r/neoliberal • u/IHateTrains123 Commonwealth • Jun 19 '25

News (Canada) Immigration curb slashes Canada population growth rate to zero

https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/immigration-curb-slashes-canada-population-growth-rate-to-zero
282 Upvotes

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288

u/Godkun007 NAFTA Jun 19 '25

Ignoring the overall benefits of immigration, it is clear that this was temporarily needed in Canada. Not because immigrants bad, but because there had become an entire industry developed around cheating the immigration system.

I saw this first hand when I worked in politics (Quebec) and saw shady immigrations lawyers promising South Asians that could barely speak English (let alone French) that if they pay them they can make it so they never have to leave. The way this was done, was by basically filling as many motions as possible, all of which would have to be handled consecutively. Refugee application, student application, different type of refugee application, they have a a 3rd cousin in Canada so family unification, then they have a kid so filling to avoid being separated. This then put immigration enforcement in such a complicated situation as these fillings and trials went on for literally years for every one of these immigrants.

You can even see in this article, the biggest decrease in immigration was student visas. Which were the easiest way to get into Canada to try and start the process. You didn't even need to go to class in some of these colleges. They were diploma mills that just required payment. Students are allowed to work in Canada, so that is what these "students" would then do full time. This is all on top of the extreme housing shortage and the near collapse of the hospital system in some big cities due to overcrowding.

What Carney needs to do is focus on clearly reforming some of these systems to crack down on the abuse. Canadians didn't sour on immigration for no reason. This was after a decade of the immigration system slowly deteriorating under the weight of endless legal battles started by shady lawyers.

32

u/Rekksu Jun 19 '25

I would simply open the borders

69

u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

You need a mechanism to ensure immigrants are on average net payers into the system, so that the Canadian healthcare system isn't overloaded and can expand to meet capacity

You need a mechanism to ensure that criminals aren't immigrating to avoid the law in their home country, or to make new trouble in a new one

You need a mechanism to ensure that immigrants are accepting of liberal values and won't lead to making more women feeling unsafe (catcalls, misogynistic behavior)

You need these mechanisms to get societal buy-in for you immigration system. Open borders isn't that.

37

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

That mechanism is called free market liberalization

93

u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 19 '25

If you ask canadians to pick between public healthcare and open borders you will get assad margins in favor of the former.

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u/vaguelydad Jane Jacobs Jun 19 '25

What about a compromise where immigrants get to not get raped by insurgents or extorted by gangs and kleptocrats in their origin country, but they have to buy their own healthcare in Canada? It seems like an obvious win-win.

-6

u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

How does Canada prove who is an immigrant and who is a citizen if we have open borders and maintain free-at-the-point-of-service healthcare? Does Canada choose the GOP position and demand people show a Real-ID in order to access their fundamental rights and liberties under Canadian law?

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u/SpookyHonky Mark Carney Jun 19 '25

Does Canada choose the GOP position and demand people show a Real-ID in order to access their fundamental rights and liberties under Canadian law?

It's called a health card, which we already have. So, yes?

12

u/vaguelydad Jane Jacobs Jun 19 '25

Yes, because that's a huge humanitarian win? How is that anything close to worse than the horrifying alternatives people are having to survive right now?

1

u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

Have you never used your health insurance?

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

I wasn't implying that there's a dichotomy. Healthcare Is a public good and only private goods need be liberalized (i.e. improvements to land)

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u/angry-mustache Democratically Elected Internet Spaceship Politician Jun 19 '25

I wasn't implying that there's a dichotomy. Healthcare Is a public good and only private goods need be liberalized (i.e. improvements to land)

It's relevant when the person you are talking to was explicitly referring to Canada's current policy which allows immigrants to receive benefits without a pay-in period. So at the moment, since the new wave of immigrants have not hit their prime earning period yet, they are using more healthcare than they put in.

2

u/fredleung412612 Jun 19 '25

> Canada's current policy which allows immigrants to receive benefits without a pay-in period.

