It's exacerbated by the rich heavily relying on cheap labour and fresh credit to keep wages low and the GDP growing.
Lots of companies rely on the Temporary Foreign Worker program to fill menial minimum-wage jobs, often paying those TFWs below minimum-wage and abusing them. Similarly, the student visa program is a backdoor for lots of companies (particularly delivery & logistics). I also used to work at a government-sponsored employment centre where I met hundreds of skilled new-immigrants who gave up everything to emigrate, only to arrive in Canada and realize they'd been deceived about their prospects (e.g. the barriers to recertification).
I am not against immigration — both my spouse and I are children of immigrants — but it's important to differentiate between reasonable immigration policies and excessive ones designed to prop up a failing system by constantly injecting new bodies. Canada's immigration system is the latter; it predominantly benefits the rich and nobody else.
Are there any economists that support your theory? Namely that (if I understand your point correctly) immigration is hurting the economy more than it’s helping? Everything I’ve seen claims the opposite - but I’m open to new information.
Also, what support do you have for the claim that the existence of temporary foreign workers suppress wages for working Canadians? My understanding is that they are performing jobs that Canadians just won’t do and thus, their presence shouldn’t affect Canadian working wages (or so the theory goes).
Labor shortage it BS. It's rhetoric to increase immigration so we can continue sustaining a slave class and don't have to pay people properly. Canada's been very successful at this.
I'm saying that bringing in foreign labor to keep wages low and therefore manipulate the local market to increase corporate profits is bad. Very bad.
Where I live, there can be a genuine shortage of labor (i.e. there are just not enough people living up here to do all the jobs - it is -40 in the winter after all)
So in that case, it makes sense to try and recruit from within Canada, at a wage that Canadians are willing to do the job for ($14-$18/hr. right now). If you still can't get enough people at that, then go to immigration, but critically, you MUST pay them the $14-$18/hr.
The controls and rules around how much immigrants are being paid are extremely lax, and in my experience, are grossly exploited in the very vast majority of cases, because it leads to higher corporate profits, which at the end of the day is the goal of all this anyway.
The blog post you've linked is titled "Why immigration doesn't reduce wages", which I think is an absurd claim to make. The author seems more interested in owning "anti-immigration people" than actually proving that thesis. Citing a handful of studies does not conclusively prove that immigration is never and can never have negative effects.
The article also does not seem relevant to Canada whatsoever. You don't think that the massive lines for a handful of minimum wage job postings are in any way impacting local job markets? Does Tim Hortons abusing the TFW program help or harm the local job market?
The Canadian economy is a ponzi-scheme dependant on bringing in an accelerating number of immigrants every year and saddling them with debt.
If you're an employer in Canada, you just get together with your buddies, call up your local government official and "convince" him to launch a program where hundreds of thousands of minimum wage "Temporary" Foreign Workers (TFW's) are imported to fill the gap.
And if you're a jealous high employer of skilled personnel, you just do the same, and legislation has just recently been passed so skilled workers can now be imported just like TFW's.
Now, there will never be full employment across most of the job spectrum so salaries will never have to rise. Add in a top 3 in the world unaffordable housing market, and this is how you eliminate a middle class.
It's actually a pretty accurate use of the term. Immigrants end up taking less money and putting up with very bad workplace situations because many of them end up forced to work for a particular employer or return (at great expense) to their home country. I don't think that's rhetoric. The work permit system in Canada is much less problematic.
Thank you both for replying with so many salient data points that underline how fucked things have gotten.
Immigration is an interesting variable. I'm an immigrant myself, but I'm also coming to question the wisdom of shipping in a cheeky hundred thousand people every year. It does seem like a bid to keep a scam economy running more than anything else. The supposed dearth of skilled employees is most likely another politically manufactured "shortage."
It always annoys me that business groups are constantly lobbying for increased immigration because of a "lack of supply" of skilled labour. When there is an imbalance in supply and demand with labour we should see an increase in the incomes of those people with the skills in shortage. Instead business groups want to cheat the system and increase supply, not by paying workers more, but instead trying to import more labour, screwing the workers out of their good fortune of being on the right side of the supply and demand equation for a change.
Would that not demonstrate the point then? You're saying wages aren't stagnant anymore, occurring at a time when the demand for workers has finally outstripped supply because not enough visas are issued. So don't blame it on immigration now, fine. But if issuances of visas increase then you're back in the <2012 situation of stagnant or decreasing wages due to the availability of cheaper workers. So can you then blame stagnant industry wages on immigration?
Displacement of indigenous workers is also a major issue.
By the way, I wasn't trying to "blame it on immigration", my ire is solely directed at corporate lobbying for public policy, given that their sole motivation is an increase of private profits regardless of the socioeconomic side-effects. It should not be allowed.
