10,000 Brainiacs - Canada's Immigration Flood

Preamble

I don’t do “political” pieces like this, much less on powder-keg issues like immigration (a white guy talking about immigration…oof⁴), but recent events have reached such a critical breaking point that it’s unavoidable.

I encourage the reader to be open minded. On this topic many short-circuit to evaluating information in the context of “is this good or bad for my side”, where a side is often a preferred political party. That is hugely destructive to meaningful discourse, and it makes it easy to turn people against their own best interests.

A Country At The Breaking Point

Canada is doing victory laps after “poaching” 10,000 H1B holders from the United States⁵, enticing them with the promise of a rapid path to permanent residency and then citizenship⁶.

Immigration advocates in the US are declaring that Canada is winning the war for “tech talent.” Immigration advocates in Canada are declaring it a success story and demanding More More More.

Nothing about this feels like winning. Whether you’re a new grad with zero job prospects, a veteran Canadian tech worker juggling a discounted rate of pay⁷, or those outside the tech industry who are rendered homeless due to the addition of over a million residents last year alone, the torrent continuing at a record pace⁸, this smells like another splash of gasoline from a malevolent arsonist. The flames grow higher.

While this measure is small and manageable by itself, and arguably is reasonable if a tad pathetic⁹, it comes as one in a series of disastrous policies. It is another raindrop in a deluge of an unending series of special programs that give away residency to a country that is at the breaking point.

I should declare that I am a Canadian tech employer, ostensibly the privileged group this measure panders to. After a career working primarily for US employers I hung my own shingle to pitch solutions and have met with good success. I operate lean, but scale out and up on a need basis depending upon the engagement, often with a core group of talented resources.

Finding talent, even in niche, high skill areas, is easy in Canada if the compensation is competitive. Even jobs paying a fraction of competitive rates are being overwhelmed with an avalanche of resumes from decent candidates, a tech workforce cowed in desperation.

There hasn’t been a tech worker shortage in Canada in decades. There has long been a compensation shortage, and now add a cost of living gap making the discrepancy even worse. The best Canadian candidates flee to the US, leveraging the TN visa available under NAFTA. The government’s solution to that “brain drain” is to suppress wages further by giving away residency to millions, which is a tactic we have seen across industries again and again.

This government, as with those before, is constantly citing illusory “worker shortages” that are backed by zero empirical metrics, spurred on by greedy industry figures¹⁰ and interested parties who want to turn the screws tighter. If you want to push wages down, cry about a worker shortage — cue the famous “no one wants to work anymore!” whine — and the government will import all the exploitable manpower you want. When that group gets wise and start demanding more, shaking off the desperation and exploitability, move onto the next batch.

After an immigration-fuelled increase in population at a rate that makes developing countries gasp — Canada’s growth rate of 3.2% is higher than every developed country by a huge margin, and exceeds many developing countries — a disastrous, predictable housing shortage¹¹ has led to the government and banks¹² declaring that the solution should be, surprise surprise, more immigration¹³. At this point they’re selling quarters for a nickel and telling you that business is going great, but to stem the losses they need to redouble sales. They need more quarters, and with that all will be resolved. Rinse and repeat.

And for partisans who think I’m hoping to exploit a situation as political rhetoric because I think it serves My Side, I’m a progressive¹⁴ who thinks the Other Guy is set to do the same or worse, and his populist pandering and anti-science adjacency is disqualifying. This country is headed for some political dark ages, and we need to come to terms with this now. Policies are pursued that are the greatest threat to social and progressive policies in decades. We are setting back the clock, increasing income equality (the rich have never been richer), and sabotaged an entire demographic¹⁵ that is not just falling through the cracks, they’re actively being stomped through them. Economic homelessness — not the more easily ignored mental health / addiction variety — is exploding. Millions of low income Canadians are in the tenuous position that if they lost their current housing, they will have zero options. Landlords, whose ranks include much of the political class, are busy plotting renovictions.

Wage suppressing mass immigration and foreign worker programs benefit the 1%¹⁶ — those who often live in enclaves and vacation overseas, and for whom the problems in wider society are abstract, distant concepts — at the expense of the rest of Canada. It is a direct assault on worker rights and the wealth and well-being of Canadians and Canadian society, and a confluence of events are dangerously pushing Canada towards an inflection point. Canada’s policies have led to a widening wealth deficiency relative to our peers, a devastating productivity gap¹⁷, and a quality of life that is on the precipice. While many countries are dealing with inflation echos of massive (but necessary) COVID era government spends causing an affordability crisis, Canada has a particularly tenuous house of cards.

