This is such a critical need and the US is foolishly wasting the opportunity. Attracting and assimilating diverse motivated immigrants was one of our Superpowers. It's like we're purposely digging out kryptonite to shut ourselves down.
Immigration is the only proper antidote to the negative population bomb that is on the horizon of an aging population. We should be doing everything we can to welcome the bright and motivated people of the world to come join us and build a better country.
It is possible to think that attracting high-skilled immigrants would be general beneficial to people already living in the US (without of course claiming that literally everyone will be better off) without thinking that a gradually falling population resulting from low immigration and low birth rates would be hellish that "negative population bomb" implies. The two scenarios are sufficiently dissimilar that I don't think even believing the latter is a good motivation to prefer the former.
Specifically, I'd like to see us change the way we finance Medicare and Social Security from taxing wages or currently employed people to taxing consumption of currently consuming people. I think this would be a good idea however fast employment was growing for demographic and immigration reasons, the differences would just change the needed consumption tax (VAT) rate.
Likewise I'd like to see us have an aggressive effort to recruit highly skilled immigrants even if we had a VAT-financed SS and Medicare system that did not contribute to the fiscal deficit and did not "need" more young income earners to make the system work.
And I'd like to see us reform urban land use policies to allow more people to live and work there making both themselves, and existing city residents better off whether or not some of those people were immigrants.
And I think we should do all these things -- attract immigrants, reform SS and Medicare financing and reform urban land use policies (and other ideas for making the US a better place to live and work) -- whether or not we are in a geopolitical rivalry with China.
I'm a little concerned when people put too much weight on the mutual compatibilities of these goals that others who do not, say, want to reform urban land us policies, will oppose recruiting more high-skilled immigrants.
AFAIK the UK in recent years has been managing a *much* higher net immigration rate than the USA.
This suggests the UK has been absorbing at least half America's net inflow of immigrants of late (in absolute terms), but the country is only about 1/5th the size of the US. (Reductions from Europe post-Brexit appear to have been compensated for by increases from outside the EU):
Thank you for the link Jasper! My personal opinion is that being a high immigrant country is a cause for celebration - for any faults the UK has, it’s a beacon of hope for many worldwide, and supports the economy. Long term migration > 1 million is, I hope, something that will persist.
Er, that's the literal opposite of what's happened. The UK used to have a policy that anyone from the EU could move there regardless of talent or even if you could find work at all. That policy and the inability to change it led to Brexit, which allowed the government to replace it with a pure points based scheme that does prioritize talent. Unfortunately and rather foolishly the thresholds appear to be absolute and set far too low, such that immigration levels have gone up since Brexit rather than down.
Fundamentally the UK is and will remain an ultra-high immigration country for the forseeable future despite the fact that the population is heavily against it, simply because both political parties like high levels of immigration and Brits are unwilling to transfer their votes to a third party.
Isn't the situation rather different for the UK though given its much higher population density (particularly in England)?
In fact it's quite likely that the UK's historic success at settler colonialism (which gave the world Canada as well as Australia, New Zealand and indeed the United States) may well have been a factor behind Brexit, as Britons often mentally compared their own country with its settler-colonial offspring and thus saw it as overpopulated:
Very true, England, especially southern England and London is much, much higher population density than Canada. But I think the underlying economic benefits of immigration are the same as long as the UK invests in more housing and infrastructure (e.g., transport).
Disagree. If you boost population from 40 million to 100 million through immigration, you might not stop aging, but you have a MUCH MUCH bigger domestic market and talent pool.
The fact that "birth rates are falling in most places" *reinforces* the urgency of enacting smart immigration policies. There will come a time when even rich countries like the United States will find it more difficult to attract immigrants. Indeed, when that time comes, the US might well find it's become more challenging to retain its own highly skilled workers.
So it makes sense to lock in demographic gains while it's comparatively easy to do so. If we lived in a perfectly safe world characterized by a complete absence of geopolitical competition, none of this would matter. But that very much does not describe the world we live in.
I wish it were so, but this sounds like another pipe dream, like how we were all supposed to become better off by outsourcing our manufacturing. For this narrative to be believable, the average Canadian would have to be better off now than 20 years ago. Instead they are worse off, particularly the young generation.
I think these objections are coming from a longer time perspective. Eventually, on the scale of decades, the immigrant descendants will have the same low birth rate as the developed world. So it’s not a permanent solution.
I guess the response is that a larger richer population will be more likely to solve the problems of an aging population, likely by advancing automation.
That is a long term effect, yes, but in the short term it adds to the workforce to increase production... leaving more capacity for promoting R&D to increase productivity, where Canada woefully falls behind our peers. If we can get immigration to patch over just one generation we could get to the point that increased automation will be able to shoulder the productivity burden .
Immigrant expectations while outside Canada seem largely irrelevant to the services they will consume once there, though (and to expectarions once there, too, due to the hedonic treadmill but we can ignore that) without the formalization of some kind of second-class citizenship that for both pragmatic and moral reasons is basically a nonstarter in the developed world. (Although in the US this could practically be addressed because Social Security is indexed to taxed earnings. Not sure how Canada handles it.)
The strangest thing reading this as a Canadian is that we 'know who we are.' The idea that Canada has no real identity and can only define itself in relation to the US is so ingrained, it was actually taught in our Civics classes! But I really think this Maximum Canadian identity can be a good and modern one, separate from the American one and hopefully somewhat inoculated against nativism. Now about those houses...
