Tired of Trump? Move to Cape Breton!

[wolfpup]

@Carryon

I know a few people this has happened to. For all the criticism, America’s immigration is far more liberal than most people realize or will admit.

I realize this is a light-hearted thread about the Canadian Maritimes and I hesitate to get into serious GD territory, but as several have already made comments along these lines I feel I should set the record straight. Quite simply, that assertion is just flat-out wrong.

We had a related discussion about immigration in GD and I want to quote a poster there who understands the issue and I believe got it exactly right – note in particular the part the I bolded [emphasis mine]:

@Richard_Parker

Previous waves of immigration (prior to WWII) involved people from all walks of life because there were really no immigration laws in America … Modern immigrants must fit much narrower, stratified classifications. They tend to either be unusually high-status (well-educated, rich) or unusually low-status (refugees or illegal). It is extraordinarily difficult for a middle-of-the-road immigrant to get here and do middle or lower-middle class work–they can really only come as family members of people already here. So especially for new immigrant groups from post-1970 waves, there is a very stratified class.

Basically the only way to immigrate to the US, other than as a refugee claimant, is either as a sponsored immediate family member or attested as being in a highly skilled special class. Anyone who qualifies for immigration to the US will, generally speaking, also qualify for immigration to Canada, PLUS Canada has other immigration options the US does not have. Specifically, Canada has general immigration options for ordinary middle-class people based on a point system that evaluates their skills and education and may in some cases also weigh that against the domestic job market.

IOW, Canada is generally more welcoming of average immigrants than the US, not less. The misconceptions seem to arise from Americans who simplistically and mistakenly believe that just being offered a job in Canada should qualify them for automatic immigration status. It doesn’t work that way in any first-world nation, AFAIK, and least of all in the US. I suggest they consult their own country’s immigration rules before criticizing someone else’s.

Canada has also been more welcoming of refugees. Last year the Canadian government committed to an immediate acceptance of 25,000 Syrian refugees who are currently in the process of being resettled. By that standard, considering ten times the population and infrastructure, the US should proportionately be admitting 250,000. In fact as far as I can tell, there’s some nebulous commitment to just 10,000, and it’s not clear how many – if any – have actually been admitted, and some politicians are pushing for that number to be zero.

Sorry for the digression but the quoted statement was such an egregious misconception that I just had to comment on it.