Well in some cases the gain is mutual especially for things like seasonal agriculture work where demand for labour periodically peaks and the labour is utterly miserable. I've seen seasonal labour wages spike to twice the minimum wage, and still seen fruit rot on the field and people continue working their minimum wage jobs at Tim Hortons. This is an area where the poor of the nation arguably benefit from the underclass by driving down the cost of fresh produce and not having to do this back breaking labour.
For other things, like the aforementioned jobs at Tim Hortons, hiring temporary foreign worker is nothing but a wage suppression scheme meant to solve the "problem" of Tim Horton's being unprofitable and locations shutting down in a low unemployment environment, and the whole "temporary" thing is something to be worked around.
The previous government got in a world of shit for doing the latter and eventually stopped and banned much of the wage suppression aspect of this program. A few years back the incumbent government figured enough people aren't paying attention and re-legalised the fast food underclass again to suppress wages to address the "labour shortage" because fast food workers were faint making more than minimum wage and shudder taking a greater share of the profits of the fast food business.
Bad examples. Legal immigrants are different from "cheap labor" (H-1B and seasonal/temporary workers for example) which does depress wages. Once you have a green card you can demand higher wages and threaten to pack up and move to the competition.
I don't want to start an immigration argument, but the skills based system that has been proposed and was in place in Canada would have let Einstein, von Braun, Brin, Fermi, Yang, Albright, etc. into the country.
It's because skilled immigrants are being brought over specifically to make large companies richer. That's it. There is no other reason. In 95% of cases, there are plenty of people here that can do the job.
Flooding the US with vast quantities of low skilled labor for four decades, is also why wages for the bottom 50% do not climb like they should. It's simple, and obvious, supply & demand.
It's bizarre that so many tech workers easily spot this concept in effect when big companies try to undercut their salaries in exactly the same manner by importing cheaper tech talent from other nations, yet they're oblivious to the exact same being done to lower income Americans.
It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.
There's a reason why Canada - and most prosperous, developed nations - have strict immigration policies against flooding their nations with large amounts of low skill labor. Scandinavia flirted with it briefly, and now they've almost entirely shut down the immigration spigot. Most of Europe has turned back against the same thing, because it's harmful to the weakest working classes.
The primary argument is whether the US should match eg Canada and switch to a merit system. At a time when low skill labor is going to be automated away, it's extremely obvious which way the US will have to move. And if the US does not move that way, the cost will drown the fiscal budget and continue to hammer the poorest workers.
I mean, immigration has been exploited by the owning class to force wages down.
Say in Canada, the workforce was set to be short around 2 million people. They're not even all retired yet and Canada has imported around 8 million bodies.
I don't know why people feel they can't ethically criticize immigration. TBH I suspect you've been conditioned by the owners.
I didn't mean to assign a value judgement to this -- maybe I can phrase it better. It's not that the "local" people don't want to do certain jobs, it's that the capital owners are not willing to pay fair wages for labour, and then only people who are desperate enough (poor immigrants) end up doing do these jobs.
I'd love to hear some examples where this has caused technological stagnation and blocked skilled migration -- US and Canada provide solid counter-examples to these claims. Both countries take in immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum, from coveted H1B high-paying tech jobs, to seasonal farm workers who exist in slavery-like circumstances. Both countries show significant, sustained technological innovation.
I agree this is destructive to the social fabric, and it separates us into strata. But I have a hard time believing that immigration is the cause; a simpler explanation would interpret it as one of the symptoms, with the underlying causes being closely related to the relentless transfer of wealth to an ever-shrinking "elite".
Well, in some cases it's that the people coming from overseas are willing to get paid less for the same job. The 'evil capitalist' sees this as a way to get cheaper labor.
I think that this can be alleviated without being anti-immigrant though. For example, make it easier for H1Bs to move between jobs and/or start their own businesses so that they don't have to feel so tied to the employer that they don't want to risk 'rocking the boat' too much. Or make it so that switching jobs doesn't 'reset the counter' on building up towards citizenship (or is it just a green card, I forget).
That's why you import labour en mass, pay them less and kick them out when you're done with them. At least that seems to be my country's solution? Literally a permanent underclass of temporary foreign workers propping up parts of the economy.
If my country (Canada) is anything to go by, instead of allowing market forces to increase low wages, they just change the rules to temporarily import workers instead.
Lots of companies rely on the Temporary Foreign Worker program to fill menial minimum-wage jobs, often paying those TFWs below minimum-wage and abusing them. Similarly, the student visa program is a backdoor for lots of companies (particularly delivery & logistics). I also used to work at a government-sponsored employment centre where I met hundreds of skilled new-immigrants who gave up everything to emigrate, only to arrive in Canada and realize they'd been deceived about their prospects (e.g. the barriers to recertification).
I am not against immigration — both my spouse and I are children of immigrants — but it's important to differentiate between reasonable immigration policies and excessive ones designed to prop up a failing system by constantly injecting new bodies. Canada's immigration system is the latter; it predominantly benefits the rich and nobody else.
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