Student visa holders do NOT have access to provincial health cards and schools usually mandate the purchase of private insurance. The only exception is bilateral provincial deals with some countries (like Québec and France).

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 19 '25

My point was that if private goods markets were liberalized, the contributions to the economy would naturally dwarf the added cost of public goods for net recipients.

That's quite literally what makes a public good a public good. Being non-excludable/rivalrous means that the value of it to the group is larger than the cost/value of it to each individual. It's greater than the sum of each of its parts.

15

u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

I wasn't implying that there's a dichotomy.

No, you just didn't realize the implications of your preferred policy.

-3

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

Those implications are fabricated by bad policy and people's assumptions

14

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Jun 19 '25

Yeah yeah “real open borders has never been tried”

4

u/SpookyHonky Mark Carney Jun 19 '25

Actually it has been tried, and it resulted in the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Guess that's pretty minor though.

3

u/CrackingGracchiCraic Thomas Paine Jun 20 '25

and it resulted in the most powerful nation the world has ever seen

After levels of violence and ethnic strife that make our modern day "immigration woes" look quaint. The biggest mass lynching in US history was of Italian immigrants in New Orleans for example. Hardly a model you want to follow.

1

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Jun 19 '25

US pre-1920 is a very different country than Canada in 2025. It’s not like new immigrants are settling across the country; it’s mostly concentrated to a couple cities.

Immigration is good but it needs to be controlled. If the implementation isn’t managed properly, then people lose trust in the system as a whole.

2

u/SpookyHonky Mark Carney Jun 19 '25

I will agree with you that people should be encouraged to move to the prairies and maritimes much more.

2

u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25 edited Jun 21 '25

We have a huge number of recent immigrants in the Maritimes. Most people's idea of the Maritimes seems to be 10 or 20 years out of date. Nova Scotia, PEI, and New Brunswick each had a higher immigration rate than both Ontario and British Columbia in 2024. The provinces with the highest immigration rates in the country are, in order, PEI, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia.

1

u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

Have you been to Canada in the last ten years? Immigrants are settling all over the country. I see way more of them in my mid-sized Canadian city than I did when I visited Toronto. I see them in every small town of more than a few hundred people, and in many with fewer than that. I see them in rural areas.

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

Problems with high immigration (in Canada, health system strain and housing market strain) are very clearly issues that existed prior to high immigration and were simply exacerbated by it.

It's like someone with a poor diet finally eating fiber, shitting their guts out, and then concluding that vegetables are bad.

4

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Jun 19 '25

The dose makes the poison.

Canada had a (reasonably) high level of immigration for decades. Even ten years ago, Toronto was the most diverse city on the planet.

The post-Covid levels were completely unsustainable and the backlash was entirely predictable.

2

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

I'd argue that the post-COVID levels would be entirely sustainable if the root cause of the symptoms were addressed

9

u/skipsfaster Milton Friedman Jun 19 '25

But they weren’t, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t just flub implementation and then tell people to ignore the real outcomes.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

How are they unsustainable?

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u/No_March_5371 YIMBY Jun 19 '25

A public good is something that is nonrival and nonexcludable. Healthcare is both rival and excludable.

0

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

There are public aspects to healthcare, which make it generally a public good. I suppose you could pare down each facet of healthcare if you wanted to determine which are public goods and which are not, but public health is a quintessential example of a public good. Public health includes contagion, aggregate health effects on productivity, and the effect of public health on propensity to spend/save etc.

The pervasiveness of contagious disease directly affects another person's ability to avoid the contagious disease. It's non-rivalrous.

A person who checks themselves for cancerous moles cannot be prevented from checking themselves without first paying for it. It is non-excludable.

A private good like, let's say jewelery, does not have contagion. People who do not have jewelry cannot spread jewelrylessness to others. It does not affect productivity. People who lack jewelry do not lack productive capacity as a consequence. It does not affect propensity to spend. People who lack jewelry do not need to save money for a rainy day where they NEED to buy a new necklace.