As a Canadian who finally got fed up and left Toronto last year — with plans to relocate to the U.S. soon — I can assure readers that the housing crisis and NIMBY is just the most visible and quantifiable aspect of the problem. Maximum Canada would have been a great idea 15 years ago when Canada was poised to join the grownups table as a value-added economy instead of a resource extraction economy, but that ship has sailed and Canada has chosen to settle comfortably back into being a nation of lumberjacks, miners, and oilmen. Every sector of the economy is dominated by rent-seeking monopolists, the legal and government culture is in love with protectionism and mindless bureaucracy, and the country’s infrastructure is pathetically inadequate to the task of serving the current 40 million, much less another 50. Over the last 15 years, the doctor shortage has proven nearly as much of a problem as the housing shortage. The roads are clogged with traffic, and public transit is anemic. The thought that they’re going to bring in another 50 million people is a joke.
And yet, the Trudeau government has decided not only to increase Canada’s skilled immigration (which has always been one of Canada’s prized advantages over the U.S. and other G8 peers), but to lower standards and bring in more unskilled immigrants as well, to unprecedented levels. This is not some libertarian growth-mindset master plan — it is a cynical short-term ploy to pad the voting rolls with reliable Liberal Party voters. I would love to see Canada turn into the place you’ve described in this essay, but the housing problem you’ve identified as a fly in the ointment is actually symptomatic of a much deeper problem: Canada is complacent and lazy, and it is incapable of supporting these new immigration inflows.
Noah, I wish housing was the only major issue here, but Canada also has a massive protectionism/bureaucracy problem that the world (and many Canadians) are unaware of. Housing, arguably, is just one symptom of this. Canada's going to increasingly punch below its weight despite its great human capital if there isn't a big shift.
The bureaucracy is pretty unreal. I'm a Canadian living in the US since childhood, with no ties to my remaining Canadian relatives. I recently managed to get a passport; this was such a Kafkaesque nightmare that my American friends and family *could not believe* my description of the process until, 14 months in, the friend I listed as guarantor actually got a phone call from the Canadian passport office where they got mad at him for saying he didn't have a Canadian passport and refused to understand that he qualified under a different provision.
Another huge issue is Canada’s failing health system. Granted the new rules also strongly encourage health care workers to immigrate, but the sclerotic and dysfunctional system is a long way from being able to handle even current residents (years long surgery waitlists, fewer ICU beds than virtually any other developed nation etc).
To be fair, we're not the only place in this boat right now. We're definitely not the best (I should know - I'm in Quebec) but speaking to friends in the UK, Eastern Europe , Germany, and Texas, everyone says burn out and retirements are hitting their systems hard. And our solution to supplement the missing labor with immigration will add to the healthcare burden in certain countries.
I am a Canadian -- an immigrant actually -- and I find the disconnect between the discussion of immigration and the discussion of housing alarming. All those immigrants, encouraged by the federal government and not (yet) opposed by the existing population, are going to flood into major cities because that's where the opportunities are. But those same cities are where the new housing, if it exists at all, is beyond the means of practically everybody. I have a vision of a near future where a million people are standing on the streets of Toronto because they have no place to go. Exaggeration. perhaps. Nevertheless, there is a clear policy on immigration and none on housing. There has to be a clear link between these two issues.
It's a big, desperate problem and not a small one. For millenials and Gen Z without a house (or rich parents), it's *the* problem. I'd encourage you to take a look at house prices in our biggest cities Noah. They're downright Californian. Then understand that those population spikes are going to jack the prices up again, at least short term. We might wind up world leaders in unaffordability.
Smart young people are YIMBYs, but some are turning to anti-Asian racism or Marxism.
As much as I appreciate the Maximum Canada arguments and want to see it myself, the more radical change we more desperately need at least short term is a culture of actually building stuff.
As a Canadian I would like to reassure our American friends that promoting population growth is in no way intended to threaten or challenge the US militarily. The US population is currently around 9 times bigger than Canada's. At its best, Canada's population policies might reduce this ratio to 8 or possibly 7 times. The US will remain massively larger than Canada in any realistic scenario.
What's more, Canada's population is spread over what is essentially an archipelago of "islands" separated by rock and tundra instead of ocean. This means that Canada would be easy to invade and defeat.
Finally, Canadians are not just culturally similar to Americans. We are actually a type of American. (I am reminded of this every time I hear my English wife's friends talk about "America" as being a place that includes such cities as Vancouver or Toronto.) A certain sort of Canadian nationalist is annoyed by this, but the rest of us are absolutely fine with it. (In fact deep down most Canadians believe the "ability to shop in the US" should be a basic human right, and are shocked every time they are reminded that it isn't.) This means that in any military conflict between the two countries a very large minority, or possibly even a majority, would side with America.
I’m a product of the dysfunctional US system. I moved from Sydney to San Fran in 2002 under H1-B and rapidly realized the downsides - no citizenship or even permanent residency within a decade, my wife unable to work,soaring house costs and being tied to an employer like an indentured servant. So we moved to Vancouver in 2004 and have never looked back. Really is a great place to raise a family, though expensive. I now work for a Canadian subsidiary of a US big tech firm of which there are thousands here.
I’m also doing my part on the housing density issue - I built a duplex in my back yard but city of vancouver red tape is preventing me from selling them so they have sat empty for 3 months.
“my suspicion is that they fear the competition the children of these immigrants will provide for their own children in the academic system.”
This excerpt gets at a basic problem with the proposal, which is that it’s not clear why it’s rational for incumbents to prefer a system in which they and their descendants incur a loss of relative status (which in the general case is guaranteed when you select for high performing immigrants) to a loss of relative GDP growth. Economic analysis often equates wellbeing with the tangible consumption of goods and services, but “not enough stuff” seems like it’s not obviously the chief complaint of the urban PMC (unless perhaps it’s stuff like lawn space or quiet neighborhoods that are more rather than less scarce under a high immigration / YIMBY equilibrium) - conversely, status and positional goods competition matters to them and everyone else because we are, after all, a bunch of hairless primates with computers and a circle of inmediate concern that maxes out at about 150 people.
