Really? How many does Canada take in legally and illegally?
I don’t know exactly what Krugman was referring to since there’s no cite or context. You can certainly have both, provided the immigration policy is sustainable, which is a very key concept. It means that the majority of immigrants need to be productive members of society, resulting in net gains to the economy. This is not callous or capitalistic, it’s basic math. We have an obligation to refugees on humanitarian grounds, too – and most of those turn out to be productive members of society anyway – but within sensible numerical limits. We have to consider the limits of growth and capacity of our own infrastructure, like roads, transit, schools, and housing. Admitting even the most brilliant of newcomers who overwhelm the existing urban infrastructure isn’t helping anyone and only leads to a degradation of living standards and strife. And even when, say, school capacity is nominally adequate, if schools are overwhelmed by the need to focus on ESL skills for new immigrants instead of basic education, the quality of education suffers. It’s all about numbers, common sense, and sustainability.
That said, Krugman’s quote in isolation seems to be used here to support a point that I basically don’t agree with.
Well, in the case of Syrian refugees, about thirty times as many per capita in the last year as the US did, and about three times as many even in absolute numbers, for a country with one-tenth the population and infrastructure.
I had no trouble getting in. Just showed up at the border with a job offer and they issued a work permit right there. After a year I applied for and got permanent residency.
Here’s a newsarticle you could look at, Octopus: “Canada: An Immigration Example to the World.”
Salient points:
• 1 in 5 Canadians were born outside of Canada;
• the Migrant Integration Policy Index ranked Canada sixth out of 38 countries in integrating its immigrants. The five who ranked ahead of Canada were Sweden, Portugal, Finland, New Zealand and Norway;
• Canada is the only country in the world which has allowed immigrant rates of 1% of its population every year for the past two decades;
• Canada leads the G7 countries in the number of immigrants.
See also this table of immigrants in counties’ populations. Canada has the greatest percentage of foreign-bit residents of any G7 country: Canada (17.4%); US (10.4%); Germany (8.9%); France (5.6%); UK (4%); Italy (2.4%); Japan (1.3%).
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Migration/Foreign-population#
Mammals sometimes help others who aren’t related to them by blood. Discussions about the evolution of altruism tend to end up discussing iterated prisoner dilemmas and other such game theory, which I don’t find terribly exciting. I’m not sure that biology has been suspended in countries that have UHC or maternity leave. The citizens of those countries tend to view it as a collective benefit. You can posit a sort of parasitism strategy, like cuckoo bird eggs where the host’s caring instincts are fooled and diverted elsewhere. Perhaps that would please those who view bleeding hearts as being taken advantage of by undeserving outsiders. Leftists don’t tend to make such distinctions, perhaps only if free riders threaten the system.
Canada’s welfare state is nowhere near as expensive or comprehensive as a Scandinavian country’s though:
Canada’s taxes to GDP ratio is a quite reasonable 32.2%, and furthermore Canada has been brilliant at controlling spending. The Scandi countries have taxation rates in the 40s.
A species with intelligence can realise that some benefits are possibly not immediate or first-level.
For example, I am heterosexual, but I want people outside of that group to be treated fairly and equally - there is no direct benefit to me in that agenda, but what I actually end up aiming to promote is a society that is fairer and more equal in total.
Any benefits from that may never actually come back to me, or they may, but either way, there is a reason for me to behave in a particular way that can be selected for or against by evolutionary societal processes - not survival of the fittest individual, but a trend toward the fittest ideas.
Sexual orientation discrimination doesn’t really have much of an evolutionary basis though, since homosexuals exist in all populations. Tribalism on the other hand was something humans evolved for a reason. I think that long after being gay isn’t a big deal, we’ll have racial and cultural tensions.
Are they renting or living in hotels? For other services, do they have personnumers or go third party? I had several coworkers who were also EU citizens and they were real surprised to find out how closely their stories matched. One from Spain, one from Poland, one from Austria, all took four years to get their personnummers. All are from countries where you don’t need a local tax ID to be able to get a contract for services.
