Preamble

I don't do "political" pieces like this, much less on powder-keg issues like immigration (a white guy talking about immigration...oof¹), but recent events call for more dialogue on this issue.

I encourage the reader to be open minded. On this topic many short-circuit to evaluating information in the context of "is this good or bad for my side", where a side is often a preferred political party. That is hugely destructive to meaningful discourse, and it makes it easy to turn people against their own best interests.

A Country At The Breaking Point

Canada is doing victory laps after "poaching" 10,000 H1B holders from the United States², enticing them with the promise of a rapid path to permanent residency and then citizenship³.

Immigration advocates in the US are declaring that Canada is winning the war for tech talent. Immigration advocates in Canada are declaring it a success story and demanding More More More.

Nothing about this feels like winning. Whether you're a new grad with zero job prospects, a veteran Canadian tech worker juggling a discounted rate of pay⁴, or those outside the tech industry who are rendered homeless due to the addition of over a million residents last year alone, the torrent continuing at a record pace⁵, this smells like another splash of gasoline from a malevolent arsonist. The flames grow higher.

While this measure is small and manageable by itself, and arguably is reasonable if a tad pathetic⁶, it comes as one in a series of disastrous policies. It is another raindrop in a deluge of an unending series of special programs that give away residency to a country that is at the breaking point.

I should declare that I am a Canadian tech employer, ostensibly the privileged group this measure panders to. After a career working primarily for US employers I hung my own shingle to pitch solutions and have met with good success. I operate lean, but scale out and up on a need basis depending upon the engagement, often with a core group of talented resources.

Finding talent, even in niche, high skill areas, is easy in Canada if the compensation is competitive. Even jobs paying a fraction of competitive rates are being overwhelmed with an avalanche of resumes from decent candidates, a tech workforce cowed in desperation.

There hasn't been a tech worker shortage in Canada in decades. There has long been a compensation shortage, and now add a cost of living gap making the discrepancy even worse. The best Canadian candidates flee to the US, leveraging the TN visa available under NAFTA. The government's solution to that "brain drain" is to suppress wages further by giving away residency to millions, which is a tactic we have seen across industries again and again.

This government, as with those before, is constantly citing illusory "worker shortages" that are backed by zero empirical metrics, spurred on by greedy industry figures⁷ and interested parties who want to turn the screws tighter. If you want to push wages down, cry about a worker shortage — cue the famous "no one wants to work anymore!" whine — and the government will import all the exploitable manpower you want. When that group gets wise and start demanding more, shaking off the desperation and exploitability, move onto the next batch.

After an immigration-fuelled increase in population at a rate that makes developing countries gasp — Canada's growth rate of 2.7% is higher than every developed country by a mile, and exceeds many developing countries — a disastrous, predictable housing shortage⁸ has led to the government and banks⁹ declaring that the solution should be, surprise surprise, more immigration¹⁰. At this point they're selling quarters for a nickel and telling you that business is going great, but to stem the losses they need to redouble sales. They need more quarters, and with that all will be resolved. Rinse and repeat.

And for partisans who think I'm hoping to exploit a situation as political rhetoric because I think it serves My Side, I'm a progressive who thinks the Other Guy is set to do the same or worse, and his populist pandering and anti-science adjacency is disqualifying. This country is headed for some political dark ages, and we need to come to terms with this now. Policies are pursued that are the greatest threat to social and progressive policies in decades. We are setting back the clock, increasing income equality (the rich have never been richer), and sabotaged an entire demographic¹¹ that is not just falling through the cracks, they're actively being stomped through them. Economic homelessness — not the more easily ignored mental health / addiction variety — is exploding. Millions of low income Canadians are in the tenuous position that if they lost their current housing, they will have zero options. Landlords — whose ranks include much of the political class — are busy plotting renovictions.

Wage suppressing mass immigration and foreign worker programs benefit the 1% — those who often live in enclaves and vacation overseas, and for whom the problems in wider society are abstract, distant concepts — at the expense of the rest of Canada. It is a direct assault on worker rights and the wealth and wellbeing of Canadians and Canadian society, and a confluence of events are dangerously pushing Canada towards an inflection point. Canada's policies have led to a widening wealth deficiency relative to our peers, a devastating productivity gap ¹², and a quality of life that is on the precipice. While many countries are dealing with inflation echos of massive (but necessary) COVID era government spends causing an affordability crisis, Canada has a particularly tenuous house of cards.

I live in a big house in an affluent neighbourhood in a prosperous, safe city, and have valuable tech skills that I can sell worldwide. Yet I refuse to ignore the growing tent cities, the growing legions of people begging in the middle of intersections, the growing theft rings, or the situational peril so much of this country is now in. I'm not going to be silenced under the fear that criticism of the shameful devaluing of Canadian residency might hurt one political party or benefit another.

