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Why Canada Should Join the EU

economist.com

341–350 of 823 posts

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because those immigrants came here because they wanted to be Canadians. These new immigrants have no desire to integrate.

I've had the same complaint about DEI stuff in the US. Diversity is wonderful, but you also need people to integrate. The US used to be called the great melting pot, now we don't expect people to melt. No wonder we have so many problems. People used to be expected to integrate, that don't now, people should rightly be pissed.

> Diversity is wonderful

Why? You literally say on your very next sentence that it’s not - that diversity must be destroyed through integration and a melting pot.

Diversity and immigration always has a cost and that’s the destruction of your existing culture in part. Sometimes that tradeoff is worth it. But you can’t overdo it.

And getting pissed at the people that don’t integrate is barking up the wrong tree. They never agreed to that and they should be left alone to live their lives.

We should go after the people that allowed this to happen.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#342

[flagged]

funny to see such a wise person reduced to this nationalistic polemic

Looking at the "Temporary foreign workers - work permit holders" graph in that report https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co... makes me think that you are the polemist

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#343
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a certain amount of people that can adapt to a place, but if too many people of common culture comes in they just hijack the place. In Canada it seems to me they didn't establish the limit properly and people also worked around it by moving within Canada disregarding the agreement that they'd stay in a certain zone that still had some slack of people they could integrate.

Hijacking deprives someone else of their rights. Living differently than your neighbor doesn’t change anything for your neighbor. Nothing is “hijacked”.

If all your neighbors no longer spoke English, you don't think that would affect you?

Obviously that's an extreme example, but other cultural differences will affect you as well.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. There are about 1 million international students in Canada and they aren't cherry picked. Basically anyone who gets into any of the strip mall colleges in Ontario gets in, and many of them are basically just diploma mills "selling" Canadian immigration status to anyone willing to pay. There is nominally a requirement to be self sufficient financially but it just requires showing you have 20k CAD in a…

Being an international student isn't "immigration status" -- it's temporary by definition. There's a potential path to PR from there, but by no means guaranteed. I'd have to go look up the conversion rate, but my understanding is the majority of international students are returning home after, or at least that used to be the case.

Yes, many return by choice, but until the last few months, it was basically guaranteed that if you get into university or a college here and graduate, you'll definitely get a work visa, and you'll definitely be able to get a PR, and then citizenship.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#345
post #59

Canada has less free trade between provinces than the EU does between countries. The two are not compatible.

This is true, but I'd love to see something happen to force Canadian provinces's hands to improve this. To dream the impossible dream...

Indeed. I don’t think I have met a single person that thinks the Canadian constitution as is is the right thing, but also have never met any two people that agree on what it should be instead.

If anything the recent Trumpian outbursts have demonstrated just how strong the inertia is on this. For it to change will take a genuine existential crisis.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#346
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't visited at all > it's not a place [I] would recommend most people to live Your recommendation (or lack thereof) carries little weight, then. But to actually answer your question, there are many places in the US (urban, suburban, and rural) where fear of violent crime is not a major factor in the day-to-day life of most people. I don't know anyone who has been a victim of violent crime, and it does not fea…

Thanks for the answer. Though I can't say that I expected most people to fear being violently killed on a daily basis indeed, murder is something the person above mentioned so that technically is an answer to my question about which bit is not ubiquitous for the country

Fair enough, I only provided a counterexample to a part of the argument. I think a lot of the social criticism in that comment is more accurate, e.g. the stuff about health care and education quality. In a lot of America it seems like the only solution to those things is "don't be poor".

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#347
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has some of the most easily abused immigration systems in the world. Back home in India, it's considered a joke, with entire movies made on that premise. It has led to mass migration of a slice of India's low-skill-low-virtue underclass. This subgroup provides little economic value, brings down wages & slots into existing criminal gangs in Canada. If this wasn't bad enough, Canada has the 1st world's most regr…

Tell me more about this Indian 'subgroup', this 'low-skill-low-virtue underclass' that's built into your very fabric of society, ingrained in religion, that you don't like.

I think you're extrapolating further than I intended.

I used the phrases 'low-skill-low-virtue underclass', 'slice' &'subgroup' for reasons of being precise, not as dog-whistles.

