pigeonburger
5d ago
The system being implemented is a spoils system, and the question to answer is whether it is a result of or a cause of a drop in civic virtue.
pigeonburger
5d ago
That's for a spouse, the situation I'm familiar with. I checked again, and for parents and grandparents, the sponsor vouches for 20 years (except in Quebec where it's 10 years).
If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship.
The number would be 3 years then. The requirement to qualify is being a permanent resident and having lived in Canada for 3 years in the last 5 years.
pigeonburger
8hr ago
Her was not dystopian? A divorcee unready for another relationship works through his issues through a relationship with an AI, and when the AI leaves for reasons the movie implies he is ready for another relationship with a woman.
If anything, it's optimistic regarding human-AI relationships.
pigeonburger
5d ago
I don't think the trust problem is a response to the selfishness problem, because just saying "people are being selfish" has no explanatory power. Are people more selfish because of genetics? Have all the selfless people selected out of the gene pool?
On the other hand, if you present selfishness as a rational response to a society that they don't trust will repay pro-social behavior, you get a lot further with explanations that match observations. Trust is downstream of shared identity, experience and culture (see: Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone). If I think of my fellow citizens as being somewhat similar to me, I can easily imagine them coming to the same pro-social conclusions as me. Shared identity, experience and culture are impacted negatively by multiculturalism and by emphasing diversity. Hence why high trust societies are typically homogenous societies.
This is about Canada, not the US.
Disclaimer: I've used family reunification sponsorship to help my wife move to live with me here. But she's not elderly, she's from a western country and she will contribute to society.
But anyway. I don't think it needs to be steelmanned: it's pretty obviously a nice thing to allow people to move in to live with their family. I think it's up to the other side to demonstrate that we cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that they cannot make that case. Chain migration exists. But I would be more in favor of slowing chain migration at the source, taking it as a granted that an economic migrant is likely a beachhead for a larger group, and thus being (A LOT) more selective in allowing them in. This, rather than disallowing family reunification, which has a clearer case of being a pro-social, pro-human justification for immigration.
*EDIT: Though I guess I'm open to some changes to family reunification. I'd be open to increase the delay between immigration and being able to sponsor. I think now it's 5 years from the moment you become a permanent resident. Maybe 10 years after becoming citizen? Long enough that anyone planning on chain migration will probably look somewhere else, unless they have extreme patience. I don't know how the pathways for immigration are for an extended family group, maybe these need to be developped/improved so a prospective immigrant and all the family he wants to bring to Canada can all attempt to immigrate together, so they can't then complain that it's inhumane and evil that we won't allow all the cousins to move in with them after we accepted one of them.
pigeonburger
2hr ago
Yeah, I saw that news too; someone I had never about before pinging on my radar twice within less than a month is a sure sign to me something is up. Someone is trying to market that person to me. It could be her marketing herself succesfully as it got the attention of two sites where I get linked to news, or a third party powerful enough to have it pushed past the filters to make sure people like me heard about her.
pigeonburger
3d ago
I don't think it's about shame, but it's absolutely about incentives. In a society that reflects you, where everyone has had a similar upbringing to yours, probably looks somewhat like you, has gone through roughly the same events as you, you can reasonably expect your neighbor to act approximately like you.
So in that kind of society, the incentive to be the kind of person who returns a wallet is that you get to live in a society that would likely return your wallet too.
If your society is not just atomized, but also doesn't reflect you, the link between the action and the incentive is harder to see, and by that token becomes less strong.
pigeonburger
5d ago
I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
pigeonburger
4d ago
No, how long before you get permanent residency is dependent on what pathway you're using. My wife visited as a tourist before we started the permanent residency process, but she never actually lived here officially until she got it. Technically you don't even need to have been in Canada. You're eligible for citizenship 3 years after having started living in Canada, and once you are a permanent resident. So you could even count, for instance, years spent as a temporary resident with a student or work visa before you got permanent residency.
have lived in Canada for at least 3 out of the last 5 years (1,095 days)
Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
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