Pierre Poilievre, the potential replacement for Mx. Trudeau as Canada’s leader, recently highlighted this chart showing the stagnation of the Canadian economy from an individual’s perspective (the economy grew with the population, though, so politicians had more money to spend every year). Let’s look at Japan, a frequent example of a worst-case outcome for Population Doomsayers and Open Borders advocates:
Japan is right in the middle of this chart, with superior economic performance compared to immigrant-rich nations such as Canada, Germany, the UK, Australia, and France. In other words, Japan retained their language and culture, supported a growing fraction of the population that is elderly, and managed to achieve substantial per-capita GDP growth despite a falling percentage of the population being of working age.
There is a Scientific consensus that immigration is the only viable path to prosperity, especially for countries with low native birth rates and high median age. Yet the above chart, especially the bar for Japan, is completely inconsistent with Proven Science (TM).
Circling back to Canada, Aporia has some interesting charts on this best-case scenario for immigration.
Unlike in the US or Europe, where most immigrants are either illegals, refugees or persons brought in through family reunification, Canadian immigration is designed to be selective. Most permanent Canadian immigrants are granted that status through employment, while the (supposedly) temporary immigrants comprise about one-third students. I say “supposedly” because this group makes up a full 7.3% of the entire population of Canada, and there’s no plan or real mechanism to remove them from the country. Note that Canada has birthright citizenship, giving “temporary” immigrants an easy path to permanent residency and citizenship through anchor babies.
Unlike most countries, Canada has imported humans who do better on academic tasks than its natives do. Given the correlation between academic performance and later earnings, Canada’s economy should be doing quite well.
Canada chucked its culture, value system, and religion in hopes of achieving economic growth. What they achieved instead is a society of incel males living in apartments:
Despite the miracle of 2SLGBTQQIA+ Science, apparently it isn’t practical for an incel male to produce a baby:
Canada will thus have to double down on immigration in order to keep its politicians supplied with taxpayers. Support for this program is particularly confusing to me with respect to Quebec. The Québécois fought for two centuries to preserve their distinctive culture, religion, and language. In the past 10-20 years, though, they gave it all up because of their passion for open borders. Is there any scenario in which a Muslim from India would want to learn French, convert to Catholicism (punishable by death, traditionally, in Islam), and follow Québécois customs? If not, Quebec is guaranteed to lose its distinctive character and will become just another poorer-than-anywhere-in-the-US random assemblage of humans, cultures, and religions in which the English language is the only thing that people have in common.
Loosely related… a friend’s comment: “Canada will obliterate us in this kind of trade war because they are already poor and are happy staying that way.”
Related:
- Montreal, Marijuana, and Masks
- Pussy Riot in Montreal
- Quebec is more French than France (in 2004, before Trudeau opened the borders)
- Refugees from Justin Trudeau’s Canada staying in Florida
> What they achieved instead is a society of incel males living in apartments
False. They achieved a society of incel males living crammed into unaffordable houses, a dozen+ per house. In Toronto, Canadastan’s largest city, the median house price is $1.2M while the median salary is only $69k. Recent news story showed an 1100 ft house converted into 13 suites (incl basement? had no permits, neighbors complained about cars parking). Another story heralded the benefits of a “multi generational and extended family” living in 3 houses on 1 lot (original house + converted garage + new structure, permits?). Immigrants + their children are now 80% of Toronto. But at least the “old stock” citizens have been culturally enriched!
Quebec could import migrants from Cote D’Ivoire and Mali. The citizens will be unified by their shared contempt for Anglophiles.
Another interesting statistics would be how many of these qualified people later immigrate or go to work in USA (i.e. good for us, bad for Canada).
Microsoft in 2000x during H1B shortages had entire campus in Vancouver, entire purpose of this campus was to have a place where people can work while waiting for H1B or L1 to get to Redmond. I worked with a team placed there. To be fair, some of them came to Redmond finally, some chose to stay in Vancouver vs Seattle.
Japan would be a great place to retire if phone translators were good enough & rural areas had any sidewalks. Strange how their 3x debt to GDP ratio didn’t result in the housing inflation that US’s did.
JD Vance gotta get laid somehow.
Your exposition is so convoluted that it illustrates why people can’t get their heads around this issue if they have a college degree and have lost the ability to think. The language is too full of jargon for the thinking layman.
This is the limit of online existence — you preach to the converted who found you because of semantic resonances. You would find a great audience with American black men chillin on the street corners late at night in the real world. That’s their blog. They are expressing the same zeitgeist but in simpler steps and with different language.
One of the main issues in Canada is the lack of capital for risky business with a high return potential. Everybody in Canada puts money into real estate, any other venture is just too risky. You can have selective immigration, the majority of immigrants may have the skills, but they have no capital and the immigrants with capital buy real estate. In Canada, Uber drivers are immigrant engineers and doctors. Some of the immigrants will become property developers, but this also has high risk in Canada because of the costs of construction and government regulation. Capital could be raised by improving the economic gains from research extraction, but there is a significant amount of government regulation, public apathy and organized environmental groups funded from outside Canada. There is also a general cultural risk aversion in Canada, this results in a low investment in technology to improve productivity, because everybody is afraid of taking away somebody’s job by introducing a new technology or getting blamed if the technology investment does not result in economic gains. The Canadian market is also small and is quite conservative, Canadians would rather take a chance with a product that has been already tested and successful in another market than buy an untested Canadian product. All of this results in a resource rich country with skilled immigrants, with non-existent economic growth.
tl;dr: immigration is bad for Canadians?
