The inefficiencies of the country where I live and the quasi-xenophobic sentiment towards foreigners (mostly Americans foreigners) made me decide to plan to leave.
I agree with your points, and I think that Canada will have to work smartly to retain those people otherwise they’ll end up leaving.
I did not know this. Makes me wonder -- what is the point at which housing is so unaffordable that people start to riot?
The Canadian government still holds crown land that they will give away for free to anyone willing to settle it. That provides an option of last resort. Any location in the country that compels one away from free has got to be worth it. While one may complain, as people love to do, they are still pulling out their purses because they know it is worth every penny.
Should the balance change, people will leave for greener pastures before worrying about rioting. Canada's whole legacy is built on people moving around when certain locations become too expensive. Its ancestral people have done it over, and over, and over again. There is no reason to think this time is different.
hope you're comfortable with -40C or lower
You probably haven't even heard about my city, because it has only 60k ish people and still runs into that problem.
"But but but but zoning and developers can't build cheap housing because they aren't allowed to!". Funny, that didn't stop them from building hundreds of units of assisted living facilities right in some of the most expensive land they could find. Maybe it's because, in a capitalistic system, it's more incentivized to build a structure that can charge the state $12k a month per resident that they neglect than one that can charge each resident $2k a month because they actually have to be able to afford it.
Meanwhile grandma doesn't even know where they are.
Years ago, I went on a business trip to the US, and while there an Indian-American colleague said some very Islamophobic things to me. I guess he probably brought some of that with him from India, although certainly there would have been things in the US to reinforce it. He was a 9/11 survivor and this was only a few years later, so that was likely a factor too. There is some obvious overlap between Islamophobia and xenophobia - although not all Muslims have an immigrant background (converts), and there are billions of non-Muslim foreigners
Australia is even more immigrant than Canada – around 30% overseas born.
But I think part of why Australia (and maybe Canada too) have less of a problem with xenophobia than some countries with less immigrants – greater selectiveness in the immigration intake, and skewing it more towards highly skilled/educated people.
If you take in 100,000 university graduates from China and India, versus 100,000 random refugees and economic migrants from anywhere at all – it is unsurprising the former cause significantly less social problems than the latter, and those social problems tend to fuel xenophobia.
The only advantage to businesses is that these people are modern indentured servants, due to their immigration status being dependent on their employer. I'm all for getting rid of that but I also think there should likely be a smaller number with a salary based bidding system (e.g. if you aren't paying in the 80th percentile or above for a person in the industry of that age, you're not getting H1-Bs, and yes age not years of experience since the latter is easily fudged). Otherwise, it simply continues to be a way for companies to suppress wages.
If companies can't bring someone over that they can overwork and underpay at threat of deportation, they'll rethink the MBA-brained "optimizations" and be forced to create a more resilient workforce rather than a loose collection of people to rugpull every time the rate of profit increase dips by .0004%.
without H-1B america would not have Elon (for better or worse)
The issues are complex - but one of the side affects are indeed artificial suppression of wages for citizens.
We have software titans bursting at the seam with imported labor - yet our domestic universities are also churning out more CS graduates than ever before. Some of these graduates are indeed from foreign countries - but not all.
It's very hard to believe companies need to import labor for commoditized software engineering positions when there are plenty of available workers already here.
We should be importing top-tier talent - the types of folks that are working in complex fields, inventing new fields, developing things that haven't been done before, etc. We should not be importing basic CS graduates and filling basic SE jobs.
H1B's are often cheaper to hire, and do not enjoy the same mobility freedoms a citizen does. In some ways, they are beholden to their sponsor company, and whatever wages that company offers - which may not necessarily be market wages.
Oh wait.
I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.
That seems like some wild calculus. Fewer people willing to accept lower pay and be stuck at a specific company = higher pay. There's no other way to make the math work, particularly for extreme-demand positions like SE.
The H1B game, as it's played today, is a relatively modern invention, and was not used to build startups into mega corps anyway.
Especially Americans working at John Deere, Dow Chemical and all the food processing
if you carefully look at silicon valley companies (even large ones) - most of product R&D and IP and innovation comes from immigrants. Native born americans are mostly working in admin jobs like HR, Admin, Sales, Operations, Finance, etc
If you look at your Googles, your Facebooks, your Microsofts, you will find a glut of H1B's working regular SE jobs, such as maintenance and feature development. That's exactly who H1B's are not supposed to be for - and that is the issue.
Mega corps laying off huge engineering teams while simultaneously importing more H1B's tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money, as they say.
but it is not the reason to get rid of the entirety of H-1B program, as some people advocate here.
Would love to see your source for this fact, genuinely curious.
Also you can check names on patents files by google or other tech firm
It's also bogus to say that H-1B is more problematic than L-1B for body-shopping: all the well organized body-shops do massive amount of intra-company transfers.
btw these indian body shops are already abusing O-1 and L-1 visas en masse as well, so your latter statement is also not 100% true
Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native, the government somewhat pulled the rug from underneath the locals who spend a lot of money to go to uni etc and were hoping to have a decent return on their investment in education.
This also creates disincentive for locals to learn these in-demand skills.
If you combine this with the fact that companies can rent out these cheap workers at £500 or more a day, while avoiding paying taxes it is a poor deal that only benefits big corporations.