When we asked to rent cars in Sweden (the idea was fly to CPH, train to Helsinborg, get the car in Helsinborg in the morning) we were told we couldn’t, not without personnummers. We had to rent them from CPH and warn that the car would be going to Sweden.
Met a guy from France who moved there with his bride; he’d also been sent to the asylum people. A coworker’s Mexican daughter in law had managed to get “I’ve been married to this Swede for five years in my country and I’m not a refugee!” through the bureaucracy and was therefore allowed to work (asylum seekers aren’t), but she was having her own bureaucratic nightmares.
Maybe it’s a Stockholm vs rest-of-Sweden thing, but it was a royal pain in the ass. It simply was a bigger pain in the ass for me than for the weekly commuters because I was spending more time there, and for those who had moved there permanently than for me for the same reason.
That’s not really the point I was trying to make. Selection acts on ideas and societal structures independently of biological reproduction.
True, but our safety net is more comprehensive than the US, and we take in more immigrants than the US, and we have a diverse population. That’s why I’m sceptical about the Krugman quote and your comment that his thesis was not in dispute.
Canada’s welfare state is more generous than the US’s, but Krugman’s statement is kinda like the Laffer Curve. He doesn’t claim there is a set point where it gets to be too much. It’s just that at some point, you can can’t keep letting immigrants come in in high numbers who will be dependent on government services. And sure enough, Canada does not just let poor Third worlders cross their border and stay. Canada’s immigration system is mainly built on importing high skill immigrants, not cheap labor, like the US:
Strangely, there’s no “felt like coming because I wanted to work as a hotel maid” category.
Wow, imagine that, a national immigration policy that is in the nation’s interest! Racism, some would say down south.
And Canada may be “diverse” in an absolute sense, but is nowhere near as diverse as the US yet:
SOmehow only a few hundred thousand Latinos have made their way up there.
Among other things, because Canada doesn’t advertise itself, because there aren’t quite a few million Latinos who had family there from way back when, and because there is less efecto llamada than in other locations. I don’t know what’s efecto llamada called in English, but it’s what happens when someone is thinking of moving Elsewhere and they pick a particular Elsewhere because they happen to have contacts there, people they can llamar (phone/call upon). What it means is on one hand that once you start getting immigrants from a certain location, the likelihood of getting other immigrants from the same location increases, and on the other it’s how those Little Wherever enclaves grow (or at least, how they grow when the people living there aren’t restricted from living in other areas).
I know you realized it’s a comedy, but aside from being a comedy the only form for which they give a code doesn’t exist and either the agency is as imaginary as the form or the order in which she’s supposed to have done things is upside-down.
(You begin by going to City Hall, where you sign up for IAE and present your DNI; then with your IAE you go to Seguridad Social Treasury, where they sign you up for autónomos. No need to do anything with Hacienda/Treasury itself until you’ve actually been working as autónomo for a while, unless you wish to be listed as an International Operator; if you want to do that, you go to Hacienda with your IAE and ask to be signed up for the ROI. Or you can skip all that and pay your local Chamber of Commerce to do it: current fee for mine is €25. What you always need to do with Hacienda is start paying your taxes as autónomo the first time a quarter rolls around.)
That’s relatively cherry picked. How about totals?
Thanks for the links.
I don’t think it does. Swedish-Americans are a slice of American society characterised by sufficient family stability to follow their ancestry back 150 years. And spending that time as white protestants in the US. I.e. the selection slices out anyone black, Latino, Asian-American or Native American. As well as Irish or Italian which mattered for some of those years.
To compare to Swedish society, you’d need to compare to a selection of Swedes which has similar advantages. Otherwise, you are making an argument similar to saying that the immediate families of congressmen have more money than the average American.
I think that’s really, really wrong. The swedes that came here weren’t the rich ones. They were the ones without hope because they came from a backwards, broken country where you couldn’t get ahead unless you were a member of an aristocratic family. Otherwise you were probably a poor peasant farmer. So they came here with nothing and became better off than their brethren that they left behind. That’s about as apples-to-apples as it gets.
I don’t think it would be difficult to filter out all of the people in Sweden who are not black, Latino, Asian America, Indian, Irish, or Italian. I think they call the people left after doing that Swedish.