A NOTE TO READERS: Pavel is a foreigner who has admitted to election interference.
Anonymous, immigration is good for Canadian land owners and for some business for which it keeps the wages down. For everybody else in Canada it is more a civilized version of hunger games when compared with the full survival version of the US hunger games.
I love Japan. When you are there, you immediately get the feeling that, beyond its many attractions, you are observing one of the most harmonious societies in the world. Everyone knows their job, people are genuinely polite, and everything is clean and safe.
That said, by objective measures, Japan is not doing particularly well economically. Salaries are low, and productivity in many areas is lacking. (For example, visit a Starbucks in Tokyo—you’ll love the coffee, but you’ll immediately notice what I mean: there are far more employees per customer than in the U.S.)
So, it depends on how you measure welfare. If you value living in a well-organized society at the cost of a lower material standard of living, Japan is an ideal place. Japan’s GDP per capita is comparable to that of Spain—perhaps even lower, considering Spain has a large underground economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
Immigration is a complex issue. And… as a reminder, most of us in the US are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants and this country is a great place to live.
“most of us in the US are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants”… how well did European immigration work out for the Native Americans?
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
Joseph Conrad. “Heart of Darkness”.
@Philg
>how well did European immigration work out for the Native Americans?
Ask Virginia Dare.
or Kipling:
>When the early Jesuit missionaries preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
>They would pray to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
>’Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale,
>For the Female of the Species Is more Deadly than the Male.
>[…]
>And the victim writhes in anguish, like the Jesuit with the Squaw.
> Mx. Trudeau
Whenever I see this honorific, I think of Superman’s nemesis Mr. Mxyzptlk
FYI, the official language of Quebec is French…English language is *not* “something they have in common.” Related: New Brunswick has *two* official languages (French and English). If you spend some time in both of these provinces, you will find that the majority of people in Quebec (and a significant portion of those in New Brunswick) can’t speak any English at all (and in fact resent those that do). Just another indicator of a messed up “country” and probably helps explain why their population is so relatively poor (along with brutal socialism) vs. the countries you highlight.
Anon: Of course, the legacy population of Quebec speaks French. My point is that the replacement for this population will not speak French. The immigrants whom I met in Montreal hadn’t learned French, even after a decade, and had no interest in learning or speaking French.
Anonymous, in comparing Canada vs the US.
Poverty rate 9.9% vs 11.1%
Fertility rate 1.48 vs 1.62
GDP per capita $44,400 vs $66,300
Infant mortality rate 4.5 vs 5.8
Life expectancy men 79 vs 76 years
Life expectancy women 84 vs 81 years
Food insecurity 22.9% vs 23.7%
Differences and similar in many ways. One of the biggest differences is the GDP per capita, but not really poor. Canadian median household wealth is higher than the US and the income inequality is lower, the middle class in Canada is doing better than the US. We do not have brutal socialism, significantly less than some EU countries.
Most of the instability in the Western countries is probably due to the fact that good opportunities are only available for a percentage of the motivated and highly intelligent people. Everybody else has to survive in the service industry or gig economy. Most people are only really useful as consumers, so goods and services can be mass produced and business can make lots of profit. The middle class is shrinking and the lower classes are only increasing. Housing is currently unaffordable for the middle class in most locations in US and Canada. This will lead to more and more instability. Western society has to find a solution to income inequality and many other economic issues otherwise the instability will destroy society. People in the US keep mentioning that 1960s was better, they forget that the income inequality was much lower, most of them would probably consider the ratio of the 1% income to median income down right socialist. My prediction that the current US administration will fail at Make America Great Again, in 2028 the economic conditions of the middle and lower classes will be the same or worse than today.
Pavel: Isn’t eliminating low-skill immigration the simplest way to reduce income inequality? As a thought experiment, imagine if Biden-Harris were still running the U.S. and, therefore, the border were still open. Then imagine that 100 million people, none of whom could speak English, showed up from South Sudan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (among the world’s least successful countries economically). We would have an instant increase in income inequality. The flip side, therefore, would be shutting down low-skill immigration and deporting as many low-skill immigrants as possible. That would reduce the inequality and instability that you’ve identified, no?
philg, shutting down low-skill immigration and deporting would increase wages in the service sector and gig economies, but they would still be significantly less than required to live the middle class life of the 1960s and definitely nowhere close to solving the inequality. The current lower class in the US is around 100 million people, there are about 11 million illegals in the US, still lots of people for the service sector. If you let in 100 million low skilled immigrants you would most likely have society collapse. One of the drivers in the inequality is the ability of a small percentage of highly motivated and high IQ members of society to take advantage of technological advances (automation, AI, globalization and etc) to exponentially increase their economic potential. A person of average intelligence has no chance today, they cannot be trained to function in today’s complex economy. The average human brain just cannot evolve fast enough to keep up. Depending on how AI capability increases, a large part of the society could become obsolete. If you are a capitalist, why would you employ a person if you can buy AI systems and AI robots that can be trained to do high complex tasks and work 24/7 nonstop. 90% of the human population would just be an inconvenience for the top 10%. There are no simple solutions to today’s complex problems.