For example, according to WhatUni [1], the average computer science graduate salary after leaving uni is £27K. Even after a year or two of pay increments, the average (median? not sure) CS graduate could be earning less than the £35K threshold. It's not just the "unis" that deserve double quotes with this kind of salary range: Exeter is Russell Group, but the same site says their graduates have a £28K average starting salary.
Staying with Exeter, their 2023 pay scales [2] have postdocs starting at £31K, and lecturers in the £40K-50K range; by the time you're earning double of £35k, you're well into associate professor territory.
Sure, you won't get a good senior developer for £35K. But if your business model is lots of juniors and high churn, you'll get plenty of people in that range.
[1] https://www.whatuni.com/degrees/computer-science-bsc-hons/un... [2] https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/humanresou...
Have you applied for a job and been told that they don't want you because there's a cheaper immigrant available?
Have you had a job and been replaced by an immigrant?
I also saw a few jobs of colleagues not renewed and replaced by immigrant teams supplied by a big consultancy.
If this trend continues, I'll be looking at retiring early or moving overseas.
We can go abroad to study it for much cheaper. Alternatively, foreign nationals can come to study here: they'll pay twice as much as us to do so. Our higher education is subsidised. Likewise, we don't have to work in this country. Immigration is not a one-way system.
The number of companies that can sponsor a Tier 2 Visa is limited. Those that do have to pay £1000pa for each individual they sponsor. The individual themselves will have to pay >£600pa to subsidise the NHS for you and me.
We no longer have the Resident Labour Market Test - it was abolished because unemployment rates were extremely low - but most people who have passed the 2 year curfew to be allowed to take an employer to tribunal are in a job where their employers first had to prove the job couldn't be filled by local talent.
Perhaps the government should update the SOC code for software engineers to be higher. They determine the going rate to hire into these 'skilled occupation' roles.
Right, someone will go abroad to study cheaper only to come back and get a poor wage. Sure.
> The number of companies that can sponsor a Tier 2 Visa is limited. Those that do have to pay £1000pa for each individual they sponsor.
Tier 2 visa has been replaced by Skilled worker visa and there is over 80,000 companies registered as sponsors. The £1,000 pa is nothing if you take into account how much profit company can make on such worker.
All immigration is GDP positive and incrementally increases tax income. On the other hand they increase the costs of providing services and infrastructure, but that is not connected to immigration per se, but economic and population growth. Unsurprisingly if the government makes money it also incurs expenses.
If you don't like immigration, say so, but don't try to blame them for government finances. Locals having children has the exact same effect, but it's even more expensive for the government. But in wealth countries people aren't having enough children, so immigration policies are used to maintain growth. You could do without them, but your economy would tend to shrink or stagnate along with the level of population over time.
Your immigration GDP logic isn't accurate. Immigration only increases GDP insofar as it increases foreign currency influx to Canada. Does it do this? Sure. But not in the prior implied rate and manner. More people making less domestic money doesn't magically increase GDP.
Blaming my critique of "more domestic labor = more government profit" talking point, typed without a hint of irony, on anything else is lazy. Especially combined with a warning not to critique that point.
If you have 2 kids you can get to Canada faster especially school age.
If you have over $500k you used to be able to get into Quebec and drive into Ontario.
Since 2010 the goal was 100m in 2050
Right now we need farmers.
Labor pool immigration, in the context of an abundant labor pool, is what it has always been: weakening of labor bargaining, undercutting of market salary, and a separate slew of political motivations.
100m by 2050 reads like incoming feudalism. Best of luck with it.
It's not so easy just to raise taxes. Raising salaries doesn't increase output, only gdp.
Taxation was tongue in cheek, but moreso our strategy is tax the blood out of immigrants to keep the country going, as really when you first come here, you don't earn much.
What for?
As a Canadian farmer I struggle to grow my operation because any time property becomes available there are 100 other farmers champing at the bit to do the same. I spend most of my days working in tech because there isn't enough farm work to do. In fact, most farmers in Canada have an off-farm job.
Those who have bit off more than they can chew likely think we need more farmhands, but they could also downsize.
While it is not completely unheard of for farmers to also be farmhands, there is difficulty in that the farms will generally share the same busy seasons. Meaning that your employer will want you on the job most especially during the times you will want a vacation to work on your own farm.
For me, it is also questionable how much I want to help out the competition. While farmers are generally good spirited and try to work together for a greater good, there is still only so much resources to go around, and I want to see my business thrive. I'd jump in and help in a pinch, but to make it a career...
But it is also true that tech will pay me more than other farmers will. That certainly seals the deal.
They need a constant stream of desperate people to abuse in order for that business model to work out - and I guess that's why farming historically has been the main industry for slavery. Or a family business where the profits of cheap labour one day ends up in the hands of the labourer when he inherits the farm.
I don't know if the labour is cheap, exactly. Tech is kind of an outlier among few other careers in the level of pay. I expect being a farmhand would still be my second best choice in terms of pay opportunity.
Of course, being the owner is more fun. The thrill of the gamble is like no other.
Similar to what's happening in cities where companies can't find people as many people left, Toronto, so all your retail is immigrants. If someone grew up here 20 years ago and was making minimum wage they could buy a house, that same job doesn't even pay for a bachelor today, they have no incentive to stay.
