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Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek
When Canada is going to take an “unlimited” amount of refugees while being the third largest population of Ukrainians it’s going to be a lot more then a couple thousand. This is a precedent that has never been set in the world stage for any crisis that has involved millions of people being displaced since WW2. I could easily see Manitoba getting 100k or more people never mind the rest of the country because there is no indication that Putin is going to back down and unfortunately an unfathomable amount of people will be displaced. That’s just reality.
Also do you truly believe those Western and Central European powers have the necessary infrastructure in place to take potentially 10 million or more Ukrainians? Romania is not even a developed country and Poland is on the outside looking in. They’re already struggling with current numbers.
I know a lot of Canadians like to downplay this but speaking from experience people moving from places like Ukraine to Canada receive a quality of life increase IMMEDIATELY. The Canadian dollar being relatively strong, children accessing superior education, socially very welcoming and accepting people, and access to food and clean water that we again take for granted. You think the LGBT+ community or visible minorities in Ukraine want to stay there anyway? And at the end of the day when/if they move back to a hopefully independent democracy this life experience will be crucial for a lot of the youth that will arrive here when they rebuild the nation.
However, if Putin is successful and a puppet government is installed would they even want to go back? We can’t guarantee the outcome of a successful resistance, so for a lot of Ukrainians when they hear their relatives are in Canada they can breath a much larger sigh of relief compared to if they were in Poland or anywhere in Europe really.
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Finally, someone who gets it.
While I think 100,000 Ukrainians coming to Manitoba is definitely on the high end of the spectrum, there is no reason to believe the province would not admit 10,000+ Ukrainians (5,000+/year) in the next two years. For Canada, the figure I would estimate, would be 125,000+ each year , for at least the next two to three years (I estimate 400,000 total). DO we actually believe Poland, who currently has one million Ukrainians, has the infrastructure to house them long term?
We have to consider the fact that places like China and India accounted for 150,000 immigrants in 2019. Considering the fact that the Ukraine is a place that is more desirable to draw immigrants from, I can easily see them finishing #1 for the next 3 or more years in terms of immigrants.
Whether we like to admit it or not, Europeans are more likely to be accepted in Canadian society than Asians or Africans. This is probably due to systemic racism (Irish, Jews, Japanese, German and most recently, Muslim immigrants experienced this in the past 150 years here), but it is what it is. This could explain why the conflict is getting intense media coverage, while humanitarian crisis in Africa and Asia receive only the fraction of the attention. Even I remember how much coverage the Civil War in Yugoslavia received in the early 90s, when a genocide in Rwanda went virtually unnoticed by the World.
Having said that, the most optimistic thing that can happen in this war, is that it lasts another few weeks, the Ukrainians continue fierce resistance, and the Russian public turns on Putin, and there is a military coup, which finally ends the war, and forces the Russian military to deal with internal matters. Worst case scenario, which I do not even want to think of, is Putin doubles down (which he seems to be doing), continues to commit war crimes, NATO countries supply the Ukraine with fighter jets, anti-aircraft missles, and intelligence to counter the Russians. Putin considers this an act of war by NATO, then attacks the Baltic countries, starting WW3. Catastrophic events unfold, causing hundreds of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and other groups to abandon their countries and seek refuge in Europe and North America.
However, I am going slightly off topic, but it's not inconceivable that this crisis could see Canada admitting well over 500,000 immigrants/year (with Manitoba taking in 20,000/year) for the next few years.