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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   28682 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Canada was the great laboratory of democracy that we needed. Trudeau's political obituary will be written with one word: immigration.

Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.

This has had disastrous and likely permanent consequences. While leftists might have cheered the new, vibrant additions to the nation's food and street culture, even right-leaning Canadians were generally pro-immigration. The consensus was that Canada's points-based admissions system would lead to incredible economic gains if nothing else. We now know that that is false. Canada's economy has been stagnant over the last 10 years while the US economy has soared. In fact, on a per-capita level Canada's economy has been in a recession now for over 6 quarters.

Canada's population has increased by large amounts since 2015. The country now groans under an influx of millions of new immigrants. Since Trudeau took office, Canada's population has increased from less than 36 million to over 41 million. Nearly 100% of the gain has been as a result of immigration. Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases. Wages, on the other hand have stagnated, and remain at levels far below those of the US. Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to. The frog is being boiled much too quickly, and people are noticing.

Mass immigration is now proven a failed policy. It remains to be seen whether it is possible for Canada to recover. I fear it might not be. With the Conservatives in charge, things will get bad less quickly, but it will take years for the consequences of the Trudeau years to be fully felt.

A big unanswered question is why so much of the anglosphere decided to dramatically increase net migration after 2020-2021. UK, Canada, Australia, and to a lesser extent New Zealand all see a slow upward trend turn into a sharp upward trend after borders opened back up. Perhaps in the US as well but I am having an awful time actually tracking down net numbers.

The obvious theory is that they wanted to prevent a recession. Every government believes that "triggered a recession" is synonymous with "kicked out by voters".

Most governments overspent on lockdown supports, and lifted them way too late (by which I mean, put them into place at all). The money they spent was often injected into the economy directly (by subsidising demand), and when the market came to equalize it, they panicked and brought in as many people as possible to keep things GDP line rising (Canada has had around 1-3% population growth, but a GDP growth of around -0.5 - 0.5% - it's fairly obvious we'd be in a recession if they hadn't imported somewhere around 3 million people in the last two years (for reference, with a population of 40 million, 3 million people is around 8%, or roughly 1 in 12 people in the country).

If there goal is recession avoidance at any cost, and it's lockdowns that risk triggering a recession, there's a really easy way to succeed. Just don't do lockdowns. Not to mention most of the anglosphere has plenty of room for unpopular policies on deregulation (particularly construction) that would do more to raise GDP and be less unpopular than mass immigration.

Actual ideological belief in both lockdowns and mass immigration is more likely than a failed attempt at popularitymaxing.

This is interesting because absolutely enormous numbers of illegal immigrants have been a post-Covid reality in the US; this being a deliberate policy change pursued for known political reasons is at least a plausible interpretation.

What about Ireland? I know they have similar issues with unaffordable housing and have seen protests due to some immigrant crime, but I can't recall hearing about massive increases there

Per capita, it looks like the post-Covid immigration increase in Ireland was roughly the same as the increase in the UK; the only obvious difference in the total numbers is that for the UK this was unprecedented whereas Ireland had an equally large immigration surge 15 years or so ago. The composition is fairly different, though. E.g., since we're talking about the grooming gangs scandals again, Ireland has something like 30% as many Pakistan-born residents per-capita as the UK.

The composition is fairly different, though.

For anyone interested Ireland's first experience with mass migration was with Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Nigerians (in order of size).

I completely agree that immigration is the ur-cause of Trudeaus downfall. What’s impressive to me about this is the false consciousness on the left about it. I’m in a group chat with some friends most of whom are leftists. They dislike Trudeau (usually for reneging on electoral reform which would have presumably enshrined permanent leftist rule) and dislike the economy and housing market, but immigration is sacred so confusion reigns.

This has been an ongoing debate in my chat, and indeed the country, for years. It simmers under the surface. Even the conservatives can’t bring themselves to describe the actual problem staring everyone in the face. Instead we get invectives about corporate greed and paying our fair share and only quietly at dinner do the liberal boomers whisper about how they “just don’t know how they feel that everyone at the airport and at the schools are non white”.