Some of the policies that are passing will reduce your profits significantly and someone from another country will be willing to work for less.
People of often having a cultural, religious and moral background completely different to more-or-less original value Canadians? How will that work?
Oh i guess by appeasing everybody to create that multicultural society with less & less identity of its own, just the same bland globalized aftertaste. The major Canadian cities beside Montreal and Quebec are already taken.
Many immigrants do come in order to work extremely hard to gain prosperity for themselves and their families, which honestly seems pretty in line with US values, but many come explicitly for the culture of freedom, freedom to do and think as they choose without having to constantly battle neighbors relatives over every little thing unconventional thing they want to do. They have given up the convenience of living near family, often given up the social status of being top in their society, for freedom, as embodied in the US culture of fast cars, eccentric geniuses, rock and roll, artistic and intellectual freedom and expression, and so on. The very living avatars of the US thirst for freedom, free of the entitlement and fear of hard work that seems to be a common outcome for growing up here.
Sizeable chunks of some immigrant populations simply won't melt, which IMO is fine in a place like Canada or the US. They'll still work with everyone else, and I feel like profession and class are both way bigger dividers than ethnicity anyway. A white SWE probably knows more Indian SWEs than white janitors.
Speaking a different language at home is a really good thing. Kids are going to pick up English through immersion anyway, so they're going to turn out bi/multilingual. That's great.
Do you consider female circumcision a dog whistle too? Because those are the kind of values being brought in.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/parents-charge...
Being a second-generation immigrant of Indian-American parents myself, I see how different the H1Bs are compared to my own family. My family left India because we were mistreated. Now, the very people that mistreated them are coming here and bringing their regressive values with them. We value the rights we have in this country because they were denied to us in the old country. We honestly need less skilled migration, or if we do have skilled migration, we need to show that those skilled migrants are from a class that is being oppressed in their own country. The last thing we need are high-status foreigners with the means and social capital to bring their own foreign values. Better to have poorer immigrants, like my own family, who adapt to the culture. Moreover, those who fled their own country don't need to be re-terrorized here.
So many times my dad has been told to basically go to hell by other Indian immigrants because we're not the right caste. Once we had a wife of coworkers pretend to feel ill just speaking to my mother because of the caste difference; in professional environments! Hearing white people speak about all these things in the abstract is one thing. Having them actually play out is another. To come to this country, you should have to prove that you were not a racist, casteist nutjob in your own country. And realistically, many Indians are going to fail that test.
Most are not interested in western culture, they come here specifically for the salary, while maintaining the culture and social networks from where theyre originally from.
And there are 1.5 billion Indians and 1.5 billion Chinese people.
How that will work is: as they become the dominant culture your country will simply become either China west or India west.
In America they let the population of an entire state every year of immigrants into America.
Caveat: there are some states so sparsely populated there are more livestock than people.
> Caveat: there are some states so sparsely populated there are more livestock than people.
Not really. The political issues with immigration absolutely not do not include finding empty land to put them in.
Also, the frontier has been closed for a long time.
This is sometimes true, but irrelevant, because their children adopt the local culture and are fully integrated. This is anti-immigration red herring.
their kids are still getting arranged marriages.
their kids are getting their social networks from their churches.
their kids are going to culturally specific schools.
Even their neighborhoods are culturally specific i.e. Chinatown, Korea town, India town, etc
Maybe they're feeling so guilty about that they've decided to invite in some more colonizers, to experience colonization from the other end.
- the primarily French and British traders with First Nations?
- the colonizing religiously oriented Europeans that committed genocide (forcibly removing all native children from their homes & putting them in schools where many died of neglect)?
- the over 600 current First Nations governments?
- the refugees Canada took in, from the Underground Railroad to the Kosovo genocide to today?
- post World War II Italians, draft-dodging Americans, a huge Irish influx, and before all of that Chinese immigration (which primarily built the railroads used to this day)?
Btw, what do you consider original Canadian values? Do you mean the Chinese exclusion in BC, which has lasted all the way into 1947? The genocide against First Nations people? The ongoing neglect of missing and murdered First Nations women? The significant Ukrainian population (the largest out of ukraine)? The generous refugee policy? The anti slavery stance which welcomed Underground Railroad refugees? The national railroad (from sea to shining sea) built by primarily Chinese labor?
sorry you weren't born at the right time to be fabulously wealthy for no reason, i guess.
If what's needed to shake this program up and shine a light on the corruption is some competition from our neighbors to the north, sounds great to me. Maybe Canada should extend this program to Americans who don't have health insurance, too. The resulting surge of expatriates just might force the parasite class to rethink America's archaic and corrupt health care system as well.
In this way Canada can achieve higher economic utility for itself. I'm imagining a system where everyone in the society is brought in on a temporary basis. They are imported after their post-secondary education and exported maybe 10 years before their retirement. In this way we avoid all the costs associated with having "people" in our country and instead we reap the economic reward of their labor!
I guess I shouldn't say "our" country. I would be exported fairly quickly... But! To those glorious (and brave) few on the executive committee entrusted to leading Canada Inc. through these difficult times, the society they get to inhabit will undoubtedly be the economic envy of the world!
