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Canada was the great laboratory of democracy that we needed. Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration.
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
This has had disastrous and likely permanent consequences. While leftists might have cheered the new, vibrant additions to the nation's food and street culture, even right-leaning Canadians were generally pro-immigration. The consensus was that Canada's points-based admissions system would lead to incredible economic gains if nothing else. We now know that that is false. Canada's economy has been stagnant over the last 10 years while the US economy has soared. In fact, on a per-capita level Canada's economy has been in a recession now for over 6 quarters.
Canada's population has increased by large amounts since 2015. The country now groans under an influx of millions of new immigrants. Since Trudeau took office, Canada's population has increased from less than 36 million to over 41 million. Nearly 100% of the gain has been as a result of immigration. Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases. Wages, on the other hand have stagnated, and remain at levels far below those of the US. Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to. The frog is being boiled much too quickly, and people are noticing.
Mass immigration is now proven a failed policy. It remains to be seen whether it is possible for Canada to recover. I fear it might not be. With the Conservatives in charge, things will get bad less quickly, but it will take years for the consequences of the Trudeau years to be fully felt.
There's a disconnect here no? If you are using a points based admission system to get the best qualified immigrants, they aren't going to be building houses. For that you want low skilled immigration (or work visas). You can't expect to only get the highest quality immigrants AND that they will do construction.
Yes, I know. And yet somehow, "we need immigrants to build houses and take care of all our old people" seems to be the normie pro-immigration stance.
It didn't work for Canada, it didn't work for Australia, Germany, France, the UK, the US, etc... It never works.
In any case, high-skill immigration, like low-skill immigration, is fraught with challenges and is generally negative sum, unless the immigrants are truly elite. I think Musk's "15,000/year" is a pretty good ballpark estimate. But for countries already choking on surplus college educated baristas, adding even more midwit college grads is only going to make everyone poorer.
Considering that the upside of high skill immigration (e.g. Musk, Jensen Huang) is absolutely enormous, I'd be curious to see the math showing high skill immigration to be "negative sum".
Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout. There's a vast difference between Jensen Huang and an H1B working for Cognizant or other low level grind factories.
We can quibble about the 15,000 and I'll admit it's just a number. Maybe double it, maybe triple it. But over 30 years, 15,000 a year amounts to nearly half a million. It's not nothing.
But I do think it's imperative that the system works to identify truly high skill people.
I doubt it. Let's check, as they say, the Early Life.
Huang:
Would you have let Jensen or his dad into the country? Is there anything here that indicates either of them is a top 15k tier talent? If, against all odds, he was able to start NVidia in Taiwan, do you think he would move to the US, or keep running his company in Taiwan, as Morris Chang (who left the US due to frustrations in getting ahead at IBM) did?
Elon Musk:
Again, would you let this guy into the country? A Saskatchewan sawmill operator who overstayed his student visa? Is this what elite human capital looks like?
Okay, I'm stumped then. How do we allow top tier talent without just letting everyone in?
Musk and Huang wouldn't have been admitted under some sort of H1B/points scheme either. So the only way to get them is open borders? That seems like a bad bargain, even for geniuses of that caliber.
What would you do if you were the king of the United States?
There's a reason that we're in this situation, and it's because it's not an easy problem.
I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps there could be a way to admit people like that selectively for them to start businesses bere, but note that Huang's success is at least partly thanks to the guys he met at his second job.
It's entirely possible that you have to either err on the side of letting in too many or too few, although there may be some obvious gains by cutting down on clueless imported cognizant employees. At least, I am not aware of any cognizant H1Bs that went on to do great things.
That makes sense to me. I wish you would post more top level content here. As much as I hate you needling my comments, I think you are a clear thinker.
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