The same problem democrats have in the states is here on a grander scale: we ruined the country with immigration and no one can say it because like a colour blind looking for the red number, the left wing majority of our country seem impervious to the reality in front of their faces. It’s truly astounding to see.

That said, I think a preference cascade could easily begin. Someone can break the ice and make xenophobia cool again.

Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.

Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.

Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?

Declaring something does not make it so. If a car salesman calls a car "a great bargain" nobody batts an eye if you say prove it, but somehow if it's the government it's considered true unless proven wrong. After their visa runs out, they have the choice to stay in a first-world country illegaly or go back to the third world legally. Would you go back? I certainly wouldn't, so I don't even blame them very much. Are they incentivized to go back? Not really, since not giving them support in line with first world standards despite their illegal status is ruled inappriopriately cruel by the courts. Are they getting deported? Not unless they cooperate, since they have first have a long time to legally fight any deportation order (unless the government can prove they have money, the government will have to pay both legal sides, which will be horrendously expensive) and even if they lose they still have a long time to vanish before a deportation order is processed (and of the already-existing illegal immigrants most aren't ordered to begin with, anyway). It's obviously hard to prove how many exactly it's going to be, but the legal realities in canada mean that any temporary worker who wants to stay will simply do so. And similar experiences from other western countries have shown that this will often be a large percentage, and unfortunately usually the least desirable to boot. It's just terrible incentives all-around.

Harper faced significant legal battles over his attempts to reform immigration an asylum claims.

One major case was "Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care v. Canada" where the Government tried to cancel extended prescription drug coverages rejected refugee claimants received while appealing their rulings. Keep in mind that Canadian citizens didn't get drug coverage.

The judge ruled that cutting the program was "cruel and unusual treatment" and thus a charter violation. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld that.

Things are a little more interesting if you look at immigration by year by country,

https://x.com/AmazingZoltan/status/1875985574429184020

There were prior trends, but Trudeau vastly increased immigration from India and Pakistan.

Instead of total number of immigrants, the key fight is really "how many poor Muslims?".

The left sees bringing in poor Muslims as key to their political success. They end up dependent on government programs and are loyal voters, or at least were before the split over October 7 in the US.

Harper did various things to tilt the balance towards economically viable immigrants. He upset a lot of Liberals by resetting the immigration backlog queue. I could go on but it was really mostly minor things that he could do with out the left going to the courts.

Trudeau tried to flip that around. Early on he brought in large numbers of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan without giving any thought about how to house them. He ended up paying for hotels and upper-middle class homes in some cases. Per head spending was enormous.

Ultimately Trudeau's problem was that he's one of those people who believes leftist academics have everything figured out and we just need to what they say. Mass immigration is always good. New housing construction is bad. So Canada has an incredible housing crisis. Also infrastructure wasn't expanded to support the additional population, so there are problems everywhere.

At least previous Prime Ministers could muster up a better response to "we need more housing for this immigration" than "shut up you racist".

What sort of leftist academic would say that new housing construction is bad? I would think that, almost by definition, if you think that new housing construction is bad than you are not a leftist.

Those that believe in the labor theory of value.

Is there a concrete example where self-defined Canadian marxists/communists/socialists have been against building new housing?

Lots of "leftists" and actual leftists (i.e. people following an ideology derived of Marx or Bakunin) oppose new building done for-profit. That means big corps, small landlords, whomever. If it is for-profit, it is exploitative. They say that building some big new apartment building isn't going to make housing more affordable, it's just more money for landlords and developers. And if it's city housing or low-income or whatever, they'll protest that it's not the right neighbourhood, of course it's a great idea but not here, there are heritage concerns, etc.

If you go to into community development meeting you will see these types. Very often they own multi-million dollar homes.