Henry VIII couldn’t buy an air conditioner for all the money in the world (nor non-terrible medical care, for that matter) but it’s not clear that he would be “wrong” to prefer being a king in Tudor England to being a nobody in 2023. If the Canadian urban PMC feels more status-constrained than consumption constrained, in what sense is supporting high-skilled immigration a rational choice for them?
One difference. In the US the top universities are small and aggressively stay small. More people = more competition for the same seats. In Canada the top universities are big, especially when compared to overall pop size (University of Toronto =70k undergrads!) and grow rapidly. And are far more diverse socioeconomic status in admissions. And way, way less expensive...
This is a really well written comment, Ethics Gradient. Very insightful.
I suspect the answer here is:
(a) The true Laurentian ultra-elite of Canada (probably 100K people total, I'd guess) feel secure that their family connections and status will hold them and their offspring - at least the next generation - in good stead.
(b) For everyone else in the PMC, I think the status they're competing for is in the US - many of them already send their kids to study at the best US universities and compete for the best US jobs.
If there’s a logical chain of causation that starts with immigration and ends with the proscription of single family zoned neighborhoods, then sooner or later there is going to be resistance to immigration.
Yep. Believe it or not most people like their yard and their cars and their single family home. If one of the arguments for immigration is that it will help spur along density, that just inclines me to be more anti-immigration than I am.
More importantly, they like their neighbors to have a yard and cars and a single family home. If you have a yard, cars and a single family home, no one is proposing to force you to pave your yard, scrap your cars and start taking in boarders.
It feels to me like, in some ways, sentiments are starting to shift a little here in Canada. My sample size is admittedly very small but I have had 3-4 conversations in the last month with people who are very politely ( how Canadian!) starting to feel the effects of these big numbers of new people coming to the country. Last year, stores like Tim Horton's would close early or have major line-ups because of lack of employees. Everyone's teenager who wanted to work could get a part-time job anywhere, anytime and quit one to get a higher paying one across the street. This year, teenagers are struggling to find summer work because so many of these new immigrants are working in jobs that teenagers would normally occupy... and they can work 40+ hours a week so are easier to accommodate from a scheduling stand point- no all immigrants coming here are highly skilled. Last year, many younger Canadians were still living with their parents as we were coming out of Covid and they were thankful that they had had the option of coming home during the pandemic. This year, when they try to look for housing and find that they cannot afford a tiny studio apartment, the housing crunch become very real. The frustration is also getting very real. Parents worry that their kids will never be able to afford to move out and buy a home. The mix of high inflation with what feels like a slowing economy could, I worry, really impact overall sentiment on these big, quick populations changes.
Sweden has similar effects. Culture matters. Unskilled labor competition matters. Eventually, people notice and vote. Unfortunately they tend to vote AFTER the people have already been allowed in and are thus politically impossible to remove. Open borders folks count on this time lag.
I don't think the economic externalities (=ve and -ve) from migration are big enough to be the primary consideration. The main case for more open borders should be based on the benefits to potential migrants and to the people in the destination country (partners, family members, and possible colleagues) who would benefit from allowing them to come.
The case is particularly clear in relation to countries with comparable income levels. Allowing free movement between them is a win for everyone. That's one of the great successes of the EU and one of the reasons why most young UK people voted against Brexit (selfish and stupid old voters, who were unlikely to be affected either way, could afford to engage in the politics of nostalgia and did so).
A lot of dispute about impacts on housing shortages, but no real resolution on net impacts, given that lots of arrivals are workers with skills that can be used in building trades
I have not read Matthew Yglesias' book but I'm curious as to why a billion people in the US would be advantageous? Mind you, this comes from a introvert who loves the outdoors and open spaces. I find city's stifling. Even the most well organized, elegantly planned ones. Number go up doesn't make for quality of life. Then there are varying views on balance between human growth and limits on resources.
You are having water shortages in various places at present. Also who is going to pop out all these babies and raise them? Educate them? I don't equate numbers with efficiency, quality, geopolitical power, or military advantage. I'd rather punch above my weight class.
I have no interest in your disgusting shithole anyway. Have fun dodging psychotic junkies and overflowing piles of stinking trash on the sidewalks as you scurry from one part of that hideous ant colony to another.
Cope, seethe, and mald at the fact that all the folks you look down on in whatever little town you thought you were too good for are buying houses, getting married, having kids, and having a great life while you take out your impotent rage because you voluntarily threw away the world for a little scrap of a garbage heap.
"we Americans to the south need to take a hard look at what Canada is doing, and ask ourselves why we can’t do something similar"
You're right, Noah! I would love an immigration system that gave points for needed skills, higher educaton, language fluency, and cultural similarity. I'm a post-liberal / conservative nationalist, and count me in on that plan!
Instead we have a system that prioritizes family connections over everything else, and allows even those who don't make the cut to enter the country and live for decades with effectively no fear of deportation, until the Washington uniparty throws up thier hands and grants them all a "pathway to citizenship" via amnesty.
As you say, our system works for perfectly for the PMC / laptop class, and it's various shades of annoying to disastrous for everyone else.
Do you know about the US immigration quotas? No more than 7% of total visas may be issued to any one country in a fiscal year. But India and China both have 18% (>> 7%) of the world's population. So it's unfair for them. No other country has more than 7%. It's insane that 1.4 billion people have the same limit as Vatican City (825 population). If both India and China divide into 100 countries their people have a much easier chance to get a US visa, this makes no sense because dividing countries suddenly won't change the individual's talent.
It’s not in fact about “fairness to other countries”, but rather equity in attracting future Americans such that the standards are not artificially higher for some (thus harming the national security interest of the US in attracting strong immigrants from those regions) based on a quirk of geography and not “real” factors.
I agree. That's why I favor a points system like Noah is describing based on skills, language, cultural familiarity, and American needs. That is the polar opposite of the system we have today, in which millions of border jumpers regardless of skills are allowed to freely roam the country for years before anyone ever even looks at their "asylum" case.