I live in a big house in an affluent neighbourhood in a prosperous, safe city, and have valuable tech skills that I can sell worldwide. Yet I refuse to ignore the growing tent cities, the growing legions of people begging in the middle of intersections, the growing theft rings, or the situational peril so much of this country is now in. I’m not going to be silenced under the fear that criticism of the shameful devaluing of Canadian residency might hurt one political party or benefit another.

Canada is a Nation Built Through Immigration

A portion of readers will have decided that this piece is detrimental to their political team¹⁸ and will be adopting one of the many cliché dismissals. They’ll call me a racist (ignore that the ones who suffer from this immigration crisis are often minorities, and that many are at the forefront of calling for immigration to be curtailed¹⁹), cite a South Park “Dey took er jobs” episode, or point out that some far right creep has said something that partly overlaps with a point in this essay²⁰.

Don’t do that.

Canada is a nation built largely by immigrants²¹, insofar as immigration was a constant and important input over the history of this country. At every level and in every space immigration has enriched this country.

Over 25% of Canada residents were born elsewhere. Another 18% are second generation. Canada is a massively diverse country, and its largest city, Toronto, is 56% “visible minorities,” eclipsing global melting pots like New York City.

Canada’s business successes are oft built around and by immigrants. Immigrants have an outsized contribution to academics, sports, the arts, and media. Immigration has been a fantastic success story. Many of the world’s most intelligent, skilled, and creative have come and enriched the fabric of Canada.

Canada’s declining birthrate²² means immigration is a critical demographic solution for a stable population, trading reputation and quality of life for sustainability and stability via an educated, working-age population. No government program or incentive is going to lift domestic fertility rates to replacement levels, and if anything the trend is veering in the opposite direction and is unlikely to improve.

Canada has leaned on immigration as the solution, following the lead of every developed nation apart from Japan.

Canada’s traditional immigration policy has been ruthless. Canada uses a point system that attempts to try to ensure that candidates will be an asset to Canada²³. It is a system built to poach the best from developing nations, ideally after that nation has spent its meagre resources educating and training the migrant.

In contrast to that infamous 2017 tweet by Trudeau — “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada” — the reality is that Canada makes every effort to keep the subjects of that missive out of Canada. Those fleeing persecution are unlikely to get a visa and thus can’t be accepted by air or sea carriers. Geographic situation means that migrants will come through the filter that is the United States, who we conveniently have a safe third country agreement with: If you claim status after arriving from the US, you’ll be turned back.

For a short while migrants facing a deportation order in the US²⁴ realized they could walk across the land border and circumvent that safe third country agreement, but that loophole has since been closed. Purposefully. Make them America’s problem.

The point of this is that the myth of Canada’s sympathetic open arms is untrue. That tweet was an ill-considered embarrassment timed to take an opportunistic swipe at a jackass South of the border. It will forever be a Canadian Cringe Moment.

Instead Canada has a pay to play immigration system, alongside a parallel system where individual Canadians — generally wealthy Canadians — get to basically gift residency in return for some personal enrichment.

Privatize the Benefits / Socialize the Detriments

Years back we were searching for a nanny for our young children. All of the resources recommended bringing over a foreign live-in nanny. The benefit was that we would get a grateful worker who we could, in effect, exploit, because it gave them a path towards permanent Canadian residency. This struck me as insane: As private citizens we got to personally leverage the promise of Canadian residency for our own personal benefit.

We hired locally through a service.

But the same thing is happening writ large across Canada. The temporary foreign worker program is exploding, bringing hundreds of thousands²⁵ of foreigners to Canada to fill jobs that Canadians, we are told, “won’t do”, or at least won’t do for a given level of compensation or in a given set of conditions, or sometimes simply without the sufficient level of gratitude necessary for their wealthier compatriots.

Factory workers. Fish processing plants. Farm workers. Coffee shops²⁶. Fast food. A demographic²⁷ are finding themselves in competition with armies of desperate, exploitable foreign workers. Workers who have normalized living many to a room and surviving via food bank. Disgusting situations are arising.

In areas of the country where there is 10% unemployment, thousands of positive LMIA assessments are being issued for roles like administrative assistant or web developers. It is insane²⁸, and the program is purpose-built to be exploited as a migration funnel, having nothing to do with labour shortages.

But that wasn’t enough.