I'd be happy if you could provide any examples - news articles, maybe even social media posts. The reason I'm asking is I've been to community development meetings in multiple cities in Canada and I've never seen anyone but nimbys opposing new builds and rezoning changes. The main concerns I've heard in those meetings is that high-rise buildings bring crime, put less tall houses in their shadow, change the character of the community, pose threat to children due to the increased traffic.

Your Statscan link seems to show a pretty big slope inflection point in 2021 tho?

(I don't think the immigrants are actually the main problem, although concentrating ~all of them in two cities has been a big mistake -- destroying the economy over covid is either the problem in itself, or pushed the issues caused by ever-increasing numbers of immigrants to the point where the camel's back just snapped. Somehow this is even harder for politicians to admit than blaming immigration policy however!)

although concentrating ~all of them in two cities has been a big mistake

Why? All you need to swing an election in Canada are those two cities; if you can demographics-are-destiny your way into having a permanent majority there, then nothing your political opposition does matters.

Of course, that also depends on the corresponding socioeconomic consequences not pissing off the existing voters in those cities too much. Which is why the Boomers will continue to vote Liberal (and is why the "muh racism" angle is mostly focused on them), because the immigrants prop up their property values, and why everyone else will not.

then nothing your political opposition does matters.

50% + 1 provincial separation is officially approved policy in Canada; you can only push so far.

Which is why the Boomers will continue to vote Liberal

Liberals are currently polling sub-20% -- I haven't looked at the crosstabs lately, but I don't think this is all Boomers. The ones I know are more likely to vote Green/NDP.

Temporary workers are immigrants and the vast majority will stay anyway.

There's already been stories of people rejected by the normal system requesting asylum.

I'm not convinced the Canadian state has the will to send them all back.

No they won't.

I'm aware of the temporary workers. I don't think they return. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.

And, yes, the trendline was there pre-Trudeau. As I mentioned, Conservatives went along for the ride because they too believed the myth that migration was good for the economy. I believed it too! They were wrong. I was wrong.

Moreso, I'm sure the counterfactual Conservative government would have been largely the same as Trudeau regarding immigration, if much less insufferable. Certainly, the UK (led by conservatives from 2010–2024) witnessed the same toxic combination of mass immigration, crime, coverup, and authoritarianism.

But, still, the two parties aren't the same. British citizens didn't like the Tories, but now that they see Labour, they realize how much worse things can get. Similarly, in Canada, the Conservatives see the problem and want to fix it. The Liberals don't.

Both parties in Canada were wrong about immigration. What's inexcusable is to persist in the error.

I'm aware of the temporary workers. I don't think they return. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt I will.

I have no idea what will happen, but is your position based on anything beyond vibes? Do you live in Canada, or spend a lot of time there? Why do you believe the things that you do?

This article claims that only one in three that have arrived since 2010 have received permanent residency. There seem to be a number of articles claiming that 1.2 million visas are set to expire in 2025; how many will actually leave versus try to claim refugee status or just stay illegally, I don't know.

And, yes, the trendline was there pre-Trudeau. As I mentioned, Conservatives went along for the ride because they too believed the myth that migration was good for the economy. I believed it too! They were wrong. I was wrong.

So...why is it Trudeau's legacy? Are you saying that it will be because people never bothered to put the least amount of effort into researching the topic, and will just say liberals bad? Are you saying he deserves it? But then, according to you, it's your legacy as well as the last 30-40 years of Canadian politicians as well? At that point, it seems nonsensical to pin this on the scapegoat du jour for continuing the status quo.

I don't follow Canadian politics in any meaningful way, and I don't have real contacts with anyone on the ground. From what I can tell, Trudeau wrecked his legacy with scandals, stupidity and bad luck. But come on, your initial take was absurd and poorly researched, no?