Canada is a Nation of Immigrants

A portion of readers will have decided that this piece is detrimental to their political team or personal interests¹³ and will be adopting one of the many cliché dismissals. They'll call me a racist (ignore that the ones who suffer from this immigration crisis are often minorities, and that many are at the forefront of calling for immigration to be curtailed¹⁴), cite a South Park "Dey took er jobs" episode, or point out that some far right creep has said something that partly overlaps with a point in this essay.

Don't do that.

Canada is a nation of immigrants. At every level and in every space this country has been built and enriched by immigration. Over 25% of the residents of Canada were born elsewhere. Another 18% are second generation. Canada is a massively diverse country, and its largest city, Toronto, is 56% "visible minorities", eclipsing global melting pots like New York City.

Canada's business successes are oft built around and by immigrants. Immigrants have an outsized contribution to academics, sports, the arts and media. Immigration has been a fantastic success story. Many of the world's most intelligent, skilled and creative have come and enriched the fabric of Canada.

Canada's declining birthrate means immigration is a critical demographic solution for a stable population, trading reputation and quality of life for sustainability and stability via an educated, working-age population. No government program or incentive is going to lift domestic fertility rates to replacement levels, and if anything the trend is veering in the opposite direction and is unlikely to improve.

Canada has leaned on immigration as the solution, following the lead of every developed nation apart from Japan.

Canada's traditional immigration policy has been ruthless. Canada uses a point system that attempts to try to ensure that candidates will be an asset to Canada¹⁵. It is a system built to poach the best from developing nations, ideally after that nation has spent its meagre resources educating and training the migrant.

In contrast to that infamous 2017 tweet by Trudeau — "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada" — the reality is that Canada makes every effort to keep the subjects of that missive out of Canada. Those fleeing persecution are unlikely to get a visa and thus can't be accepted by air or sea carriers. Geographic situation means that migrants will come through the filter that is the United States, who we conveniently have a safe third country agreement with: If you claim status after arriving from the US, you'll be turned back.

For a short while migrants facing a deportation order in the US¹⁶ realized they could walk across the land border and circumvent that safe third country agreement, but that loophole has since been closed. Purposefully. Make them America's problem.

The point of this is that the myth of Canada's sympathetic open arms is untrue. That tweet was an ill-considered embarrassment timed to take an opportunistic swipe at a jackass South of the border. It will forever be a Canadian Cringe Moment.

Instead Canada has a pay to play immigration system, alongside a parallel system where individual Canadians — generally wealthy Canadians — get to basically gift residency in return for some personal enrichment.

Privatize the Benefits / Socialize the Detriments

Years back we were searching for a nanny for our young children. All of the resources recommended bringing over a foreign live-in nanny. The benefit was that we would get a grateful worker who we could, in effect, exploit, because it gave them a path towards permanent Canadian residency. This struck me as insane: As private citizens we got to personally leverage the promise of Canadian residency for our own personal benefit.

We hired locally through a service.

But the same thing is happening writ large across Canada. The temporary foreign worker program is exploding, bringing hundreds of thousands¹⁷ of foreigners to Canada to fill jobs that Canadians, we are told, "won't do", or at least won't do for a given level of compensation or in a given set of conditions, or sometimes simply without the sufficient level of gratitude necessary for their wealthier compatriots.

Factory workers. Fish processing plants. Farm workers. Coffee shops¹⁸. Fast food. A demographic¹⁹ are finding themselves in competition with armies of desperate, exploitable foreign workers. Workers who have normalized living 8 to a room and living via a food bank. Disgusting situations are arising.

But that wasn't enough.

The government ²⁰ has now made other programs de facto TFW programs as well, turned the international student spigot into an exploitable workforce for business owners, offering a basically unlimited work permit to students.

The number of international "students" is exploding — an eight-fold increase in ten years, seeing exponential growth — in a situation that is grossly exploitative (both by the students, and by those involved in this program in any way: the politicians, the colleges, the employers). The entire situation is despicable.

There are currently well over 800,000 international "students" in Canada²¹. In contrast there are ~950,000 international students in the United States, a country with over 12x more student spaces. Where students in the US are largely the best of the best studying at prestigious universities, the vast bulk in Canada are not.

Canada gives these students an open work permit, and many are working in factories, fast food, acting as delivery drivers, and so on. It's an enormous workforce to use to wage suppress. In contrast the United States gives students a permit to work up to 20 hours, but solely on campus. US international students are limited to working in the campus coffee shop, doing cleaning for the facility, and so on, and their reason for being in the United States is for an excellent education.

As if that wasn't enough, Canada also offers a path to permanent residency via the student path, and this is the reason it has seen such enormous interest. Families in India are selling their farm to send their child to work in Canada (let's discard the foolish notion that there is any educational aspirations in this venture for many of these "students") in hopes that it leads to permanent residency, where the child can then sponsor their extended family as residents.

