Comment by poncho_romero
1 month ago
Canada as a whole has been pro immigration for a long time, but our immigration system was broken in recent years, and the most visible consequence of that has been an enormous increase in low skill, low wage Indian workers. A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.
I think there's some particular niche immigration programs (ie. TFW) that have been broken because bad actors are aggressively defrauding the government, but I wouldn't say that Canada's system is broken beyond that.
I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
Now we've "solved" that problem by turning immigration down to zero but that is a kludge and not an actual long term solution to systemic problems.
It's pretty hard be critical of the need for supposed "low skill" immigration when pretty much all of our settler ancestors were penniless dirt farmers.
I agree for the most part. I said immigration is broken, but really the problems are almost exclusively to do with the TFW program and degree mills. One area the TFW program has hurt the country, is in the significant reduction in the number of jobs available to high school students. Anecdotally, I know of many high school students who have been unable to find any work for years, and a stop into any local fast food restaurant or superstore will back that up. These kids looking for part time jobs don't show up in unemployment numbers. They could help the labour shortage, but instead are silently being added to it, in favour of temporary foreign workers filling the positions.
We do need immigration long term for sure! Canada is and will always be an immigrant country. That said, I also don't think an appeal to the past (the fact that almost all of our ancestors came as penniless farmers) should enter into the conversation. To my view, this is a dispassionate conversation about politics. Concerns over hypocrisy are irrelevant.
Don't take it as an appeal to the past but rather the notion that even people with "low skills" are enormously valuable to building a country.
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Construction is not really a low-skill profession anymore, and needs highly qualified workforce to thrive. Buildings of 2026 are de facto complicated industrial robots.
>I'm skeptical that an increase in so called "low skill" workers are even a problem considering that the country is experiencing labour shortages that have contributed to construction costs being so out of whack that building new buildings is unviable.
I'm skeptical that those migrants helped add more to the housing pool than their own needs.
That's more related to the fact that housing policy in this country is more oriented to helping landlords stuff ever more renters into a basement suite than it is enabling people to create homes.
> A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.
So we just let racists determine national policy now? I wonder how that's working out in the US.
Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment in Canada is relatively recent and happened after a decade of mass immigration that is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.
"Widely agreed" meaning the National Post and other foreign owned conservative press banged the drum on the issue endlessly for years and years and now people are thoughtlessly repeating the talking point.
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> Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment [ justification for said sentiment ]
Wild sequence of sentences.
> is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.
Citation very much needed.
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You don't understand, and your unwillingness to approach this issue with the nuance it deserves will only drive people towards right-wing extremists. These people are not racists! The federal government increased immigration (largely of TFWs and students) by far too much, and that has put an enormous strain on Canada's housing and job market. Canadians are turning against broken immigration policy, which has naturally become associated with its most visible aspect--the recently arrived, unskilled Indian worker. You must understand the negative sentiment is driven by association with bad government policy, not naive racism towards Indians. Of course, none of this is the fault of individual immigrants or TFWs, but they are part of the problem, because they are symptoms of it.
Racism is a serious allegation. Let's not cry wolf when there is a reasonable explanation here.
How else am I to interpret someone seeing a group of people working low wage jobs and concluding that everyone from their country is a bad influence?
> will only drive people towards right-wing extremists
The right talks a big game about personal responsibility, but somehow their worst beliefs are always someone else's fault. Funny, that.
> naturally become associated
Now see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's _not_ natural or inevitable.
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US immigration policy was explicitly racist from its founding up until the Hart Cellar act of 1965. Assuming that the 2016 election of Donald Trump is your benchmark for when immigration policy became determined by racists again, then the US's immigration policy was non-racist for 51 of the last 251 (and counting) years, or 20% of its history.
Safe to say that the 1990s "End of History" theory has been proven wrong. It may be that the ~1960s-2010s "post-national" political consensus was actually just a historical aberration that is still in the process of being unwound.