From my contacts that run in Canadian circles, immigration was huge. When I went back to visit not too long ago now, it came up, unprompted by me, in almost every conversation I had. Even from people who were otherwise good lefties. You could just watch how their brain was trying to thread the needle, avoiding saying that it's outright bad, but talking about how it's "changing the culture" and surprising that when you go to Sobey's, you might (voice gets quieter) "be the only white person there, ya know? It's different." I've had other recent conversations with a family who lived in a different part of Canada, but recently moved to the states. Sure enough, immigration was the topic du jour there, too. How the neighborhoods were composed now, which ethnicities owned all the houses (and they rented from), etc.

Trudeau may only be the current face of a longer trend, but he is absolutely the face of it right now, in the moment that people are thinking about it. Perhaps they should be smarter and thinking about the longer trend, but I kinda doubt it. From the perspective of a fair number of people, it's almost as if they disappeared into a hole for COVID (longer than in the US), and when they emerged, at some point, they suddenly noticed that something had changed. That moment of realization happened during Trudeau, and that's likely what's going to stick.

From my contacts that run in Canadian circles, immigration was huge.

Of course? For the purposes of buying a house or getting a doctor or being employed in Tims this century it doesn't really matter to people that they're TFWs and allegedly will leave at some point. They're still people, making use of limited resources today.

I'm not sure how that distinction is supposed to change anything about how Canadians manifestly feel, even before we get into whether those TFWs were always going to stay temporary. Guest worker programs have become fait accomplis before and Canada especially has limited anti-immigration antibodies.

So...why is it Trudeau's legacy?

Perhaps it's much like how a President tends to own a bad economy, whether they want it or not, and whether or not the trends/conditions actually began before they took office. Trudeau has been in office for quite a while, and it was under his administration that the issue got to the Threshold of Complaint.

The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants.

First time seeing that, and it looks about right. We can handle <1% population growth due to immigration, but not >3%. Why would you call that "conflating" the issue?

Did they follow the points-based system of immigration, or did they keep making cut-outs, set-asides, exceptions, etc to let those not qualified in?

Yes, the points based system was retained, but as the numbers increased the points cutoff began to fall so the quality of immigrants became lower and lower. And that’s just economic stream, many more immigrants are dependents of those in the economic stream and other forms of family reunification.

And that’s just permanent residents which doubled since 2015, but temporary migration is where the huge increase was. Students, refugees and temporary workers rose by over 700,000 per year for 3 years on net.

Basically all Western immigration systems are incontinent in the sense that they —

(1) allow the right for anyone arriving in the country (legally or illegally) to lodge a claim for asylum in accordance with the 1951 UN refugee convention

(2) provide guaranteed rights for new citizens to sponsor visas for non-citizen family members

(3) do not condition entitlements (benefits, voting rights, etc.) on any basis beyond citizenship; once you’re in, you’re in, and any attempts to restrict this principle can be resisted via the “second class citizen” meme.

On top of this, educational polarisation means that the people actually making immigration decisions (magistrates and civil servants) are almost guaranteed to be sympathetic to any and all asylum and immigration claims.

In short, the West is utterly fucked unless and until governments are willing to make radical breaks in international treaties and national constitutional law.

I broadly agree, but with the footnote that you don't really need a radical break, you just need a consistent policy of saying that no on one showing up from Central America is actually a refugee. This is (in principle, not practice) easy to accomplish, because approximately none of them actually are refugees. Almost all of them that say the magic words and claim to be threatened aren't. Their countries suck, their countries are super violent, everyone there is at risk all the time, but no, they're not actually being targeted for political, ethnic, or religious violence. Recognizing every ridiculous and obviously false claim to refugee status was a much more radical approach than doing the opposite.

I mean unless you consider such things as assimilation, gainful employment, speaking the language as requirements for first-class citizenship a minor change, or required proof of criminal background checks for entry to be a minor change, we absolutely are talking about a major change here. Right now, basically if you manage to put a finger on the dirt of your chosen country, you’re in, and will be supported by the government of that country for as long as it takes for you to get on your feet (and given how good the benefits are, the immigrants aren’t in any hurry), with no requirement that even the bare minimum (speak the language, adapt to the culture, be a law abiding member of society) are required. Just show up.