“there are about 11 million illegals in the US”? First, the correct term is “undocumented” because no human is illegal. Second, I’m glad that you subscribe to the Miracle of the Constant Number. We’ve had 11 million noble enriching undocumented migrants here for three decades now, unchanged no matter how many newcomers cross the border. The Yale nerds estimated the correct number at 22 million in 2016 (see https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/yale-study-finds-twice-as-many-undocumented-immigrants-as-previous-estimates ). Perhaps 2 million arrived during the first Trump dictatorship and then the Biden-Harris administration says that another 10 million crossed during the Biden admin.
Maybe the Biden-Harris administration gave legal status to 20 million previously undocumented migrants and that’s why the current undocumented population is back to the number of 25+ years ago? (I’m surprised that Joe Biden didn’t sign an executive order on January 19, 2025 giving legal status to every undocumented American! Then he could have said that he had eliminated 100% of illegal immigrants since there wouldn’t have been anyone in the U.S. illegally on the day he left office.)
Pavel, can I use the honorific “comrade” in front of your name? GDP per capita essentially flat vs. +21% in U.S. and dead last in the chart over 10 years (even including a number of failed socialist states!!) surely qualifies as brutal socialism. Without the many subsidies provided by the U.S. (e.g. defense and trade), the country would be caput. Hence why ~20% of folks in Alberta (the one province that seems to have an above-average number rational, non-socialists) are actually interested in joining the U.S. That number should be a huge wake-up call to folks in Canadstan (or arctic Mexico as others call it). I wish it were different for my hapless Canadian friends, but it’s not.
Median household wealth figure can be easily skewed. Many single mothers are single due to extra benefits its confirms on them, even though fathers are present. Vice versa, adult children staying with their parents can hike median household value. As can single family home valuation, which adds nothing in real wealth until inheritance event.
philg, it sounds like there is a large uncertainty in the number of undocumented, 10 million, 20 million, the only reason that they are kept around is that they are useful to some business in the US (i.e. farming), they are most likely not in the top 20%. The cost of deportation would probably be too high and messy to deport 20 million, so the criminals and a few more will be deported for show, otherwise it will be business as usual.
Anonymous, Canada, just like the US is a mixed economy of socialism and capitalism. Is Canada more socialist than US, yes, is it brutally socialist, no. The +21% GDP growth in the US went mainly to the top 20% and especially the top 1%. The top 1% own 30% of the US wealth, the bottom 50% own 2.4%. Congratulations to the oligarchs in the US, by 2028 there will be no elections and the US will have completed its conversion to a dictatorship run by oligarchs, this is why the current administration worships Russia. They like the absolute power and control. They will keep the professional classes (top 20%) around, because they are useful, the rest of the general population will be easily replaced by AI and automation over the next 10 years, so at best they will have the value as serfs from 100s of years ago.
“There is a Scientific consensus that immigration is the only viable path to prosperity …”
This is because GDP/head is a difficult statistic to gather, so economists prefer not to use it: they need a single up-to-the-minute value whose significance they can all disagree over.
The difficulty is that you have to measure not only changes in economic activity but also changes in population: to do both together accurately is too hard. In the short term increasing the population can make the economy look better as GDP increases; only later it turns out that the apparent gains actually came from adding a lot of workers with a low GDP per head, as in the IMF 10-year retrospective above.
But how are USA and Denmark not like Canada? Can the answer be found in phrases like nVidia, Novo Nordisk, and so on.
I think that the answer is in many areas, not just one industry. Canada for example gave a boot to Wall Street and Eropean fixed income operators, with negative consequences for Canadian investment and access to liquid capital. Canada has greater natural resources wealth then Saudi Arabia, but has problems transporting them to its ports, after 70 years.
Yes, socialism is a corrosive, evil ideology that has unfortunately infected much of Canada (and other countries in the list). If Canada and these other Western countries don’t wake up soon it will be game over. The “movie” of their future has already been shown by the terrible arc of Argentina. It was one of the wealthiest nations in the world until the Peronist socialists destroyed it beginning in the 1940s, condemning its citizens to leftist deprivation (and terror) for 85 years and going! Wishing all the best for Milei and his war on leftism!
Anon, worth mentioning and can’t overlook that the U.S. narrowly “dodged a bullet” last year (as per Elon and others) on socialism/leftism (figuratively and actually), which had taken root under the modern day Marxist Obama and gained further traction under the demented Biden and dumb-as-dirt Kamala. That battle is still ongoing as we’ve seen in recent weeks; leftist terrorists following a playbook taken right out of the book written by the cop killing Weather Underground Marxists/terrorists…including Bill Ayers…a guy that Obama idolized and socialized with…until he decided to run for president and pretended he never knew the guy!