However, the original commenter was arguing that the percentage system was "unfair to other countries", hence the reason for my response.
As a Canadian, I find Noah's writing related to Canada to be somewhat ill-informed, which has me concerned about the validity of his writings about other places I know less about. I feel duty-bound to point out some inaccuracies in the article, in the interest of calibration.
I hope Noah accepts this in the same kind manner in which it is offered.
1) Canada has never been on board with multiculturalism. Francophones have never embraced it, because it would lead to francophone cultural dilution (not just national population dilution). Multiculturalism is embraced by national elites (crucially, in all parties), and also among the first generation immigrants which now make up a large portion of the population. Anglophones so far have accepted the benefits at the cost of their culture fading away, but their are growing signs that the limits of tolerance have been reached or exceeded. Combined with the anglophone left's peculiar fixation on casting Canada's British heritage as essentially evil, a political reckoning may be in the offing. All is not calm in the peaceable kingdom.
2) Precisely zero of the federal government's immigration program is driven by the Anglophone majority's desire the reduce the political influence of Quebec. First, no such desire exists, but I'll get back to that later.
Francophones are correct that high-rate immigration will dilute their influence nationally. The francophone culture is generally more pro-immigration than anglophone culture, but knows it can't attract the ever-higher volume of skilled immigrants this would entail. High skill francophone immigrants face becoming hostages to a small culture in North America. Therefore, ramping up immigration for Quebec translates roughly into draining Haiti and french Africa of their mid-, low- and no skill people.
Francophone dilution risks inflaming francophone separatism. Anglophones in Ontario (with nearly 40% of the national population) always politically lean away from inflaming next-door francophone separatism. With Quebec clearly not on board with the federal immigration project, Ontario will follow eventually (hastened also by the housing crisis). The clout of either province alone is enough to cause a future federal political reckoning on immigration. The clout of both, when aligned, ensures federal re-alignment.
3) British Columbia, Ontario and the federal government are headed towards loggerheads on the immigration program, because the federal government controls the immigration levels, and the provinces face the expenses, and the housing shortages, which are increasingly acute. The previous round of immigration increases in 2015-19 led to the current housing crisis, and the newer 2022-2025 program is set to crush housing in Vancouver and Toronto.
4) Causes for high immigration: The program has nothing to do with national security (from the US). Canada has no economic, military or political security in the 21st century without a stable US, period. The immigration program has to do with avoiding dealing with declining per-capita GDP, declining birth rate. But the main driver is that Canada's elites imagine that their future-elite children will matter more globally helming a country with a larger population.
5) Re: "low rise cities". Canada's largest cities are not low-rise. By North American standards, they are often as high-rise as they come, New York excepted. That's part of the problem. Canadian cities need more walkup and low-rises, as do American cities.
Finally:
For 35 years, Canadians have mostly supported a high rate of immigration, and factions have managed to not upset a fine political balance on the file. Critically, Canada has a rare conservative party that successfully pursues the votes of immigrants and supports high-rate immigration. However, that balance was lost in the immigration acceleration of 2016, and obliterated in the 2nd round in 2021. The end result some years from now is likely to be large-scale rejection of high rate immigration by anglophones. I suspect that Canada's elites, in their greed, are going to lose what had been excellent in moderation.
So, conclusion immigration policy should take account of the externalities (net of their mitigation by Pigou taxation)? Sounds reasonable. Are you near or still very far from that point? [I think the US is very far from that point.]
Immigration policy should be more holistic, certainly.
In this case, a federal government responsible for setting immigration policy would need to make sure that sub-national governments are not out of pocket. But even more important is that the federal government ensure, through constitutional means available to it, that negative effects on the existing population, such as a housing crisis, are mitigated or avoided.
Although I'm familiar with Pigovian taxation, I'm not sure how it could be effectively applied to this situation.
I'll agree with you. Pigouvian taxation is a way of reducing negative effects (traffic congestion, CO2 emissions) that my be exacerbated by immigration. And yes it can be appropriate to national share some of the immediate costs of immigration even though benefits can also be unequally spread. [How much should Texas be compensated for taking in Elon Musk? :)]
Musk was once an immigrant to Ontario, Canada, and I'm sure Ontario would be happy to have him back from Texas. It's not a coincidence he's there though..
Most entrepreneurs in Canada are looking to just cash out, very few find it a place they want to grow a global firm.
From 1750 to about 1950, most of Canada's immigrants would emigrate to the US within 5 years, and Canada had net out migration, growing only due to then-higher birth rates.
This is such a critical need and the US is foolishly wasting the opportunity. Attracting and assimilating diverse motivated immigrants was one of our Superpowers. It's like we're purposely digging out kryptonite to shut ourselves down.
Immigration is the only proper antidote to the negative population bomb that is on the horizon of an aging population. We should be doing everything we can to welcome the bright and motivated people of the world to come join us and build a better country.
It is possible to think that attracting high-skilled immigrants would be general beneficial to people already living in the US (without of course claiming that literally everyone will be better off) without thinking that a gradually falling population resulting from low immigration and low birth rates would be hellish that "negative population bomb" implies. The two scenarios are sufficiently dissimilar that I don't think even believing the latter is a good motivation to prefer the former.
Specifically, I'd like to see us change the way we finance Medicare and Social Security from taxing wages or currently employed people to taxing consumption of currently consuming people. I think this would be a good idea however fast employment was growing for demographic and immigration reasons, the differences would just change the needed consumption tax (VAT) rate.
Likewise I'd like to see us have an aggressive effort to recruit highly skilled immigrants even if we had a VAT-financed SS and Medicare system that did not contribute to the fiscal deficit and did not "need" more young income earners to make the system work.
And I'd like to see us reform urban land use policies to allow more people to live and work there making both themselves, and existing city residents better off whether or not some of those people were immigrants.
