Thesis statement
Canada is currently reviewing the number of immigrants it is admitting in the coming years. A majority of stakeholders have provided their standpoint regarding the issue. For example, the Canadian advisory council on economic development has recommended the government should decrease its levels of immigration to 300,000 from the current annual intake of 450,000 immigrants. This would ensure that economy is not overburdened and it would further alleviate any economic and fiscal challenges posed by the huge influx of immigrants. In this paper we argue that Canada should decrease the number of its annual intake as such increase has had significant impact on the country’s overall development.
Statement of Context
Beach, Worswick, & Green, (2011) indicates that, the ability to control immigration is one of the important elements that define a sovereign state. It is as important as the power of establishing and implementing laws, issuance of money among other roles of the government. He further adds that, in order to practice sovereign control over the land, it requires a country to be capable of applying the law to all those that are within its jurisdiction. It should be able to regulate who enters. Even though the Canadian government has the ability of not exercising such controls, it still should retain such rights. This is what it would mean to have a sovereign Canadian nation. Controlling and minimizing immigration implies, restoring the rights to the Canadian natives and ensuring that their plights are always considered first. Therefore, the Canadian government should exercise these powers appropriately to ensure that it befits the new immigration propositions (Picot, & Sweetman, 2012).
It is important to emphasize that higher levels of immigration can only create an anticipated benefit only if the immigrants have positive economic outcomes. By simply increasing the number but not addressing the existing challenges would lead to significant economic cost as well as further risk decreasing public support for immigration. Therefore, moving forward, maintaining a strong immigration system will only depend on how the government is serious in decreasing the number of immigrants. In Canada, there is a strong evidence that the national interests have not been well served by the country’s immigration policy over the last fifty years. Even as the levels of immigration increase, most of the debates on the matter have been subdued whereby, opinion leaders have mainly focused on the perceived positive impacts of immigrations, further overstating the benefits under understating the significant cost of immigration policies. The government has further been able to achieve this through vigorous enforcement of the existing pro-immigration laws and shifting away from the current system, which mainly admits immigration on the grounds of family relationships, towards the one based on the Canadian Interests.
Argument 1
The collective benefits of immigration are now close to insignificant. Banting, (2010) supports this position by arguing that “the irrelevance of immigration is now widely acknowledged, where the recent referendum has revealed a significantly divided country, with the old immigration policies being fractured with increased inequality day-by-day.” The majority had voted against immigration arguing that what really matters is the Canadian citizens who take the pain of huge influx of immigrants.
Argument 2
The evidence of distributive impact of immigration is inadequate. According to a study conducted by the LSE, the economic effects of immigration on careers is neutral. Counties that have been receiving huge numbers of immigrants and experiencing neither a larger increase in number of unemployed adults beyond the national baseline. In addition, the percentage of new jobs that go to migrants has been consistent with the ratio of natives to immigrants in the populace. However, this is only during the great times which are very few. The country’s migration Advisory council notes that the country has been struggling to take in immigrants and accommodating them properly. In addition, an increase in immigration means an increase in the supply of labor, which further implies that there is a decrease in demand and thus wages fall. This is often common among the low skilled labor force as well as the economically depressed areas. As a result, most of the Canadian natives are displaced from the jobs they would other have maintained.
Argument 3
The economic impact of immigration in Canada is a fundamental subject that need to be discussed widely among the key stakeholders. While the immigration levels have been maintained at a constant number for the past years, Canada still remains one of the few countries that take most immigrants per capita. The rate per capita immigration has been on the decline since the last 20 years, and recent years have seen as steady decrease in skilled level immigrants to Canada. Nevertheless, over the last few centuries the economic position of the immigrants relative to the native Canadians have steadily increased.
A study conducted back in 2009 by the Statistics Canada shows that the income profile of immigrants by then deteriorated by huge amount between 2000-2008. In addition, most of the recent immigrants are far more probable that the Canadian natives to remain in the low-income bracket and the rates of employment further decreasing towards the national average with most of the time spent in Canada (Ferrer, Picot, & Riddell, 2014). Therefore, Canada needs to minimize its capacity of absorbing immigrants in order to ensure that they are able to integrate properly, both socially and economically. This involves identifying the most appropriate measures that would develop the Canadian economy in order to ensure that the immigrants have access to better opportunities that can generate sufficient economic activity as well as government revenues that can later be used to develop various social welfare systems that would support better living standards for the manageable number.
Conclusions
Canada ought to evaluate a myriad of options as it tries to identify the most appropriate ways of reducing the immigration levels in order to achieve its economic goals. Some of the considerations include: new immigration compositions such as limiting the family immigration or chain immigration, minimize its absorptive capacity with respect to the income per capita among others. At the moment, Canada needs to mostly consider economic considerations while devising new processes.
References
Banting, K. G. (2010). Is There a Progressive’s Dilemma in Canada? Immigration, Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Presidential Address to the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, June 2, 2010. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 43(4), 797-820.
Beach, C. M., Worswick, C., & Green, A. G. (2011). Toward Improving Canada’s Skilled Immigration Policy: An Evaluation Approach. CD Howe Institute.
Ferrer, A. M., Picot, G., & Riddell, W. C. (2014). New directions in immigration policy: Canada’s evolving approach to the selection of economic immigrants. International Migration Review, 48(3), 846-867.
Picot, G., & Sweetman, A. (2012). Making it in Canada: Immigration outcomes and policies. IRPP study, (29), 1.