The government²⁹ has now made other programs de facto TFW programs as well, repackaging the international student spigot into an exploitable workforce for business owners, offering a basically unlimited work permit to students.

The number of international “students” is exploding — an eight-fold increase in ten years, seeing exponential growth — in a situation that is grossly exploitative ( by those involved in this program in any way: the politicians, the colleges, the employers, and even by the students who know exactly what they’re getting into). The entire situation is despicable.

There are currently ~1,000,000 international “students” in Canada³⁰. In contrast there are ~950,000 international students in the United States, a country with over 12x more student spaces. Where students in the US are largely the best of the best studying at prestigious universities, the vast bulk in Canada are not.

Canada gives these students an open work permit, and many are working in factories, fast food, acting as delivery drivers, and so on. It’s an enormous workforce to use to wage suppress. In contrast the United States gives students a permit to work up to 20 hours, but solely on campus. US international students are limited to working in the campus coffee shop, doing cleaning for the facility, and so on, and their reason for being in the United States is for an excellent education.

As if that wasn’t enough, Canada also offers a path to permanent residency via the student path, and this is the reason it has seen such enormous interest. Families in India are selling their farm to send their child to work in Canada (let’s discard the foolish notion that there is any educational aspirations in this venture for many of these “students”, many of whom are enrolled in worthless programs³¹) in hopes that it leads to permanent residency, where the child can then sponsor their extended family as residents.

Colleges — many strip mall diploma mill type operations – get to charge massive tuitions to these students³². Consultants are demanding enormous fees. Private businesses get to enjoy a desperate workforce and the wonderful effects of wage suppression.

Canadian colleges went from institutes of education to instead being fronts to purchase a work permit and path to residency. The entire situation is grotesque.

Food banks are overwhelmed with international students, who as a basic requirement of an education visa are supposed to be financially capable of supporting themselves for their tenure, yet somehow have to work 40 hours a week and still lean on food banks to survive.

And all of it represents parallel paths to residency. Historic highs of traditional migration. Refugee and irregular flows. Special programs. Regular feel good pronouncement by the government for some world crisis or other. Now add an unfathomably huge student and TFW pathway. It is a confluence of abuse that leads to a hostility to a simple H1B program that might seem out of proportion in isolation.

What are we doing?

And what happened to this purportedly progressive government? Who do they serve? It certainly doesn’t seem to be Canadians or the interests of Canada, as the wealth and lifestyle of the average Canadian is declining as our productivity falls. We import millions from low carbon areas of the world to the worst carbon footprint lifestyle on the planet, yet pretend that we’re an environmental leader or are in a position to dictate anything? Our cities sprawl and traffic worsens.

Now we’re normalizing tent cities, strangers sharing beds and living a dozen to a bedroom.

There should be riots in the street at this point, and it will likely come to that.

Conclusion

This government needs to seriously chill on the outrageous levels of immigration, especially the abused student and TFW pathways. What was an incredibly successful, lauded immigration policy that enriched this country has been seriously harmed by this malpractice, grievously injured via the exploitation of the few. Enabled by a mainstream subservience that we have some social obligation to be a saviour to the rest of the planet.

The Likely Retorts

”Canada Is Aging. Everyone is Retiring. This is necessary”

Like all developed countries, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, and Canada is getting older.

This is a problem that we need to address. And rational immigration does address it.

Careful, selective, diverse immigration, bringing the best to enrich this nation, as has happened for decades. Canada has (had?) a great name brand and this pathetic whoring is destroying it, turning it into a half-rate “almost USA”³³. Setting up exploitable systems to enrich a few is not a reasonable solution. We’re also setting up incentives that prioritize and favour those who are more willing to find cheats, short-cuts and circumventions. Precisely the qualities that should disqualify prospective migrants.

Canada had the highest population growth in the developed world in absolute numbers last year. Let’s discard with the myth that the extraordinarily high levels are merely satisfying demographic balancing (and no numeric accounting demonstrates the same). Among the Canadian political class there is this dreamy notion of the “Century Initiative” where the target is 100 million, and the whole “ageing country” thing is just an easy cover.

And the most damning of all is that through massive levels of immigration, the average age of the country keeps rising. Family reunification policies, and ridiculous situations where the 60 year old and his wife become “students” have completely demolished the entire pitch for why we need such high levels of immigration. Somehow it keeps making the country even older. Nothing that redoubling immigration can’t fix though, right? Is that what we’ve learned?