'Subgroup and slice' because Canada definitely imports some elite human capital from India. Those numbers haven't changed over the last decade. It's the 2nd type of immigration that's exploded and is worth talking about.

As for your implication, I didn't call them Sikh because they aren't all or even majority Sikh. For the ones that are Sikh, their religion has very little to do with being low-skill or low-virtue. They're low skill as a matter of fact. A person doesn't chose to move to a bogus diploma-mill without basic competence in English, if they had meaningful skills. Low virtue because it involves actively abusing Canada's immigration system and closes your door to most respectful careers. It isn't endemic to the religion or the people. It is endemic to post-1980s Punjab. Now yes, being Sikh does make them more susceptible to being drawn into gangs once they're in Canada. But, there are enough non-Sikh gangs for the rest of them as well.

If your sieve preserves pebbles, then you'll get pebbles. Canada created a system that actively imports 'low-optimism, low-skill & young Indians; with no opportunities back home; low attachment to the homeland, and a propensity for using shady methods for immigration'. Smart Sikhs & Indians alike are staying back home or working in the US, where wages and opportunities are plentiful. There is ofc the aforementioned steady stream of high-skill Indians moving to Canada, but their numbers have been outstripped over the last decade.

If Canada had focused on expanding their high-skill pool while stamping some unsavory backdoor loopholes, then they could've had an excellent decade of productive immigration. Instead, they laid a red-carpet by the backdoor, added a 8 lane highway and now it's getting overwhelmed by unsavory backdoor users.

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I acknowledge that low-virtue might not be the best way to phrase it. It's just that this group is desperate for survival. They have no time or concern for integration, Canadian culture or the west's conception of civic sense. While it manifests as low-virtue optics, it is primarily about individuals who refuse to give up extractive 3rd-world-surivivalist zero-sum mentalities.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy When you compare Canada, the US or some of the higher immigration countries in Europe to developed countries without immigration you'd wish you'd have price increase problems. Japan, sometimes hailed as an alternative to immigration is now so poor and old that middle class Westerners travel there like they traveled to a middle income countr…

Oddly enough I am visiting Japan right now. There are lots of foreign workers in service jobs. They speak zone language and don’t jay walk. Prices feel like a middle income country, but that is just the Yen sucking. Otherwise it feels very first world.

>Prices feel like a middle income country, but that is just the Yen sucking

No it isn't. In purchasing power terms Japan has been, or is about to be overtaken by Poland and Slovakia [1]. This is largely due to demographics and the declining share of the working age population. There is nothing that impoverishes countries more. Gradual decline feels fine for a while, until it doesn't when the bulk of the workforce ages out.

[1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/po...

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#349
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reddit thread started by a woman working at a college in Toronto was on the front page of reddit 2 months ago. Commenters just piled on with more and more anecdotes. : https://old.reddit.com/r/canadian/comments/1g7a6eg/im_sick_o... I binged watched a bunch of videos on Europe's various countries' backlash to immigration. An example was a Sweden reversal of attitude on immigration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am…

Reddit is completely astroturfed and shouldn't be taken as an real-world indication of political sentiments on any issue. However, turning to racist policy in light of economic crisis is not new, the last time Americans deported people of Mexican descent in droves was during the aftermath of the Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the…

> Humanity will just have to relearn the lessons of the 1920s-1940s again, if it learns anything at all that is

Every 3rd generation, the cycle starts over. It's the circle of strife. The last generation that saw war on an industrial scale has almost completely died out.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And most of it misplaced. I've seen that tactic to try to discredit real, valid concerns with immigration, either by lumping it with racism (which definitely exists, but is not the only argument against unfettered immigration), or by pretending something else is the problem (something else may also be a problem, but that doesn't make the problems that people are worried about with high levels of immigration invalid…

>When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy When you compare Canada, the US or some of the higher immigration countries in Europe to developed countries without immigration you'd wish you'd have price increase problems. Japan, sometimes hailed as an alternative to immigration is now so poor and old that middle class Westerners travel there like they traveled to a middle income countr…

I think literally all of those problems also apply to Canada. The population over 60 is around 20% and our birth rate as of 2022 was 1.33. We have low productivity, low entrepreneurship driven by a number of factors, and a stagnant economy that by the Bank of Canada's own admission is propped up by post-COVID immigration.
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