Since we allow a new wave of them in every year, these problems you are calling short term will continue. We should be greatly reducing the family class of immigration, being way more selective with the skills class and adjusting the annual numbers up and down according to the annual job figures. We also need to find a way to address immigrants clustering together in a few cities, straining the infrastructure while other communities would welcome them. Find a way to force immigrants to go to those communities or don't come to Canada.

I really don't know much about immigration, but I've been led to understand that the Canadian birth rate is not high enough to maintain our enetitlement programs, and that's why we need immigration.

The point Andy makes is yes we need immigration.

We dont need 300,000 a year when we have high unemployment,
and we dont need to import grandma and grandpa who pay nothing, contribute
nothing except to the ghetto, and use our social systems.

I'll gripe at the immigrants all I want, but it's kind of counter-logical to blame them for problems and crises that our own wonderful upper class is entirely responsible for precipitating.

I think my initial posts got moderated - thought I had included excerpts. Doubt if the critics bothered to read the linked articles, which is why I like to include part of them in my posts.

The native Canadian population has a negative population growth rate currently, which is expected to level off over time into a plateau. This deviation below the replacement rate is typically seen as just before the 2.1 replacement rate is found.

Yes, immigration is expected to alleviate some of the problems in the long term. One source I provided (and I can likely find it again) quoted a 30% decrease potentially in those problems due to immigration in some form, but we still need to make changes. Personally, I think people simply have to get used to the idea that not only do we get to live longer, but we have to work longer since we live longer too. I already plan to work for as long as possible.

I absolutely agree with this part of Thanos' post. I find it kind of odd especially since those most worked up about immigrants coming to Canada are the same folks very willing to ardently argue about how the upper class is screwing us all and we shouldn't blame those on other pay scales as much as we are.

Yet when it comes to a thread about immigration, suddenly immigrants are a massive problem in Canada. Wage inequality plays a larger role for problems in Canada than does immigration.

Not really. As much as I like to rag on the immigrants what's really fucked up the United States has been all the outsourcing of industrial- and middle-class jobs to the third world. And, as opposed to our wishy-washy Canadian way of doing things, the United States really doesn't provide a gravy train of free goodies for immigrants as soon as they step off the plane; maybe California does, with all this 'sanctuary city' nonsense they've got going for illegals from Mexico, but on the federal level government assistance to immigrants is no where near what we give them when they show up in Canada.

It's one thing to blame them for coming here and "stealing" jobs (which is a crock anyway since 99% of the time they're filling the shitty and lowest-level jobs no one else here wants to take anymore). It's something else altogether to somehow manage to hold them responsible because some greedy CEO's or those evil cocksuckers on Wall Street think it's a cool idea to get rid of as many working North American jobs as possible to 'increase shareholder value'. Or just because they've decided that unions are just too annoying to deal with anymore.

I'll gripe at the immigrants all I want, but it's kind of counter-logical to blame them for problems and crises that our own wonderful upper class is entirely responsible for precipitating.

Unless we keep importing more and more people we'll never solve this problem with immigration. Immigrants also get old and adopt the same breeding rates as Canadians. An when we import their aged parents and grandparents, that just makes the problem worse, not better.

As for Borjas etc. The studies I saw you put up in the past always seemed to be a tangent to what we were discussing. So, show me a study that directly shows that immigration in Canada has not depressed wages in any way in the last 20 years. And one that looks at the same question that Grubel does but comes up with a different conclusion. I really doubt you'll be able to do so,espcecially the last one. So for you to claim my source is wrong, when you have none to counter it isn't right. Nobody else seems to have addressed that simple question - low income people cost the govt more in services than they contribute. That's true for native Canadians as well. The point is that there is no point in importing a bunch more people to also be working poor here, depressing the wages and costing the govt money. Even Grubel makes that point, even tho he's a right wing Fraser Institute type. He says that if we had higher low end wages it would cost the govt a lot less in revenues, would in fact increase govt revenues so we could all pay less taxes. He doesn't look at the social costs part of the equation of course, how it would help to build a more cohesive and harmonious society. And that saves money again in the legal and health systems. It's win win.