Sure you can. The only reason nations avoid allowing people to become stateless is an appreciation of the burden that places on those people. But if we're pursuing a modest proposal where the government shifts its perspective to focus on "realize[ing] higher economic utility for" itself, that becomes less a concern.
At the very minimum you can "export" those low-economic-utility people by sticking them them on a barge and towing it to well into international waters where the currents will take it away (and if you're a nice government, just outside the territorial waters of some other country).
"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
If you kick out people you don't like and expect them to go to different countries it will end similar to those migrant boats in the Mediterranean.
This is how the Gulf economies work. (Also the Vatican, but for different reasons and at a different age.)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/assisted-s...
>Denise said she hasn’t cancelled her MAID application because she still suffers from painful chronic health problems that haven’t been properly handled.
She'll never have healthy-millionaire quality of life, but this isn't what medically-assisted dying is meant for.
"Canada Veteran Affair's department: Finishing what the enemy started!"
This has nothing to do with the article.
Given the current zeitgeist, I feel there's only a 70% chance that's an autocorrupt of Alzheimer's.
Or did, until I saw the alternative font in the comment box and realised that's a lowercase L not a capital i.
My mum died of that. Technically liver or kidney failure from dehydration, but that in turn was from refusing food in the care home and not having the awareness to get liquids separately.
I think it was worse for us than it was for her, overall, though there were a few occasions where her self-awareness of the nature of her condition caused her unhappiness.
Happy we are making progress with that and other degenerative diseases. I just wish we all had the opportunity to choose how our life ends, not just for our own suffering but also for those that suffer for us.
But the recent outrage over it is definitely an overreaction, and is being brought up by the same people that were complaining about vaccines and masks 2 years ago.
Make no mistake, I'm a hippie leftist even by Canadian standards. My argument is one I like to use with more right wing friend who oppose immigration.
You think our government respects people taking time to rear offspring? Of course not! They're not contributing their labour to our economy while being parents so we've structured the incentives to start families in such a way that they're driven back to work ASAP. Strictly speaking: having children is bad for our labour force and should be avoided.
In terms of across the board consumption, there is nothing as productive as a modern child. Clothes, consumable goods, travel sports, recreations, hobbies, and diversions all lead straight to the consumption that is so vital to our economy.
And yet, with sicknesses, evening activities, and other problems, there is nothing that disrupts an individual worker's productivity as a child.
I'm not sure I am smart enough to come up with an equation, but, it's in there somewhere to tell us whether a child is a net positive or negative influence on our Economy than the other.
I have two kids and it isn't that bad at all. Very small loss of productivity for me except when I took parental leave for 3 months. I have grandparents that live nearby and they can help with sickness and other babysitting though.
Just so happened that my family had to move for work, health, etc. I love raising my kids so it’s fine. It has been the equivalent of drop kicking my career against a brick wall occasionally, if I’m being honest.
The best economics can only tell you how to convert value into different units. It can't tell you what value is.
This is so ridiculous! Export where?? Isn't it what Hitler tried to do?
And also, Swift's was always a very s(ali|oyl)ent Green proposal is appropriate to Make Room! Make Room!
This is a big deal. Back in the early 2010s, software developers moving to SF pretty much willed into existence the tech industry up there. Before then, companies would start in SF and move down to the valley. If skilled folks want to move to your area, it can be a boon, and if I’m not mistaken, Canadian tax policy is better suited to redistribute the gains from that than U.S. tax policy.
Nothing attracts profitable businesses and high earning individuals more than a tax policy optimized to redistribute those gains.
Not a new policy. Gotta put in your time as a PR to qualify for a citizenship (that mostly can’t be taken away from you ever).
It anything, the physical presence requirements have been diluted because politicians realize they’re more likely to get your vote if they have you citizenship.
They're not saying that we should get rid of natural-born folks. They're just saying that often times the people who most want their nation to not allow other folks in, don't appreciate all of the things that those other folks provide for them. i.e. Immigration is subsidizing a lot of the things you probably enjoy about your life, and we should probably be considering it more as a blessing than a curse.
Nobody is trying to replace you. They're just trying to help you, and provide a better opportunity for their children once they've bought into the same system your parents bought into.
LOL
And while they may not explicitly be trying to help you, their goals are such that "helping Canada helps themselves." Way more than you give them credit for. But that's okay, please join the fear-mongering of "the great replacement."
It’s pretty bonkers to say people who immigrate to the US on H1-B visas are doing so out of an altruistic desire to “help” anybody but themselves and their families (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
People seem to still prefer immigrating to the United States over Canada even though Canada’s immigration system is far more reasonable. They’re trying to scoop people up with policies like this but I think it’s worth taking a step back and reflecting on why that is. I think a big part of it is Canada’s cost of living especially wrt housing is even worse than the US’s and salaries are lower.
And I say this as an expat currently living in Mexico with a fair amount of Americans and Canadians. So this isn’t a pro United States comment, it’s just a reality check. The US has draconian immigration rules and hoops to jump through… but it seems like the demand is such that they can get away with it.
I'm trying to replace me! Humans are first and foremost economic units. Fungible and replaceable. There's absolutely no reason to prefer any one human over another -- except for their ability to produce economic output.
Society is a vain illusion for the true foundation of civilization -- economic produce. Things like care for the elderly or education of children only exist to maximize the future labor of the young and to deceive the middle-aged. We should cut these vestiges from our society and embrace a new future where only the economically gifted are permitted to remain.