Also, if you try to block by country, I think what will happen is that people will quickly spread the word and suddenly every person trying to enter from Central America will claim to be from Southern Mexico or Columbia or Venezuela or whatever they need to say to get it. They’re probably already lying about everything else, lost their passport (or never had one).

You can't have this consistent policy since judges are policymakers here too and have proven to be one of the major obstacles across the Anglosphere. You have to break the judges. Which amounts to "radical breaks in international treaties and national constitutional law."

In England judges present no obstacle to a party with a majority in parliament. Parliament has absolute sovereignty. You can write a law that literally says “notwithstanding the ECHR, courts and any existing legislation, X” and pass it with a 50%+1 majority of seats. The Lords can delay it for a year, but you can abolish them with the same majority and consensus for 100+ years is that they’d have to accept it. The king could refuse to sign it, but he won’t.

There is only a lack of will.

  • Far from the fever dream of immigrants doing useful labor such as building new housing, the new arrivals are competing aggressively for the same sort of high wage sinecures and government benefits that native-born Canadians previously thought they were entitled to.

There's a disconnect here no? If you are using a points based admission system to get the best qualified immigrants, they aren't going to be building houses. For that you want low skilled immigration (or work visas). You can't expect to only get the highest quality immigrants AND that they will do construction.

I think multiple lines of pro-immigrant rhetoric are being conflated here.

The points-based system was to bring in middle class people to compete with the Canadian middle class. It had some carveouts for certain jobs or underpopulated regions (was never sure how well this worked given so many people wanted to come to the same slice of the GTA and would legally be able to after PR), but the track sold to me was college-> skilled work experience-> PR-> citizenship and I was supposed to be typical. Back then Canadians bragged about the higher educational attainment of immigrants.

I think this was the main idea, and it probably worked (or was tolerated) because it was competition for the middle class, not the entire working class. I wasn't allowed to work in college cause I wasn't supposed to be competing with lower skilled Canadians, I was supposed to be keeping the universities afloat and aiming the email jobs. Jobs a Canadian high school graduate could do would yield no points.

After COVID both that sort of migration increased - and the standards were dropped to compensate - and temporary foreign workers were also bumped up massively. So now everyone was competing with the world. Young kids can't get jobs, everyone feels the crunch.

Since there's no country cap (genius move btw) you start getting scams allowing in a much larger percentage of lower skilled migrants combined with people pretending to be on the student track but "studying" at some strip mall college. Presumably all these people would be useful for things like building houses but then that's still an issue of local governments and zoning so it's probably just one of those things you say.

Yes, I know. And yet somehow, "we need immigrants to build houses and take care of all our old people" seems to be the normie pro-immigration stance.

It didn't work for Canada, it didn't work for Australia, Germany, France, the UK, the US, etc... It never works.

In any case, high-skill immigration, like low-skill immigration, is fraught with challenges and is generally negative sum, unless the immigrants are truly elite. I think Musk's "15,000/year" is a pretty good ballpark estimate. But for countries already choking on surplus college educated baristas, adding even more midwit college grads is only going to make everyone poorer.

Considering that the upside of high skill immigration (e.g. Musk, Jensen Huang) is absolutely enormous, I'd be curious to see the math showing high skill immigration to be "negative sum".

Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout. There's a vast difference between Jensen Huang and an H1B working for Cognizant or other low level grind factories.

We can quibble about the 15,000 and I'll admit it's just a number. Maybe double it, maybe triple it. But over 30 years, 15,000 a year amounts to nearly half a million. It's not nothing.

But I do think it's imperative that the system works to identify truly high skill people.

The family members that brought Jensen Huang to the US as a child would not have qualified under any kind of limited elite scheme. Nor would Musk, who entered the US on a student visa, and who was a nobody at the time he founded Zip2.

Was t he at MIT?