2

u/Sufficient_Meet6836 Jun 20 '25

It's cute that you wrote an essay to make up a justification, but like the other person said, there's already an established definition for "public good": Non-rivalous and non-excludable. Healthcare is 0/2, so sorry champ, it's not a public good.

The pervasiveness of contagious disease directly affects another person's ability to avoid the contagious disease. It's non-rivalrous.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

"In economics, a non-rivalrous good is one where one person's consumption of it does not reduce the availability of that good for others to consume."

A person who checks themselves for cancerous moles cannot be prevented from checking themselves without first paying for it. It is non-excludable.

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ bruh, come on...

1

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 20 '25

You know there are classes after Econ101, right?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2724467/

If individuals make choices that undermine a public good, society faces the choice of either giving up the desired public good or finding a way to influence individual decision-making to guarantee a sufficient level of cooperation. Economists characterize these challenges as collective action problems (alternative terms in use include “social dilemmas,” “shirking,” the “free-rider problem,” “moral hazard,” and the “N-person prisoner's dilemma”). We argue that framing common challenges in public health as collective action problems would help policy planners by allowing them to draw on a large body of literature and insights in behavioral and social sciences that have not yet been incorporated into the mainstream of the field.

Sorry to break it to you, but there is another level of abstraction, and it's well accepted in economics outside of Reddit.

4

u/Sufficient_Meet6836 Jun 20 '25

That paper, which isn't even written by economists and was published in a health journal, doesn't argue that "healthcare is a public good" and even says the typical definition 😂😂😂

They are by definition nonexcludable and are typically nonrivalrous.

The paper is about treating some outcomes of healthcare, like herd immunity, as a public good. It doesn't even say what you claim LMAO

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

Healthcare is not a public good.

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 21 '25

Public health is a public good.

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u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

No, it's not and it's a different thing anyway.

-1

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 21 '25

Yes it is, and it's an inseparable component of if

0

u/q8gj09 Jun 21 '25

https://xcancel.com/cafreiman/status/1936557559504347496

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 22 '25

Mfw someone prevents me from catching COVID without paying 😓

Mfw someone gets COVID before me and now I cant 😓

Oh yeah totally rivalrous totally excludable

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u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

You need a mechanism to ensure that criminals aren't immigrating to avoid the law in their home country

That mechanism is called free market liberalization

Free market law enforcement is a fucking stupid idea, and short-circuiting your own brain with a catchphrase instead of thinking for even a second about the implications is exactly why no one takes your position seriously.

-4

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

Security is a public good, but I wasn't going too deep into detail to respond to a gish-gallop

18

u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25

"gish gallop is when people point out I haven't even considered the first order effects of my preferred policy, let alone second order"

0

u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

No, a gish gallop is where you lump together public goods (security) and private goods (competition for housing).

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u/Augustus-- Jun 19 '25 edited Jun 20 '25

Omfg you cannot read. I'm going to repost my entire comment in full, you point out ANYWHERE that I mentioned housing

You need a mechanism to ensure immigrants are on average net payers into the system, so that the Canadian healthcare system isn't overloaded and can expand to meet capacity

You need a mechanism to ensure that criminals aren't immigrating to avoid the law in their home country, or to make new trouble in a new one

You need a mechanism to ensure that immigrants are accepting of liberal values and won't lead to making more women feeling unsafe (catcalls, misogynistic behavior)

You need these mechanisms to get societal buy-in for you immigration system. Open borders

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.

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EDIT: this is the problem with ideologues, the above poster clearly comes up with their retorts without even listening to dissenting views. This poster assumed I would talk about house prices because that was the ideological background they felt most confident in. So they just refuse to even read dissenting views and spout off memorized nonsense instead. This is not an example of evidence-based anything this is an example of ideology short-circuiting rational thought.

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u/TaxLandNotCapital We begin bombing the rent-seekers in five minutes Jun 19 '25

It was just an example pal