”Canadians won’t do the work that is necessary. We need to bring in hard workers to function”

If a coffee shop can’t function without TFWs, and can’t adapt to offer competitive benefits to attract a workforce, it should be shut down. If a delivery service needs exploited international students to operate, it should be shut down. These are not necessary for the functioning of this country, and subsidizing them by allowing franchise owners and various other layers of exploiters to essentially sell residency and a path to citizenship is grotesque.

Institutions of higher learning should not be a front for selling work permits or a spot in the permanent residency line.

TFWs in their many forms (including now the student pathway) have long been a destructive dependency used instead of automation or modernization, through which our productivity keeps falling further behind peers. We can directly contrast with the United States which beats Canada on every metric. Somehow we need armies of TFWs in an “acute labour shortage” while we have an unemployment rate almost double our peers to the South.

Canadian farming is a perfect example, with many farms operating as if it’s the 1940s. Every year an army of central American workers come and do manual labor, often in horrifying conditions. Comparing this with agriculture in the Netherlands is an extraordinary contrast that is revealing. The Netherlands has a more valuable, profitable agricultural industry in a country smaller than Nova Scotia.

The same is true across industries, from factories to food processing. There is no need to modernize or improve, just demand that the government provide you a spigot of exploitables.

”You’re a colonist on native land!”

North America’s aboriginals were indeed here before Europeans and have a legitimate claim if you subscribe to the DNA-based title to a piece of land³⁴. Tribes and groups have been horribly wronged over the centuries, having been given promises and agreements that weren’t rightfully upheld. It is a shame that we’ve worked hard to correct.

If a migrant or their proponents want to lean on this to dismiss concerns about immigration levels, why migrate here? Why intentionally seek to take advantage of the purported wrongs of long-dead colonists?

If a migrant thinks this country is unlawful or illegitimate, they have absolutely no place here. This is not a controversial position and is actually extraordinarily obvious and logical.

Using natives as a cheap rhetorical backstop like this should convince no one, and it’s such a boorish, tiring tactic that became prevalent, though the Canadian public has grown entirely tired of it. It is another one of those demonstrations that immediately should bar the individual from Canada if they aren’t already a citizen: If you don’t believe in the nation or think it is any way illegitimate, in no universe should you be allowed to join it. It is wholly disqualifying. It is the sort of justification that people contrive to engage in fraud or other criminal ventures, imagining themselves some sort of modern-day Robin Hood.

”Canada’s population is too small”

I work in ML/AI day in and day out. I’m involved in the heart of the industry. I’m optimistic about the impact the industry will have. That optimism is offset by a serious fear of the impact the industry will have.

In the near future, “more people” is going to be a detriment. A nation with the smartest will thrive, but simple numbers will not be a positive. It will be an anchor.

”Canada is so big! It needs the people!”

Almost everyone who comes to Canada moves to the Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal areas, in that order. The vast majority of Canada live along the US border.

Canada has 1/4 the arable land the US and India have. Much of Canada is inhospitable tundra.

It isn’t as big as the rumours claim it to be. Nor do we need to clear-cut the country to move the developing world in. Millions aren’t fleeing India because of how great density turned out.

Footnotes

1. Public discourse on a given topic often gets captured by the most engaged/motivated. In the case of immigration, the loudest, most amplified voices were the “borders are illegitimate; any consequence is acceptable; this solves colonialism or white guilt or something” crowd, alongside the many whose income relies upon unchecked levels of immigration, to enormous detriment to policies and outcomes ↩

2. The notion that line cooks for fast food, restaurant managers, admin assistants or web developers require an endless procession from the developing world — at the same time that many areas of Canada have almost 10% unemployment and recent grads are finding zero employment prospects — is so transparently, laughably unjustified, yet this continues to happen in the thousands per month. Everyone involved with that program need to be relieved of their jobs, and those who defrauded it need to be punished ↩

3. Some incredibly foolish gaslighters would always counter any concerns about the ridiculous levels of immigration with retorts that most of the residents are “temporary,” and surely will depart when their visa ends. That the population bulge was illusory. This had zero basis in reason or rudimentary logic, and we’re now suffering the extreme financial and social consequences of that incredible myopia ↩

4. Years ago the government ran an anti-racism ad and one of the featured examples was a guy saying “there are too many immigrants”, laying the groundwork that the topic is verboten or you’re a despicable racist.