And I think we should do all these things -- attract immigrants, reform SS and Medicare financing and reform urban land use policies (and other ideas for making the US a better place to live and work) -- whether or not we are in a geopolitical rivalry with China.
I'm a little concerned when people put too much weight on the mutual compatibilities of these goals that others who do not, say, want to reform urban land us policies, will oppose recruiting more high-skilled immigrants.
Exactly the same in the UK as well. Foolishly shooting ourselves in both feet by not wanting to attract the world’s best talent.
AFAIK the UK in recent years has been managing a *much* higher net immigration rate than the USA.
This suggests the UK has been absorbing at least half America's net inflow of immigrants of late (in absolute terms), but the country is only about 1/5th the size of the US. (Reductions from Europe post-Brexit appear to have been compensated for by increases from outside the EU):
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingdecember2022#:~:text=Population%20change,-Net%20migration%20for&text=In%202022%2C%20net%20migration%20added,to%20be%20333%2C000%20in%202018.
Britain can legitimately be described as a "high immigration" country. The US no longer can.
Thank you for the link Jasper! My personal opinion is that being a high immigrant country is a cause for celebration - for any faults the UK has, it’s a beacon of hope for many worldwide, and supports the economy. Long term migration > 1 million is, I hope, something that will persist.
Er, that's the literal opposite of what's happened. The UK used to have a policy that anyone from the EU could move there regardless of talent or even if you could find work at all. That policy and the inability to change it led to Brexit, which allowed the government to replace it with a pure points based scheme that does prioritize talent. Unfortunately and rather foolishly the thresholds appear to be absolute and set far too low, such that immigration levels have gone up since Brexit rather than down.
Fundamentally the UK is and will remain an ultra-high immigration country for the forseeable future despite the fact that the population is heavily against it, simply because both political parties like high levels of immigration and Brits are unwilling to transfer their votes to a third party.
Isn't the situation rather different for the UK though given its much higher population density (particularly in England)?
In fact it's quite likely that the UK's historic success at settler colonialism (which gave the world Canada as well as Australia, New Zealand and indeed the United States) may well have been a factor behind Brexit, as Britons often mentally compared their own country with its settler-colonial offspring and thus saw it as overpopulated:
https://medium.com/@Metatone/s-yorks-brexit-and-usa-philia-20d90a7790a5
Very true, England, especially southern England and London is much, much higher population density than Canada. But I think the underlying economic benefits of immigration are the same as long as the UK invests in more housing and infrastructure (e.g., transport).
Disagree. If you boost population from 40 million to 100 million through immigration, you might not stop aging, but you have a MUCH MUCH bigger domestic market and talent pool.
The fact that "birth rates are falling in most places" *reinforces* the urgency of enacting smart immigration policies. There will come a time when even rich countries like the United States will find it more difficult to attract immigrants. Indeed, when that time comes, the US might well find it's become more challenging to retain its own highly skilled workers.
So it makes sense to lock in demographic gains while it's comparatively easy to do so. If we lived in a perfectly safe world characterized by a complete absence of geopolitical competition, none of this would matter. But that very much does not describe the world we live in.
Yup, mass immigration as a solution to population ageing has something of a Ponzi scheme flavour to it...
No, because at the end you end up bigger and more powerful and richer instead of broke.
I wish it were so, but this sounds like another pipe dream, like how we were all supposed to become better off by outsourcing our manufacturing. For this narrative to be believable, the average Canadian would have to be better off now than 20 years ago. Instead they are worse off, particularly the young generation.
I think these objections are coming from a longer time perspective. Eventually, on the scale of decades, the immigrant descendants will have the same low birth rate as the developed world. So it’s not a permanent solution.
I guess the response is that a larger richer population will be more likely to solve the problems of an aging population, likely by advancing automation.
Having more babies as a solution to an aging population also has a Ponzi flavour. Either way, we’re relying population increasing forever.
Indeed: there's a demographic trilemma in that a society's population can only ever have two of the following three positive qualities:
1. A stable or falling size (to avoid hitting the Malthusian limit),
2. A youngish average age (to avoid being excessively burdened by elderly care), and
3. A high life expectancy.
This is true irrespective of the native-born vs foreign-born share of the population.
That is a long term effect, yes, but in the short term it adds to the workforce to increase production... leaving more capacity for promoting R&D to increase productivity, where Canada woefully falls behind our peers. If we can get immigration to patch over just one generation we could get to the point that increased automation will be able to shoulder the productivity burden .
-- Steve
Immigrant expectations while outside Canada seem largely irrelevant to the services they will consume once there, though (and to expectarions once there, too, due to the hedonic treadmill but we can ignore that) without the formalization of some kind of second-class citizenship that for both pragmatic and moral reasons is basically a nonstarter in the developed world. (Although in the US this could practically be addressed because Social Security is indexed to taxed earnings. Not sure how Canada handles it.)
The strangest thing reading this as a Canadian is that we 'know who we are.' The idea that Canada has no real identity and can only define itself in relation to the US is so ingrained, it was actually taught in our Civics classes! But I really think this Maximum Canadian identity can be a good and modern one, separate from the American one and hopefully somewhat inoculated against nativism. Now about those houses...
As a Canadian who finally got fed up and left Toronto last year — with plans to relocate to the U.S. soon — I can assure readers that the housing crisis and NIMBY is just the most visible and quantifiable aspect of the problem. Maximum Canada would have been a great idea 15 years ago when Canada was poised to join the grownups table as a value-added economy instead of a resource extraction economy, but that ship has sailed and Canada has chosen to settle comfortably back into being a nation of lumberjacks, miners, and oilmen. Every sector of the economy is dominated by rent-seeking monopolists, the legal and government culture is in love with protectionism and mindless bureaucracy, and the country’s infrastructure is pathetically inadequate to the task of serving the current 40 million, much less another 50. Over the last 15 years, the doctor shortage has proven nearly as much of a problem as the housing shortage. The roads are clogged with traffic, and public transit is anemic. The thought that they’re going to bring in another 50 million people is a joke.
