the context in the rest of the Americas? Why doesn't Canada abandon its regressive skill & education based immigration system and allow in millions of Latin American immigrants?
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