   Immigration is always a legitimate discussion for citizens of a country, whether native-born or not. ↩

5. In the same way that there are 1.5 million Cybertruck reservations, follow through may differ ↩

6. Whereupon they could turn around and take advantage of the TN visa and work in the US again, as Canada is the second choice for many migrants who really want to work in the US ↩

7. Canada does better than many further off nations, and a few big US employers with campuses here do pay well and pull up the averages. To achieve the upper tiers of compensation you need to work directly for a US employer, whether remote or on location in the US ↩

8. The pandemic saw a temporary decline of immigration, just as it saw a decline in homebuilding and other normal functions of society. Rather than rationally trying to slowly open the spigot again to let the market readjust, the government decided to make up the losses all at once, and are continuing that incredibly high intake rate ↩

9. Begging for those getting kicked out of their preferred country to come to yours as a consolation prize is sad. Canada is more likely to get laid-off workers who are out of options rather than “poaching” anyone in demand. Immediately it has a negative selection criteria, like so many of Canada’s “who can find the right loopholes to exploit” systems ↩

10. Canadian media constantly likes to cite purported industry leaders to push a position, and the “leaders” are always Some Guy at some marginal operation churning out low value copy/paste template apps built by an army of TFWs, desperate to be quoted because they’ll be presented as an authority. That person doesn’t speak for me, but they are always presented as if they speak for an industry, giving weight to a position ↩

11. Not just a price issue where tiny shacks are going for over a million, a bonafide housing shortage where there simply aren’t enough accommodations, public figures sincerely asking residents to lend out a room

    And for what it’s worth, both government and industry figures are busy claiming that millions of new residents have no effect on housing — good news everyone, supply and demand no longer matters if it’s a protected topic — a claim they make just after crowing about Canada’s extraordinary growth, for which zero infrastructure or planning took place. ↩

12. Poor people are a primary profit vehicle for banks, and adding millions of new service charge customers is a goal. Any statement or projection by a bank or other growth-driven-but-saturated monopoly industry like telcos should be taken with a massive grain of salt ↩

13. When doctors move to the US in numbers and there is a shortage, instead of opening up more residency spots or expanding education just use it as another excuse to widen immigration. When there is a purported skilled trades gap, instead of training programs and incentives, use it as another excuse to widen immigration. And of course that immigration will make the need even more acute, so GOTO more_immigration. We’ve been iterating through this broken loop for years now, but somehow the routine still convinces some people. Everything calls for increased immigration ↩

14. But not so progressive that I think moving billions from the developing world to Canada is a good idea ↩

15. When talking about unchecked immigration hurting the working class, invariably someone will retort that those people should just Get Educated and make something of themselves. That they’re the authors of their own misfortunate. This is folly. Not everyone can be a doctor, an engineer or an artist. A healthy society accommodates all its members with a place for them to contribute.

    Add that automation and AI means that a lot of people who went to enormous efforts to educate themselves and be the best person they can be are going to find themselves in a race to the bottom with planeloads of migrants who’ll happily work heinous conditions for peanuts and live 12 to a room. ↩

16. The ultrarich use mass immigration to squash worker leverage, and to make things like housing and land more easily exploited, yet people will seriously discount the latter as a problem and blame the former, when it’s quite literally a vehicle of their exploitation ↩

17. Canada’s solution to declining competitiveness isn’t modernization or automation, it’s to push our currency down, and when that fails push wages down via mass immigration of the exploitable. Either is a temporary respite in a highly competitive world until you need to do it again as a race to the bottom, forever selling out the country for a yearly GDP boost. Adjusted GDP per capita has started declining ↩

18. Alternately it is detrimental to their personal interests. There are millions of new residents currently trying to sponsor their aged extended family to join them — completely undoing the purported demographic advantage of them being brought in — just as there are hundreds of millions of prospective migrants online who will tell you that the best thing for Canada would be open borders. There is an enormous machine behind this unchecked immigration, which a simple web search on any of these topics will reveal.

    Our official government branch in charge of immigration, the IRCC, would put out surveys purporting to state how Canadians felt about immigration levels, but if you dig into the survey design they quite literally overloaded the survey with noncitizen temporary residents, which instantly explains how so often their surveys were glowingly pro-mass-immigration. It was effectively designed propaganda. ↩

19. One video has an Asian-ancestry Canadian critiquing the irrational immigration levels, to which many of the comments are that he is “pulling up the ladder after him”. This is how criticism of high immigration levels can be dismissed: If you’re white you’re a racist/colonist/settler and have no say because of the possible cherry-picked misdeeds of your ancestors, and if you aren’t you’re pulling up the ladder and thus should be ignored. All in service of ensuring that only the fiercely pro-immigration class are given a chance to speak ↩

20. This is one of the reasons society has become hyper-polarized: If a figure on the opposing camp holds a position, clutch onto and promote the antipode. For instance, if they’re against all immigration, well then you surely must be for infinite immigration. And as each camp grows in numbers, more are pushed to the extreme of the other camp.