And yet, the Trudeau government has decided not only to increase Canada’s skilled immigration (which has always been one of Canada’s prized advantages over the U.S. and other G8 peers), but to lower standards and bring in more unskilled immigrants as well, to unprecedented levels. This is not some libertarian growth-mindset master plan — it is a cynical short-term ploy to pad the voting rolls with reliable Liberal Party voters. I would love to see Canada turn into the place you’ve described in this essay, but the housing problem you’ve identified as a fly in the ointment is actually symptomatic of a much deeper problem: Canada is complacent and lazy, and it is incapable of supporting these new immigration inflows.
The Squamish getting a ton of criticism from every NIMBY in Canada and responding with even more housing is so incredibly based
Noah, I wish housing was the only major issue here, but Canada also has a massive protectionism/bureaucracy problem that the world (and many Canadians) are unaware of. Housing, arguably, is just one symptom of this. Canada's going to increasingly punch below its weight despite its great human capital if there isn't a big shift.
Good starting point here: https://www.everybodysbusinesscanada.ca/
The bureaucracy is pretty unreal. I'm a Canadian living in the US since childhood, with no ties to my remaining Canadian relatives. I recently managed to get a passport; this was such a Kafkaesque nightmare that my American friends and family *could not believe* my description of the process until, 14 months in, the friend I listed as guarantor actually got a phone call from the Canadian passport office where they got mad at him for saying he didn't have a Canadian passport and refused to understand that he qualified under a different provision.
Another huge issue is Canada’s failing health system. Granted the new rules also strongly encourage health care workers to immigrate, but the sclerotic and dysfunctional system is a long way from being able to handle even current residents (years long surgery waitlists, fewer ICU beds than virtually any other developed nation etc).
To be fair, we're not the only place in this boat right now. We're definitely not the best (I should know - I'm in Quebec) but speaking to friends in the UK, Eastern Europe , Germany, and Texas, everyone says burn out and retirements are hitting their systems hard. And our solution to supplement the missing labor with immigration will add to the healthcare burden in certain countries.
Good points--thank you.
I am a Canadian -- an immigrant actually -- and I find the disconnect between the discussion of immigration and the discussion of housing alarming. All those immigrants, encouraged by the federal government and not (yet) opposed by the existing population, are going to flood into major cities because that's where the opportunities are. But those same cities are where the new housing, if it exists at all, is beyond the means of practically everybody. I have a vision of a near future where a million people are standing on the streets of Toronto because they have no place to go. Exaggeration. perhaps. Nevertheless, there is a clear policy on immigration and none on housing. There has to be a clear link between these two issues.
It's a big, desperate problem and not a small one. For millenials and Gen Z without a house (or rich parents), it's *the* problem. I'd encourage you to take a look at house prices in our biggest cities Noah. They're downright Californian. Then understand that those population spikes are going to jack the prices up again, at least short term. We might wind up world leaders in unaffordability.
Smart young people are YIMBYs, but some are turning to anti-Asian racism or Marxism.
As much as I appreciate the Maximum Canada arguments and want to see it myself, the more radical change we more desperately need at least short term is a culture of actually building stuff.
As a Canadian I would like to reassure our American friends that promoting population growth is in no way intended to threaten or challenge the US militarily. The US population is currently around 9 times bigger than Canada's. At its best, Canada's population policies might reduce this ratio to 8 or possibly 7 times. The US will remain massively larger than Canada in any realistic scenario.
What's more, Canada's population is spread over what is essentially an archipelago of "islands" separated by rock and tundra instead of ocean. This means that Canada would be easy to invade and defeat.
Finally, Canadians are not just culturally similar to Americans. We are actually a type of American. (I am reminded of this every time I hear my English wife's friends talk about "America" as being a place that includes such cities as Vancouver or Toronto.) A certain sort of Canadian nationalist is annoyed by this, but the rest of us are absolutely fine with it. (In fact deep down most Canadians believe the "ability to shop in the US" should be a basic human right, and are shocked every time they are reminded that it isn't.) This means that in any military conflict between the two countries a very large minority, or possibly even a majority, would side with America.
Calm down.
*stares in South Park*
Yeah that's just what you WOULD say... ;-)
They say they're American from their big, flapping heads.
Yeah, I found that passage pretty funny as well.
I love Canada.
I’m a product of the dysfunctional US system. I moved from Sydney to San Fran in 2002 under H1-B and rapidly realized the downsides - no citizenship or even permanent residency within a decade, my wife unable to work,soaring house costs and being tied to an employer like an indentured servant. So we moved to Vancouver in 2004 and have never looked back. Really is a great place to raise a family, though expensive. I now work for a Canadian subsidiary of a US big tech firm of which there are thousands here.
I’m also doing my part on the housing density issue - I built a duplex in my back yard but city of vancouver red tape is preventing me from selling them so they have sat empty for 3 months.
“my suspicion is that they fear the competition the children of these immigrants will provide for their own children in the academic system.”
This excerpt gets at a basic problem with the proposal, which is that it’s not clear why it’s rational for incumbents to prefer a system in which they and their descendants incur a loss of relative status (which in the general case is guaranteed when you select for high performing immigrants) to a loss of relative GDP growth. Economic analysis often equates wellbeing with the tangible consumption of goods and services, but “not enough stuff” seems like it’s not obviously the chief complaint of the urban PMC (unless perhaps it’s stuff like lawn space or quiet neighborhoods that are more rather than less scarce under a high immigration / YIMBY equilibrium) - conversely, status and positional goods competition matters to them and everyone else because we are, after all, a bunch of hairless primates with computers and a circle of inmediate concern that maxes out at about 150 people.