Colleges — many strip mall diploma mill type operations – get to charge massive tuitions to these students²². Consultants are demanding enormous fees. Private businesses get to enjoy a desperate workforce and the wonderful effects of wage suppression.

Some Canadian colleges now have 70%+ international students, largely from India. This should be an outrage, completely corrupting the purpose of these institutions (going from institutes of education to being fronts to purchase a work permit and path to residency). The entire situation is grotesque. It should outrage all Canadians.

Food banks are overwhelmed with international students, who as a basic requirement of an education visa are supposed to be financially capable of supporting themselves for their tenure, yet somehow have to work 40 hours a week and still lean on food banks to survive.

And all of it represents parallel paths to residency. Historic highs of traditional migration. Refugee and irregular flows. Special programs. Regular feel good pronouncement by the government for some world crisis or other. Now add an unfathomably huge student and TFW pathway. It is a confluence of abuse that leads to a hostility to a simple H1B program that might seem out of proportion in isolation.

What are we doing?

And what happened to this purportedly progressive government? Who do they serve? It certainly doesn't seem to be Canadians or the interests of Canada, as the wealth and lifestyle of the average Canadian is declining as our productivity falls. We import millions from low carbon areas of the world to the worst carbon footprint lifestyle on the planet, yet pretend that we're an environmental leader or are in a position to dictate anything? Our cities sprawl and traffic worsens.

Now we're normalizing tent cities, strangers sharing beds and living a dozen to a bedroom.

There should be riots in the street at this point, and in the near future it will likely come to that.

The Likely Retorts

Canada Is Aging. Everyone is Retiring. This is necessary.

Like all developed countries, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, and Canada is getting older.

This is a problem that we need to address. And rational immigration does address it. Careful, selective, diverse immigration, bringing the best to enrich this nation, as has happened for decades. Canada has (had?) a great name brand and this pathetic whoring to any and all is destroying it, turning it into a half-rate "almost USA"²³. Setting up exploitable systems to enrich a few is not a reasonable solution.

Canada had the highest population growth in the developed world in absolute numbers last year. Let's discard with the myth that the extraordinarily high levels are merely satisfying demographic balancing (and no numeric accounting demonstrates the same). Among the Canadian political class there is this dreamy notion of the "Century Initiative" where the target is 100 million, and the whole "ageing country" thing is just an easy cover.

"Canadians" won't do the work that is necessary. We need to bring in hard workers to function

If a Tim Hortons can't function without TFWs, and can't adapt to offer competitive benefits to attract a workforce, it should be shut down. If a delivery service needs exploited international students to operate, it should be shut down. These are not necessary for the functioning of this country, and subsidizing them by selling citizenship to enrich some franchise owner is not reasonable.

Institutions of higher learning should not be a front for selling work permits or a spot in the permanent residency line.

TFWs in their many forms (including now the student pathway) have long been a destructive dependency used instead of automation or modernization, through which our productivity keeps falling further behind peers. We can directly contrast with the United States which beats Canada on every metric. Somehow we need armies of TFWs in an "acute labour shortage" while we have an unemployment rate almost double our peers to the South.

Canadian farming is a perfect example, with many farms operating as if it's the 1940s. Every year an army of central American workers come and do manual labor, often in horrifying conditions. Comparing this with agriculture in the Netherlands is an extraordinary contrast that is revealing. The Netherlands has a more valuable, profitable agricultural industry in a country smaller than Nova Scotia.

The same is true across industries, from factories to food processing. There is no need to modernize or improve, just demand that the government provide you a spigot of exploitables.

You're a colonist on native land

This is a pretty common go-to when discussing immigration in North America, believed to delegitimize any and all borders and controls. Canada's aboriginals were indeed here first and have a legitimate claim.

Among domestic populations, first nations groups have the highest birthrate and are the only group with an above replacement fertility rate.

If a migrant wants to lean on this to dismiss concerns about immigration levels, why migrate here? Why intentionally take advantage of the wrongs of prior colonists for your own benefit? If you truly believe this, morally you should stay away. Eventually the "colonists"²⁴ will fade away, first nations groups will dominate, and it will return to aboriginal land (if genetics are the land deed to a nation).

Canada's population is too small

I work in ML/AI day in and day out. I'm involved in the heart of the industry. I'm optimistic about the impact the industry will have. That optimism is offset by a serious fear of the impact the industry will have.

In the near future, "more people" is going to be a detriment. A nation with the smartest will thrive, but simple numbers will not be a positive. It will be an anchor.

Canada is so big! It needs the people!

Almost everyone who comes to Canada moves to the Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal areas, in that order. The vast majority of Canada live along the US border.

Canada has 1/4 the arable land the US and India have. Much of Canada is inhospitable tundra.

It isn't as big as the rumours claim it to be. Nor do we need to clear-cut the country to move the developing world in. Millions aren't fleeing India because of how great density turned out.

Footnotes follow