I know at first this is hard to accept but its only through this radical, but sensible, plan that every citizen in Canada will be able to afford a Netflix account with password sharing.
edit: I hope we can make it there in time.
This notion that Bob from Podunk rural Canada with an IQ of 80 competes with an immigrant with a PhD makes no sense. The latter finances the welfare of the former. You need to create wealth first before you can redistribute it and keeping the strongest wealth creators out of the country is one of the stupidest damage you can inflict on yourself.
This sarcasm drenched replacement fantasy is the exact opposite of reality. Only if you have a strong economy you can continue to maintain public welfare.
That's too far fetched. They're more likely to start a company in their own country than Canada.
"Garnett Picot and Yuri Ostrovsky revealed based on data from 2016 that immigrants are 41.7 per cent more likely than Canadians who were born in Canada to either start a business or be self-employed.[...]Leaving aside self-employment, immigrants were found to be 30 per cent more likely to own a privately-incorporated business that provided jobs for others than were native-born Canadians."
And maybe even more important, from US data:
"Immigrants have started more than half (319 of 582, or 55 per cent) of America’s start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more,"
IIRC among AI related startups the number of immigrant founders or co-founders is even close to two-thirds. Attracting top tier human capital is pretty much North America's greatest advantage.
https://www.immigration.ca/immigrants-start-more-businesses-...
Not "in general, Immigrants formed corp more than Canadians born in Canada".
US is different. Cost of business in Canada is high due to red-tapes and lower RoI than US (plus less Capital to go around).
The romanticization of Indian programmers creating a successful tech company in Canada (just like they did in US) is just that for now, romanticization.
Indian, specifically Punjabis, done better as Entrepreneur in non-tech in Canada.
Hence, far fetched.
Citizenship was the world's first labor union.
Inherited citizenship is nepotism.
People love their children (genes).
We have posts like this one several times a week in our subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/1498ksd/does_any...
People in that thread are saying their retirement plan is MAiD (the new Canadian assisted suicide program). People talk about being depressed, sobbing regularly over how unaffordable things have gotten.
There are more posts like this in every major BC city subreddit as well as /r/britishcolumbia and /r/canada
Second, nobody is saying their retirement plan is euthanasia other than as a joke, or a dogwhistle.
I assure you a lot of people do break down over how hopeless it feels here. And I don't even think people are joking about MAiD as a retirement plan (and the people relying on MAiD as a retirement plan are also the people who support MAiD)
It's the people in their 30s who have no savings (I'm one of them). People in their 40s who work for <$24/hr and have had to rent at near-market for the majority of their time, for one reason or another. People who have been paycheck to paycheck despite busting their asses every day, and maybe even getting a bachelors degree that did nothing for them (again, I realize CS grads have been relatively unscathed here to date)
Vancouver has gotten much worse even in the last year, in terms of homelessness, mental health issues, rent prices, and overall affordability, so maybe if you moved away > 1 year ago you aren't even aware of how bad it's gotten.
Vancouver is a WONDERFUL city by 99% of the world standard, that's why so many people CHOOSE to live here. Just like Canada is an amazing country.
I've been in Vancouver for 10y now, have lived in many other cities across the first world and wouldn't want to be anywhere else. It has its challenges like any other city
Well.. I've been in Vancouver for 10 years now also.
The city has gotten much worse.
I'm relatively privileged in that I'm able to pay bills right now, but many people aren't. I have so many friends working for less than $25/hr who are one renoviction away from homelessness (they can't afford the market rate).
And I have recently-homeless friends who have decided to live in their car rather than compete for rent.
Several friends on PRs have decided to go back to their home countries (India, Australia). Lots of young people who don't have parents to fall back on have left the city. Other friends have retreated to the interior or the island (though the affordability of everywhere in BC is abysmal right now)
I'm not saying there aren't more people coming than going (Canada's aggressive immigration goals have ensured that), just that most people who get here find it's a struggle.
> Again, go touch grass and plug out of reddit, that shit isn't good for your mental health.
I'm basing this on the experience of people I know outside of the internet, but obviously that's not something I can link to in Hacker News.
Most people I know IRL don't consider Vancouver a desirable place to live now. Perhaps more desirable for weather than other Canadian cities, but not on par with the major cities of other first-world countries (again, I have friends from other countries who have said this is why they were going back).
Have you read other reddits ? If you read the Amsterdam one, London, NY, Sydney.. it's all the same. It's a GLOBAL problem.
Life is much less affordable now than it was 10y ago. Nothing unique to Canada.
Go ahead and find me as many doom and gloom posts about the economy in Amsterdam as here... I'll wait. Looking at the Amsterdam sub, it looks like the number of posts from people freaking out about work/homelessness/affordibility has been relatively consistent (and low volume) over the last 10 years. Vancouver on the other hand...
I'm not denying it's a "global problem" in that many cities are affected.
Yes, many other west coast cities are having a tough time (though at least jobs pay more relative to CoL in every other west coast city... even SF).
But cities like Amsterdam aren't, and people struggling in Australia are largely doing so for different reasons (politics / social attitudes rather than economy). The minimum wage there is much closer to a living wage. My friend who prefers Vancouver for nature/vibe is going back to Australia to work so he can save up some money to come back with.