    Everything has nuance and an infinite gradient of positions, but this is becoming rare for people to understand ↩

21. But just to be clear, the word immigrant actually has a meaning and isn’t some flexible thing we 1984 to fit our rhetoric. I was born in Canada and am not an immigrant. Every member of my family tree going back hundreds of years were also not immigrants. The child born here to immigrant parents also isn’t an immigrant.

    Words actually have meanings, and we don’t get to redefine them to suit our rhetoric ↩

22. Modern lifestyles already saw lower fertility rates, but the current job and housing crisis hitting Canadian young adults is going to make this problem significantly worse, which invariably is going to spur demands for more immigration. Selling quarters for a nickel.. ↩

23. Though there is often a mismatch. Canada has long had a problem where educated individuals from parts of the world would end up driving taxis or delivering pizza after making it through the gauntlet. Even at a massive discount Canadian employers weren’t interested, shellshocked and weary by the discovery that skills often didn’t translate or weren’t at the level expected. Instead of adjusting the system to adapt to what employers actually need, cue a series of feel bad shaming articles in the Toronto Star telling us it’s all just racism, despite how diverse most employers are and how beneficial it would be for them to exploit every migrant they can if the skills are there ↩

24. In most cases Canada is a fallback when the US dream is blocked ↩

25. There are a seemingly infinite number of different programs and it’s almost impossible to determine how many are in Canada at any point, the government intentionally being secretive and above accounting. Recently the government earned some heat for the exploding numbers so they simply changed what they published and everyone said okay ↩

26. A viral TikTok has a “racist Karen” being told that “you people won’t work”, which is a recurring level of irony that just boggles the mind. To see all of the proudly exploited cheering this on is astonishing. Being an exploited underclass is not the big dunk it is thought to be. A similar video made the rounds and again the woman — a woman who notes that the father of her child is an immigrant — is again dismissed as a racist “Karen” when she observes the seeming racism of hiring practices, which the gentleman in the prior video outright stated with pride ↩

27. Notably the demographic with the least voice or people speaking on their behalf are the victims of this ↩

28. Canadians often hear that prospective TFW employers have to “prove” there are no local workers for a given role. None of the citizens, permanent residents, or the millions already in country with work permits are suitable, we’re told, for a given role, and only yet another migrant is the solution.

    In reality the employer has to post the job for a prescribed period of time during which they can simply send applications to the trash bin, with literally zero oversight or auditing. Once the time window has passed they get to bring in a TFW. This scam is incredibly widespread, such that even our politicians are leveraging it.

    If there were third-party oversight on this program, approximately 0% of LMIA assessments would be positive. It is a mountain of fraud ↩

29. Justin Trudeau campaigned on reining in the temporary foreign worker program, noting that it was working against the poorest of Canadians. Instead his government has massively expanded it ↩

30. Given the untrustworthy numbers from the government on this file, the number is likely higher. And note that students can bring a spouse and other family members, with a liberal grant of work permits as well. The entire program has been purpose built to be abused ↩

31. One of the most egregious abusers of the international student path has been Conestoga college. If that discredited school opened a campus in Punjab or Nigeria, offering the programs that they use to draw tens of thousands of international students here, it would be a massive, catastrophic failure. None of these students are paying big dollars because of the farcical programs these exploiters are offering. Instead they’re buying a ticket to residency, and know the program itself will never lead to anything ↩

32. A common rejoinder is that these international students are “subsidizing” domestic students, but tuition has increased for domestic students concurrent with international student counts increasing over 10-fold. Orgs like this will burn every dollar that comes their way, and any notion that it’s zero sum and one paying more means the other benefits is not based in observable reality ↩

33. Many migrants are actually being smuggled across the border to the United States, so I suppose it wasn’t almost enough ↩

34. Though there is often a conflict in this rhetoric, and the same people who will tell you that a peoples have a genetic right to a land are incredibly selective in which peoples they hold this position for. It’s extraordinarily regressive to ascribe entitlements or traits to genetic lineage, but we’re in a weird world today where the people who view themselves as the most progressive hold these remarkably conflicting positions contingent upon the beneficiary ↩