Henry VIII couldn’t buy an air conditioner for all the money in the world (nor non-terrible medical care, for that matter) but it’s not clear that he would be “wrong” to prefer being a king in Tudor England to being a nobody in 2023. If the Canadian urban PMC feels more status-constrained than consumption constrained, in what sense is supporting high-skilled immigration a rational choice for them?
One difference. In the US the top universities are small and aggressively stay small. More people = more competition for the same seats. In Canada the top universities are big, especially when compared to overall pop size (University of Toronto =70k undergrads!) and grow rapidly. And are far more diverse socioeconomic status in admissions. And way, way less expensive...
This is a really well written comment, Ethics Gradient. Very insightful.
I suspect the answer here is:
(a) The true Laurentian ultra-elite of Canada (probably 100K people total, I'd guess) feel secure that their family connections and status will hold them and their offspring - at least the next generation - in good stead.
(b) For everyone else in the PMC, I think the status they're competing for is in the US - many of them already send their kids to study at the best US universities and compete for the best US jobs.
If there’s a logical chain of causation that starts with immigration and ends with the proscription of single family zoned neighborhoods, then sooner or later there is going to be resistance to immigration.
Yep. Believe it or not most people like their yard and their cars and their single family home. If one of the arguments for immigration is that it will help spur along density, that just inclines me to be more anti-immigration than I am.
More importantly, they like their neighbors to have a yard and cars and a single family home. If you have a yard, cars and a single family home, no one is proposing to force you to pave your yard, scrap your cars and start taking in boarders.
It feels to me like, in some ways, sentiments are starting to shift a little here in Canada. My sample size is admittedly very small but I have had 3-4 conversations in the last month with people who are very politely ( how Canadian!) starting to feel the effects of these big numbers of new people coming to the country. Last year, stores like Tim Horton's would close early or have major line-ups because of lack of employees. Everyone's teenager who wanted to work could get a part-time job anywhere, anytime and quit one to get a higher paying one across the street. This year, teenagers are struggling to find summer work because so many of these new immigrants are working in jobs that teenagers would normally occupy... and they can work 40+ hours a week so are easier to accommodate from a scheduling stand point- no all immigrants coming here are highly skilled. Last year, many younger Canadians were still living with their parents as we were coming out of Covid and they were thankful that they had had the option of coming home during the pandemic. This year, when they try to look for housing and find that they cannot afford a tiny studio apartment, the housing crunch become very real. The frustration is also getting very real. Parents worry that their kids will never be able to afford to move out and buy a home. The mix of high inflation with what feels like a slowing economy could, I worry, really impact overall sentiment on these big, quick populations changes.
Sweden has similar effects. Culture matters. Unskilled labor competition matters. Eventually, people notice and vote. Unfortunately they tend to vote AFTER the people have already been allowed in and are thus politically impossible to remove. Open borders folks count on this time lag.
I don't think the economic externalities (=ve and -ve) from migration are big enough to be the primary consideration. The main case for more open borders should be based on the benefits to potential migrants and to the people in the destination country (partners, family members, and possible colleagues) who would benefit from allowing them to come.
The case is particularly clear in relation to countries with comparable income levels. Allowing free movement between them is a win for everyone. That's one of the great successes of the EU and one of the reasons why most young UK people voted against Brexit (selfish and stupid old voters, who were unlikely to be affected either way, could afford to engage in the politics of nostalgia and did so).
Hi John, would you be able to comment on Australia's immigration rate and its impact and the differences between here and Canada?
Adjusting for population size, I think it is pretty similar, though complicated by temporary flows of students and temporary migrants https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/15/australias-population-grew-at-fastest-rate-since-2008-amid-post-covid-migration-boom
A lot of dispute about impacts on housing shortages, but no real resolution on net impacts, given that lots of arrivals are workers with skills that can be used in building trades
Thanks John, so not as bad as some would state.
I have not read Matthew Yglesias' book but I'm curious as to why a billion people in the US would be advantageous? Mind you, this comes from a introvert who loves the outdoors and open spaces. I find city's stifling. Even the most well organized, elegantly planned ones. Number go up doesn't make for quality of life. Then there are varying views on balance between human growth and limits on resources.
You are having water shortages in various places at present. Also who is going to pop out all these babies and raise them? Educate them? I don't equate numbers with efficiency, quality, geopolitical power, or military advantage. I'd rather punch above my weight class.
A billion Americans would give us about the same population density as France, which is not a particularly high-density European country.
One of the greatest things about America is that we are vastly less dense than Europe. I'd like to keep it that way.
It’s a stupid idea and you should stop advocating for it. It’s also NOT going to happen.
Cool, I'll step it up one. I am anti-immigration in large part because I like our low density. Sue me
I have no interest in your disgusting shithole anyway. Have fun dodging psychotic junkies and overflowing piles of stinking trash on the sidewalks as you scurry from one part of that hideous ant colony to another.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-att-us-rvc3&sxsrf=AB5stBillNs-Texau85EkKQ-qgCGGawW3g:1688180998881&q=nyc+sidewalks+covered+in+trash&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiqgIOmxOz_AhUGlGoFHaumDpMQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=360&bih=649&dpr=3
Cope, seethe, and mald at the fact that all the folks you look down on in whatever little town you thought you were too good for are buying houses, getting married, having kids, and having a great life while you take out your impotent rage because you voluntarily threw away the world for a little scrap of a garbage heap.
"we Americans to the south need to take a hard look at what Canada is doing, and ask ourselves why we can’t do something similar"
You're right, Noah! I would love an immigration system that gave points for needed skills, higher educaton, language fluency, and cultural similarity. I'm a post-liberal / conservative nationalist, and count me in on that plan!
Instead we have a system that prioritizes family connections over everything else, and allows even those who don't make the cut to enter the country and live for decades with effectively no fear of deportation, until the Washington uniparty throws up thier hands and grants them all a "pathway to citizenship" via amnesty.