Edit: Interestingly, people in the Amsterdam subreddit seem to think that Amsterdam is overall better/more affordable than Vancouver:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/xetw2m/comment/i...
> "i call bullshit, no fucking way that Vancouver or Calgary are more liveable than Amsterdam, no fucking way."
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/13fdx4z/comment/...
> "Vancouver property market (both buying and rental) is much much worse than the Dutch one."
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/xetw2m/comment/i...
> "Vancouver; liveable yes, affordable no"
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/y51soz/comment/i...
> "Housing crisis is worse in Toronto and Vancouver ... you earn less there and it’s still more expensive than here"
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/twxkio/comment/i...
> "As a Vancouverite that left for Amsterdam 11 years ago, moving to Vancouver is a horrible idea"
For the last year, the only time I've seen posts in /r/vancouver (from people who live here) talking about it being a great city, the praise is tempered by caveats about how it's going to be a struggle unless you're wealthy
Amsterdam has a wait list for one year for rental, there's zero availability, rents are through the rough and salary is way lower Vancouver for any tech person, apart from their tax credit in the first 3y you move there the taxes are bigger than here too, ask me how I know ;)
I'm not talking about tech specifically, just overall liveability/affordability for the average person trying not to die on the streets.
Is there some reason people in the Amsterdam sub seem pretty content and the people who have lived in both Amsterdam and Vancouver think Vancouver is unaffordable?
But I also think it's important to maintain perspective. Nobody is talking about killing themselves in retirement. This is literally not a thing. Don't pretend it is, it'll only make you depressed and susceptible to conspiracy theorists.
Vancouver sucks, but it's also the most desirable city in Canada. There's a reason real estate is so expensive and keeps going up, it's because people keep moving in.
I've got nothing against Canada, but I do prefer the US.
A lot of US Reddit comments on lifestyle affordability split quite drastically into earning-well-going-great and how-does-anyone-survive camps.
Not so much for me as I'm mostly mortgage free at this point, but for my kids someday, I despair.
That, and underfunding the health care system and underbuilding infrastructure
It's a corrupt and mediocre country. But it wasn't always like this. And no, I don't blame Trudeau. Both major parties and the entire corporate & political class are implicated.
Mediocre, rofl.
Wage growth in Canada isn't just stagnant it's terminal.
Disclaimer: I did move to Canada from Italy, one of the reasons was the insanely low salaries for IT
Basically there isn't a fixed number of jobs. As you add people you need more jobs to provide goods and services for those extra people.
It is just all things being equal and they are specially not equal in this case. If they were so great countries producing them would have used them for no-downside profit but it is not happening. US being hub of thousands of high tech companies also not finding much use of them lately.
I guess good on Canada for finding such a profit booster in times of economic downturn.
Something about this is horribly depressing. It’s bad enough that the private sector is doing everything humanly possible to maximize profit.
It makes me wonder what the point of citizenship is if government officials and elected representatives see the cultivation of those born in the country as more expensive and burdensome than just bringing people in. And, it sounds like the government is more interested in higher salaries for new arrivals than longtime constituents.
And it’s not like this is sustainable either. All these much more profitable immigrants are going to become settled and have their own children, who will then become just as expensive to educate. Where does it end, and what’s the ultimate purpose?
Canada Inc.?
There's a pretty important point to citizenship. If you have it, you can't be kicked out.
I've heard your arguments time and time again, and sadly most people think like this. Even though any economic advantage of labour immigration is mostly reaped by big businesses.
A society has failed completely if it depends on abusing foreign labour to function. Let's not pretend that they are hiring the foreigners because it would be too expensive for them to hire locals of the quality they need. You can either side with the employers and think that this is great, or you could side with the people and think this is wrong.
I was born in a place were the school children are in the absolute top of the world in their knowledge as measured and awarded by Pisa. And I know from hiring local people, that the youth there are smart, hard working and honest. At the same time it is a place where the media together with politicians and businesses continuously blast out how there is a "shortage of competent labour" and that they need more immigrants. The truth is of course that they don't want to pay. I think it's just audacious to claim there is a shortage of competence, when there is nothing wrong with the stock material. There is a shortage of willingness to pay a decent salary for labour. And there is a fairly high amount of hatred from older generations towards younger generations. A hatred that I have never understood, but it is there out in the open.
Nobody has the right to cheap labour. If your business cannot turn a profit without paying lower than market rate salaries - you are simply a failure. You don't go demanding more immigrants so you can cut wages. You don't go demanding child labour so you can cut wages. You have to improve your business or admit that you are a failure and close shop.
No sympathy for businesses and sectors that cannot survive without abusing labour. They are not needed.
The talk about expensive education for native children is completely false, and just weird. Children are not expensive to educate anywhere in the world. Education turns expensive because corrupt practices of the governments that administrate education. The same government that then turns around and says the country needs more foreign labour because their own children are too expensive and incompetent.
Let's compare it with a farm. The owner of the farm notices that he can get more milk to sell by not letting the calves have any milk, letting them die instead. So soon he has no more cows and he goes on buying more cows from another farm. "Great! These cows start milking right away, no need to feed them for a year like I would have to with those annoying calfs"
And so on the farmer keeps milking his cows dry and just buying more from his neighbours. All the while people are complementing him for what an economic mastermind he is and how horrible those calfs where that were just drinking all his milk. That is the idea that has taken hold today.
