Canada's Immigration Policy
 

Moving this discussion from the Barrhaven LRT | Proposed thread in the Transportation forum.

I mostly agree but will take it a step further. People confuse immigrants with refugees.

Refugees "might rely on social services for the first 3-4 years as they integrate" but they are taken on humanitarian grounds because as a civilized, developed society it is the right thing to do.

Immigrants are selected based on their qualifications and how they will benefit the country. Most don't rely on social services at all as they need to prove that they either have someone to support them locally or have a job that they can jump right into. As a result, they are not a drain on society but a huge benefit for the reasons you pointed out.

We don't need a local thread for this.

Thanks - the discussion was indeed not germane to Barrhaven LRT :haha:

Feel free to move the discussion to where you think it belongs. I just know it wasn't related to Barrhaven LRT.

Just delete the original post as off-topic and then delete this thread. The Canada forum has an immigration thread.

Users can't delete posts. Please provide link to the immigration thread for future replies.

QUOTE
Originally Posted by Aylmer View Post
Think about this a bit. An immigrant who comes in might rely on social services for the first 3-4 years as they integrate but then they become working net contributors to society.
But growing up in Canada, I benefited from social services for the first 22 years of my life in subsidized childcare, subsidized health services, free dental until 14, subsidized university, tax breaks for my parents, etc. It has taken me 23 years to become a net contributor to society with a job that pushes me above the poverty line.

An immigrant comes raised and educated on someone else’s dime. And we get to chose people with valuable skills.
A Canadian-born baby will be a drain on ressources for two decades. And even then, there is FAR from a guarantee that that person will end up developing any useful skills (we can all think of examples ).

Have babies for love. Have them because it’s a beautiful thing to watch a human grow. But don’t have them for economic performance - they’re just not a solid financial or societal investment.



Immigrants & refugees often bring young children, and/or bear new children, who would add more burdens to society as they haven't built their local social network yet.

At the end of the day, it's not fair for taxpayers to fund so much immigration & refugees, when we cannot even afford children ourselves & have social systems that are already bursting at the seams.

What about taxpayers who have to pay much of the thousands for cancer treatment out of pocket?

What about taxpayers who need a little help with their fertility or need surrogacy?

What about taxpayers who avoid having more children because they cannot afford to?

Meanwhile so many foreigners are being welcomed here on on our dime. I'm not saying don't have immigration or don't help refugees at all. I'm saying we need to help people do pay into the system first, and find a more fair balance.

That's not a government issue, that's a personal finance issue. If you need government assistance to pay for expenses related to your baby then maybe you shouldn't be having kids.

The same goes for fertility treatments. I've known 3 people who opted for fertility treatments and not one of them expected the government to pay for it. It was their choice to start a family and they knew the costs associated with it.

So much of what you said is based on a false premise. The points system we use for immigrants gives us high quality, well educated and driven people with skills our economy can use. Usually they're at least middle class in their country of origin. In fact, because we're not paying the cost of educating these people who will be part of our workforce, other countries could complain that we're stealing their top talent after they paid the costs of said education. Immigrants are a damn good deal for Canada. Note that since we have stopped growing naturally we will depend on these people to support our retirements.

Some level of protectionism (I don't know what kind) needs to go away first, though, or else we will have lots of immigrants working as cashiers that could have worked as professors, doctors, etc.

My high school teacher talked about this, and 5 years later I still remember.

Speaking of supporting retirements, yea healthcare for baby boomers will require an enormous tax base. :o

Letting in some skilled immigrants who are willing to respect our culture is fine.

It's the unskilled unpatriotic foreigners that add unfair burdens to our society -- uneducated family reunification immigrants, elderly parents who come here just in time to collect OAS, healthcare tourists, birth tourists, endless numbers of refugees and their massive families and many young children.

We need to comfortably take care of our own taxpayers 1st, before choosing to be saviour of the world.

Family unification is a pretty small percentage and parents/grandparents is a pretty small percentage of that (about 17,000 last year). And they can't collect OAS (which is based on years spent in Canada).

Healthcare tourists are paying money, so are not really a burden (and there are way better health tourist destinations than Canada).

Agree with you on the birth tourism. That is ridiculous.

What you're calling "endless numbers of refugees".is about 60k in a population of 37 million.

There are certainly problems. The people that create the points system do not communicate with the people who regulate professions (which is why we end up with taxi-driving surgeons). Immigrants disproportionately end up in the GTA and lower mainland of BC (contributing to sprawl, pollution, transportation problems, etc) while most of the country struggles with population decline. The federal government loves the refugee photo ops but dumps most of the costs onto municipalities.

I think you're right that some of the low-skill jobs could be done by people already here, but too many low skill Canadians would rather play video games in their parents basement than do hard work.

17,000 is huge! Say the net fiscal cost of a parent/grandparent through the family reunification system is something like $100,000 in present value (I think this is conservative). Then the program costs $17 billion annually, or $500 per person every year. That is a massive and unfair fiscal burden.

Wow, talk about completely making things up, pulling figures out of the air, and bad math. This is how fake news is created.

Why would your "conservative figure" for reuniting a parent cost twice the average wage? It's not like we're waiting on these people hand and foot. Um, and 17K X 100K is 1.7 B

Why is this thread in the "Ottawa" forum when the topic is national in scope?

17,000 is about 0.05% of our total population. And as noted, elderly immigrants don't receive CPP or OAS once they get here (as they are based on time spent working and living in Canada, respectively).

Locked. Continue the discussion here or a similar thread...
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=231244