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.
>The only thing keeping the GDP at the level it is is high level of immigration which favours the wealthy in the name of a “point based immigration system”.
Is that supposed to be bad? The main factors that contribute to your points are language skills, education, work experience, age, and job offer. It's true that those requirements favor the wealthy, but would canada be better served by immigrants that don't speak english, are inexperienced, old, and don't have a job lined up?
> 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?
> "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.
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.
> Immigrants and their children are now 27% of the US population.
Immigrants from 1800s maybe ?
> Show me the numbers on China.
China has just started. I dont think there is any data yet. Even if there is, wont be easy to find.
> Why is Canada only 1% hispanic? Because they restrict immigration overwhelmingly by skill.
No they don't. They encourage both. Express Entry is for the skilled ones, family based quotas parents and siblings in addition to asylum and refugees. Isn't that how immigration is supposed to work ?
> How's that for treating people with dignity?
Canada have temporary worker visas similar to H1B. They issue the spouses of those temporary skilled workers with open work permit. Dignity & freedom from the day one they land in Canada. There are no carrots in Canada for temporary skilled workers. If you satisfy Express Entry points which you almost will, you can apply for permanent residence. Your permanent residence is not under the control of your employer master. Canadian employers cant threaten your Express Entry application. You wont have to wait 10 years or get kicked out of the queue if you change jobs or gets fired while being on H1B.
Those who come to Canada as students get a post graduate work permit. No lotteries, no quotas and can apply to express entry and become residents unlike those unfortunate master degree holders who are at the mercy of their employer masters and waiting 10 years for their GreenCards.
The fact that open work permits are issued for spouses of temporary skilled workers in Canada proves that temporary workers are treated with dignity in Canada than H1B workers in the US.
> The problem is the policy driving it is bad. Rather than high-skilled workers, we're letting in low-to-mid-skilled young people.
The US has been running its immigration system this way for many decades. It's a disaster. With low to modest economic growth, lifting tens of millions of poor, low education, low skill, non-english speakers up out of poverty is almost impossible. You need persistently rapid economic expansion to do that. The US is getting a long-term under economic class of non-English speakers with low education levels: forever low income laborers. There are large special interests (business and political) in the US that like this and have kept our immigration system this way on purpose for decades despite the mess it has caused. Canada should avoid replicating this failed approach to immigration. The US also has a lot of sprawl space to live in, Canada for the most part does not (most of Canada isn't reasonably inhabitable obviously), so you just get ever more intense density problems in Canada with bulk immigration.
The other huge problem for Canada's immigration change, is that the low skill workers won't contribute enough in taxes net to make a difference in the fiscal demographic problems of the coming decades. The net tax contribution of a low skill worker is between zero and very low across their lifetime. Whereas with Canada's former policy of focusing on high skill immigration, you get a large tax surplus per person, which pays for expensive social programs.
> I suspect that a future immigration policy based of a belief there is a single-line merit measure is going to have huge flaws.
If I understand you correctly: this is accounted for in the Canadian system, at least, through a complex merit measurement. Multiple factors that are weighted according to desired immigration outcomes, and allow categorical exceptions (ie valid refugees or asylum seekers can have '100% merit' and be processed differently). This is how they regulate the justness and social outcomes.
I think it's a more reasoned immigration system, to measure merit along multiple axes, but I think it goes a bit against the idealized 'American Dream', especially as espoused on the statue of liberty.
> 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?
>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.
>...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.
>What you are really saying is that you think countries have very good reasons to keep people that are not well off from entering.
Well, yes. As far as immigration goes, the policy of most non-US western countries is primarily merit-based or if you have money to invest in the country. If you aren't educated and productive and you're not a legitimate refugee, why should a country let you in? How does the country benefit?
Canada has a generous welfare system and social safety net that that would likely be unsustainable if it let in sufficient number of people unable to support their own benefits. Even if you hold the view that drug use ought to be a public health matter and not a criminal matter, there's a limited amount of immigration that can be sustained without overburdening these services and why let in a drug user when you can let in a doctor or engineer?
In the case of tourism, it's just about limiting risk of someone overstaying their visa.
> You should perhaps learn a bit more about the history of the country which you want to immigrate to.
Because no one could possibly be opposed to per country caps unless he were a disgruntled Indian.
I was born in New York. My parents were born in New York. Three of four of my grandparents were born in New York. The fourth grandparent was born in Germany. His parents died in a concentration camp because they couldn't come to the US with their teen children. You see they had be been born in Eastern Europe and the racist national origin system was designed to prevent too many people born in Eastern Europe from coming to the US. Kind of like how you don't want too many people born in India or China to come to the US.
> The green card diversity lottery is based on exactly the premise I mention.
With your encyclopedic knowledge of American history I'm sure you are aware of the political origins of that program.
>Even if you're right, I don't think people want a system that benefits a group of people just because they have a bigger population than others.
This does not make much sense. People get green cards, not countries. Imagine if you were at the DMV and each region of your city had its own queue. People coming from the smaller parts leave in 5 minutes, and people hailing from the larger parts have to wait 8 hours for their turn. It's their fault for living in a more populous place?
What did the people in the smaller areas do to deserve their faster queue compared to others, except being born at a certain place?
Work visas should be about the person who passes the interview, is selected and is able to hold said job.
> 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.
> Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year)
You could just stop there, it’s clear where your priorities lie. I’m not Canadian (and don’t worry I’m not emigrating), but I welcome a “crazy high” 1% population immigration rate and I don’t see a conflict with that and reasonable housing policy. Many major cities already see this kind of growth regardless of where people are moving from. We should be able to house and sustain that growth.
Limits on immigration don’t slow the growth, they just satisfy anti immigration attitudes for a while.
> I'm guessing there was a flood of cons to Canada at some point that made them skittish and enshrine a bunch of hoops in legislation.
Not really; it's more of an outcome of political balance. Our conservatives have historically been ornery about immigration, but our progressives made it a focus of their policy. (This is very untrue now, few outright oppose immigration, but historically shaped the dialogue). To accommodate the disagreement we somehow came to a skills-oriented system with a high-threshold for ability and other qualities.
We have/had our own problem with authoritarians, and it's shaped our policies in some particularly Canadian ways.
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.
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