As you say, our system works for perfectly for the PMC / laptop class, and it's various shades of annoying to disastrous for everyone else.
Do you know about the US immigration quotas? No more than 7% of total visas may be issued to any one country in a fiscal year. But India and China both have 18% (>> 7%) of the world's population. So it's unfair for them. No other country has more than 7%. It's insane that 1.4 billion people have the same limit as Vatican City (825 population). If both India and China divide into 100 countries their people have a much easier chance to get a US visa, this makes no sense because dividing countries suddenly won't change the individual's talent.
https://thevisafirm.com/dc-immigration-lawyer/visas/quotas/
Fairness to other countries can not be the primary determinant in immigration policy though. It's fairness to your own citizens that matters.
It’s not in fact about “fairness to other countries”, but rather equity in attracting future Americans such that the standards are not artificially higher for some (thus harming the national security interest of the US in attracting strong immigrants from those regions) based on a quirk of geography and not “real” factors.
I agree. That's why I favor a points system like Noah is describing based on skills, language, cultural familiarity, and American needs. That is the polar opposite of the system we have today, in which millions of border jumpers regardless of skills are allowed to freely roam the country for years before anyone ever even looks at their "asylum" case.
However, the original commenter was arguing that the percentage system was "unfair to other countries", hence the reason for my response.
As a Canadian, I find Noah's writing related to Canada to be somewhat ill-informed, which has me concerned about the validity of his writings about other places I know less about. I feel duty-bound to point out some inaccuracies in the article, in the interest of calibration.
I hope Noah accepts this in the same kind manner in which it is offered.
1) Canada has never been on board with multiculturalism. Francophones have never embraced it, because it would lead to francophone cultural dilution (not just national population dilution). Multiculturalism is embraced by national elites (crucially, in all parties), and also among the first generation immigrants which now make up a large portion of the population. Anglophones so far have accepted the benefits at the cost of their culture fading away, but their are growing signs that the limits of tolerance have been reached or exceeded. Combined with the anglophone left's peculiar fixation on casting Canada's British heritage as essentially evil, a political reckoning may be in the offing. All is not calm in the peaceable kingdom.
2) Precisely zero of the federal government's immigration program is driven by the Anglophone majority's desire the reduce the political influence of Quebec. First, no such desire exists, but I'll get back to that later.
Francophones are correct that high-rate immigration will dilute their influence nationally. The francophone culture is generally more pro-immigration than anglophone culture, but knows it can't attract the ever-higher volume of skilled immigrants this would entail. High skill francophone immigrants face becoming hostages to a small culture in North America. Therefore, ramping up immigration for Quebec translates roughly into draining Haiti and french Africa of their mid-, low- and no skill people.
Francophone dilution risks inflaming francophone separatism. Anglophones in Ontario (with nearly 40% of the national population) always politically lean away from inflaming next-door francophone separatism. With Quebec clearly not on board with the federal immigration project, Ontario will follow eventually (hastened also by the housing crisis). The clout of either province alone is enough to cause a future federal political reckoning on immigration. The clout of both, when aligned, ensures federal re-alignment.
3) British Columbia, Ontario and the federal government are headed towards loggerheads on the immigration program, because the federal government controls the immigration levels, and the provinces face the expenses, and the housing shortages, which are increasingly acute. The previous round of immigration increases in 2015-19 led to the current housing crisis, and the newer 2022-2025 program is set to crush housing in Vancouver and Toronto.
4) Causes for high immigration: The program has nothing to do with national security (from the US). Canada has no economic, military or political security in the 21st century without a stable US, period. The immigration program has to do with avoiding dealing with declining per-capita GDP, declining birth rate. But the main driver is that Canada's elites imagine that their future-elite children will matter more globally helming a country with a larger population.
5) Re: "low rise cities". Canada's largest cities are not low-rise. By North American standards, they are often as high-rise as they come, New York excepted. That's part of the problem. Canadian cities need more walkup and low-rises, as do American cities.
Finally:
For 35 years, Canadians have mostly supported a high rate of immigration, and factions have managed to not upset a fine political balance on the file. Critically, Canada has a rare conservative party that successfully pursues the votes of immigrants and supports high-rate immigration. However, that balance was lost in the immigration acceleration of 2016, and obliterated in the 2nd round in 2021. The end result some years from now is likely to be large-scale rejection of high rate immigration by anglophones. I suspect that Canada's elites, in their greed, are going to lose what had been excellent in moderation.
crazy how relevant this is today. perfect prediction.
So, conclusion immigration policy should take account of the externalities (net of their mitigation by Pigou taxation)? Sounds reasonable. Are you near or still very far from that point? [I think the US is very far from that point.]
Immigration policy should be more holistic, certainly.
In this case, a federal government responsible for setting immigration policy would need to make sure that sub-national governments are not out of pocket. But even more important is that the federal government ensure, through constitutional means available to it, that negative effects on the existing population, such as a housing crisis, are mitigated or avoided.
Although I'm familiar with Pigovian taxation, I'm not sure how it could be effectively applied to this situation.
I'll agree with you. Pigouvian taxation is a way of reducing negative effects (traffic congestion, CO2 emissions) that my be exacerbated by immigration. And yes it can be appropriate to national share some of the immediate costs of immigration even though benefits can also be unequally spread. [How much should Texas be compensated for taking in Elon Musk? :)]
Musk was once an immigrant to Ontario, Canada, and I'm sure Ontario would be happy to have him back from Texas. It's not a coincidence he's there though..
Most entrepreneurs in Canada are looking to just cash out, very few find it a place they want to grow a global firm.
I really don't mind if some of our immigrants use Canada to "acclimatize." :)
That's been the historical pattern.
From 1750 to about 1950, most of Canada's immigrants would emigrate to the US within 5 years, and Canada had net out migration, growing only due to then-higher birth rates.