As a datapoint: I immigrated to the US in 2008. After 5 years on an F1 visa and 10 years on an H1B, I'm still at least 10 more years away from being freed from the immigration and visa hassle.
No?
Could it be because you and I both know that FAANG companies' Canadian offices are basically places to stash those who cannot and will not ever get US visas, plus the occasional native Canadian who does not want to move to the US for family reasons?
Second, your supposition of my under/overestimation has nothing to do with the factual composition of FAANG and other US tech companies' Canadian offices. As I said, they are a) mostly people who cannot and will not ever get US visas (i.e., those who didn't make the first hurdle that xbonez was lucky enough to cross), and b) a few native Canadians who for one reason or another don't want to move to the US.
I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.
I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/amazon-canad... [1] https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/microsoft-vancouver-office-b...
125k CAD is 94k USD. Going from 135k to 94k USD is not trivial, and Vancouver is pretty expensive as well. Skytrain is pretty awesome though.
I don't know if you know this, but the rest of the world considers the US to be kind of a terrible place. Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
Basically, yes. According to the Canadian government <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...> (table 1), for every two Canadian-born people moving to the US, one person born outside the US or Canada moves from Canada to the US. Given that during 2001-2006 20% or less of Canada were immigrants <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/g-a00...>, that implies that a Canadian resident born outside the US or Canada is about 50% more likely to move to the US than a Canadian native.
I've heard that New Zealand is similarly used by those seeking to move to Australia.
The exact same thing happens across the board, as I cite elsewhere <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512411>: The best Canadian scientists move to the US, while an equal number in absolute terms of (presumably not the top) American scientists move to Canada.
Also, most highly skilled Canadian devs I know just negotiate remote positions with US based companies. That's what I used to do: US salary living in Vancouver
The Chinese Canadian thing does happen. It's usually 1st generation immigrants with very few ties to Canada and highly competitive families. They're parents usually barely speak English, and their entire families are still in China. Canada let a lot of Chinese immigrants come in during the 80s, and did very little to integrate them, and this is the result I guess.
For what reasons?
Having worked with a lot of Canadians over the years, I've discovered that a significant number of them have this very negative perception of the USA that is not accurate. I can see a lot of these reasons being based on incorrect assumptions, especially when considering how educated upper-middle class people live.
I spent a lot of time in Toronto about 7-8 years ago and I couldn't imagine living there as an American. Everything is so expensive (housing in particular), traffic is terrible, the weather sucks, and my role in Canada paid like 25% less. The food was pretty good, but that's about it.
Sounds like you moved to Toronto and tried to live like you were in the US. No wonder you had a bad time.
I presume he's among those I wrote about, the ones stuck in Canada because they cannot and will not ever be able to get a US visa. And/or believes everything he reads in /r/worldnews and /r/politics.
Shouldn't you save Reddit-tier comments like this for /r/worldnews or /r/politics?
Meanwhile, in a survey of scientists from 16 countries <http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>, the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.
>Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but historically, every year four Canadians move to the US for every American going the other way. According to the Canadian government, this has not changed in the 21st century <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...>.[1] According to Reddit, Texas is basically one step from Nazi Germany, but Texas is those Canadians' fourth-favorite state <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/t/11287/tbl002...>; if you exclude Florida and its retiree-heavy flow, it is their third.
From the Canadian-government analysis:
* "Canadian-born persons who emigrated to the United States between 2000 and 2006 were relatively young", with a median age of 31. Unsurprisingly, "Nearly two-thirds of recent Canadian emigrants to the United States were employed".
* They are also younger than Canadians in general: "Lastly, Canadians who emigrated recently were also generally very young compared to the Canadian population where the median age according to the 2006 Census was 39.5."
* Canadian migrants have become younger in recent years, implying that retiring is further decreasing as a cause of migration: "While the median age of all Canadians residing in the United States was 49 in 2006, the median age was only 31 for Canadians who emigrated between 2000 and 2006. In addition, many of these recent emigrants were of prime working age: over one-half (approximately 53%) were between 20 and 44 years of age. Only around 10% were aged 60 or older."
* While retirement was an important factor for Canadian migrants to Florida and Arizona, those states only received under a quarter of all Canadian migrants to the US, with correspondingly higher median ages.
According to that above-mentioned survey, if you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat:
*16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US.
* They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
[1] It is true that from 2010 to 2012—during which the Canadian economy genuinely performed better than the US's—70,000 Americans moved north while only 20,000 Canadians moved south <http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/americans-mov...>, but this still puts the per-capita ratio considerably in the US's favor.
Anyway, I'm not denying any of those things. That still doesn't mean people think the US is a good place to live. They think they can make more money there, and the tradeoff is worth it.
But there's also plenty of people for whom that tradeoff is not worth it. Those people don't use Canada as a stepping stone, they just like living there. Because the US is kind of a shithole.
As an American STEM worker in Canada: salaries are definitely higher in the US. Not even close in some cases, easily a 40% difference for high-end roles. And while COL is high in SF or NYC, it's just as crazy in Greater Toronto or Vancouver but the salaries have not kept up.
