Saturday, January 17, 2009

Immigration Watch Canada Says "Just Slow Down"

In favour of a steady-state model

Condo constructions which dot the Toronto skyline.
Due to over-building, many are to remain unfinished,
others have lost contracts or funding. IWC says
"Slow down".


[I took the above photo about 8 months ago. The construction is at exactly
the same spot now.]

The writers at Immigration Watch Canada , who post "Weekly Bulletins", although I wish there was more frequent activity there, just put up a post which says: "McJobs won't pay for Canada's safety net." Here is what they write:
Too many Canadians...believe that Canada needs a "McJob" fix to prevent a labour shortage or supply the demographic base for an aging work-force that will need pension and medical support.
Part of the article discusses this fallacy.
[Canadians] seem willfully ignorant of studies that have examined unskilled workers, who comprise the vast portion of immigrants (legal or illegal) on both sides of the border. These studies conclude consistently that these workers are unable to pay enough income tax to even reimburse government coffers for the services they consume, never mind subsidize the needs of others.
In fact these immigrants have cost Canadian taxpayers $18.3 billion between 1990-2002. Let alone add money into the coffers!

IWC makes a clever proposal:
And if a skills shortage does indeed exist, uncorroborated as it is by any thorough and objective inventory, it is chronic in a growth economy that ultimately must be abandoned in favour of a steady-state model.
Exactly!

Of course, there is much more to it than just crunching numbers. From IWC:

[Mcdonald's] simply love the bottom line: cheap wages and low benefits. This is a business motive that is as old as the hills. But, in this era, that motive is dressed up as a quest for cultural diversity and liberal tolerance. And any opposition to it is depicted as nasty, nativist and bigoted.