@bilked
For what its worth, my view is that Canada clearly needs more immigration to remain globally competitive in the era of declining birth rates and demographic crisis, not less.
I'm just gonna repeat a previous
post of mine in this thread which completely blows up this myth:
"Ah perfect, I was waiting to bust out a StatsCan report from a few years ago questioning the "immigration good" meme:
This report aims to describe the methods used for the calculation of projection parameters, the various projection assumptions and their rationales.
www150.statcan.gc.ca
"The sociocultural absorptive capacity for increased immigration may be approaching limits within some of Canada’s urban centres in particular."
"The economic benefits of immigration, often used to justify planned increases,
may be questionable and could be held up to increasing scrutiny if levels continue to increase in the future.
Most advocates of the economic benefits of higher immigration do not support their claims with evidence, nor quantify the additional investments needed for successful integration (Grubel 2016a, 2016b; Griffith September 1 2017; Todd 2017). As Hou and Picot (2016) note, measuring the net benefit of a given immigration level is difficult since the various costs and benefits associated with the diverse goals attached to immigration cannot be compared on the same scale."
"
Immigration has both negative (added competition for jobs and housing) and positive (larger consumer base and increased businesses) effects (Riddell et al. 2016). An increase in overall gross domestic product resulting from a larger population is arguably only beneficial if it also translates into a rise in quality of life for an average Canadian.
However, increasing the size of the economy does not necessarily create a proportional increase in individual wellbeing (Riddell et al. 2016, Beaujot 2017)."
"The demographic benefits of immigration, often used to justify planned increases,
may be questionable and could be held up to increasing scrutiny if levels continue to increase in the future. While international migration can partly reduce old-age dependency ratios,
it cannot reverse the trend of population aging (United Nations 2016). It has been found that immigration to Canada has both rejuvenating and aging effects on the population, resulting in
very little net change in terms of population aging (Caron Malenfant et al. 2011; Riddell et al. 2016; Robson and Mahboubi 2018)."
"Furthermore, certain Canadian demographers such as Beaujot (2017) have recently argued that as an alternative to continual population growth through sustained high immigration,
stabilization of the population (also known as a stationary population) would in fact permit the achievement of greater quality of life standards, social cohesion and longer-term ecological goals. According to Romaniuk (2017), immigration has been wrongly considered a “palliative solution for all problems, real and imaginary, that beset Western societies” (p. 168). He argues that rather than increasing immigration—which in his view does little to combat population aging,
has no proven record of economic benefit and holds potential negative societal and ecological impacts"
www.thestar.com