Make no mistake, you can still do pretty well, but I could probably double my salary if I moved back to the big US East Coast city that I'm from.
Long-term I'm not optimistic about the US economy and culture, and my wife wouldn't be a fan, so I'm willing to miss out -- but sometimes it stings knowing what options are out there.
Yeah I made the sacrifice and lived in the Bay, crammed into a hacker house for a few years.
It totally sucks, but working with all those smart people and stashing the money completely changed my life.
Definitely a sacrifice I’d make again
However, I don't know if I agree with you about SF and NYC being equivalent to Toronto and Vancouver. They're just not. We complain about rent in Canada, but SF/NYC rent is another level of bullshit. And general expenses are definitely more expensive as well, I know I feel it whenever I travel to the US.
The other thing is that in most US cities you have to pay for a car. That's just not true in Canada. This makes up a huge part of the income gap.
* free healthcare, but only if you're in the CAN 51% of the year; they track this now
* strong immigrant cultures, esp. in areas like Vancouver or Brampton
* 5 years to citizenship, and then able to get NAFTA TN visas to the US, but still have a Canadian fall-back
* reasonable flights to warm parts of the US, without having to live in Sheriff Joe's AZ or Meatball Ron's Floridian Dystopia
* winters can be rough but 1st world means they're tolerable, and that's a downside that can be worked around
Look... we get you don't like him, but his state is home to more immigrants than most of the country, and pulls above his weight. How about we let the immigrants decide what state best suits them?
So, that means inflation and it is bad for the regular citizens. If before they needed to work forever to afford their own housing, now they would have to work even more.
What's more likely to happen is the people who take Canada's offer will be the ones that were let go for performance reasons or have other productivity or efficiency issues.
H-1B and other immigration paths make sense if the goal is to collect the most tax money. But the country has to (at least somewhat) work by the will of its people. Even many immigrants who have gained citizenship are opposed to easing the immigration policy.
US has awful public K-12 in most of School Districts. Private schools are very good, but cost just as much as college.
What I understand is that anything good in America costs $$$$. And all the free stuff is the same quality as a free couch on a sidewalk
There are (or were?) second or third world countries where private is the majority and only really poor people go to public.
Here's why:
Remember that Canadian graduates from engineering/CS university programs here can go directly south to the US without much hassle under a TN NAFTA VISA. They have a lot of advantages over H1B holders.
So what this really ends up being is an exchange between local talent -- who will go south to where the salaries are much better under TN -- for immigrant talent that currently struggles in the US.
Remember that the local talent was developed under subsidy by Canadian universities. Our tuition rates are a fraction of the US private universities -- while being very high quality. And while they're not free, they are highly funded by the gov't. So... indirectly, we are subsidizing US tech employers with Canadian taxpayer dollars.
I've heard numbers as high as 75%, 80% for the number of e.g. University of Waterloo (highly respected CS/SWE school) graduates who go south after graduating.
Meanwhile H-1B type candidates who come up to Canada will likely be doing it only as a stop-gap before returning to the US; because compensation here is on the whole not competitive with the US, the US was the destination they likely had in mind in the first place, and the selection of employers and interesting companies here is far worse.
And this will only worsen the compensation gap between here and the US by flooding the market with talent; which will thereby encourage more of our own homegrown talent -- who wants to get fair compensation -- to go south ... along with a bunch of these H-1B holders. Vicious circle.
The structure of things are such that Canada has already simply become on the whole a "landing pad" for talent before they relocate to the US. This only further entrenches that.
While I'd say this was not the case for Google Canada (where I worked before) it is the case for most other large US-based employers. And the local companies are on the whole choosing to underpay and take advantage of fresh-off-the-boat talent from overseas at lower cost.
Most shops here aren't doing much of interest, and the VC community here is fairly insular and conservative. The kinds of businesses that will generally succeed here will be places that can take advantage of large work forces of 'meh' imported talent, while the high quality talent finds ways to get to Silicon Valley.
It's also not a great deal for the immigrants who come here; they will find that cost of living here is terrible while compensation rates are lower. There's already a growing recognition/bitterness among many that the Canadian gov't is selling an image of prosperity and potential to skilled immigrants that it can't deliver on when they arrive. And it used to be that at least one could hope one's children would prosper, but the state of the real estate market here is such that most will never able to own a home or get out of debt.
That said, remote work may change this somewhat for some. At least it has for me, giving me a wider pool of (American) employers to choose from.
All in all, I don't think this is much of a good move for Canada. Canadian employers need to learn how to compete with the US for quality talent by offering quality interesting work with better compensation that matches the insanely high cost of living in cities like Toronto or Vancouver -- cities with Bay Area real estate prices & rent but with compensation ranges far lower.
I smell another SAP in the works.
100k for senior was good 5y ago, nowadays 300-400k is very doable
The majority of costs a person will typically have on a country are their initial K-12 education, and their health care costs later in life. Immigrants like these will never cost the government that first major cost.
At the same time, they are far more likely to have higher than median salaries when employed. That means higher taxes paid.
So from a purely economic point of view, an H-1B immigrant is a perfect profit center for government taxes.
Meanwhile a Canadian who gets their K-12 education here, gets a highly government subsidized post-secondary degree, then moves to the USA to work and pay taxes there is a huge loss, economically.