Edit: Penn

Surely these geniuses would be included in the 15,000 year elite carveout.

I doubt it. Let's check, as they say, the Early Life.

Huang:

  • Born in Taiwan
  • Son of a chemical engineer and a school teacher
  • Dad visits the US for some training and decided to send Jensen (who doesn't speak a lick of English) and his brother to live with their uncle (I have no idea how this is legal)
  • Parents sell almost all their possessions to afford private school
  • Parents move to Oregon, Jensen works as a busboy at 15
  • Jensen graduates with his degree at 20 from OSU, begins to punch the clock at AMD
  • Jensen hears of an interesting position at LSI Logic in Santa Clara working on early graphics cards. The project is a success and two of the guys he met leave with him to start NVidia.

Would you have let Jensen or his dad into the country? Is there anything here that indicates either of them is a top 15k tier talent? If, against all odds, he was able to start NVidia in Taiwan, do you think he would move to the US, or keep running his company in Taiwan, as Morris Chang (who left the US due to frustrations in getting ahead at IBM) did?

Elon Musk:

  • Born to a dietitian/model and, uh, electromechanical engineer/emerald dealer/property developer
  • Graduates Pretoria Boys High School with unremarkable grades
  • Uses his mom's Canadian citizenship to dodge Safrican conscription, moves to Canada to work at lumber mill and do other odd jobs
  • Admitted to the University of Pennsylvania, graduated with two degrees in five years
  • Possibly overstayed his visa at this point, although Musk claims he was an H1B despite (AFAICT) not having an actual job
  • Founds zip2 with his brother (possibly also in the country illegally) in 1995 which sells for $300M in 1999
  • He rolls his $20M proceeds into x.com, which gets acquired and merged into paypal
  • Musk cashes out $176M, repeat until Musk is the richest man in the world

Again, would you let this guy into the country? A Saskatchewan sawmill operator who overstayed his student visa? Is this what elite human capital looks like?

Okay, I'm stumped then. How do we allow top tier talent without just letting everyone in?

Musk and Huang wouldn't have been admitted under some sort of H1B/points scheme either. So the only way to get them is open borders? That seems like a bad bargain, even for geniuses of that caliber.

What would you do if you were the king of the United States?

Isn't it a fallacy of some sorts? Perhaps NVIDIA or Musk's companies would not exist exactly as they are if the immigration laws had been different and enforced differently. However, it is not like we can observe the counterfactual outcomes. Would not there be GPU companies in the US without the single individual Huang? According to Wikipedia article concerning NVIDIA founding, there were 70 graphics computing start-ups in the US in the 1990's. The market environment would have been similar without NVIDIA.

Musk's enterprises appear more singular and his interests idiosyncratic, so imagining alternative paths is more difficult. Some of the alternative paths could have seen less technological development and slightly more enshittified world today. However, it is not certain the alternatives would have been worse. Perhaps, with overall more stringent US immigration there would have been another innovative tech scene (or several) somewhere else and he would have migrated there. Stronger competition between the SV and other hypothetical scenes would perhaps have produced even greater technological innovation and varied, better outcomes for everyone. Or if there was no alternative to SV, they could have collected the points under the alternative immigration system at another life stage. (Or perhaps the people who would have prospered under a different legislation would have been more stellar and exceptional.)

What would you do if you were the king of the United States?

Allow essentially unlimited immigration for groups like Taiwanese and white South Africans who have a track record of making countries better, but not allow Indians without a Nobel prize on their application?

There was also a post on Marginal Revolution the other day referencing Hanania and calling for more US immigration based on the outcomes of Musk and Huang.

Maybe that's what's motivating some of the comments in this thread. Yet, I suspect if one proposed to—while keeping all else the same—increase the number of Taiwanese and white South African immigrants by 10x, much less infinity, the reaction from many mass-US-immigration enthusiasts would be along the lines of "no, not like that!"

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There's a reason that we're in this situation, and it's because it's not an easy problem.

I think the thing that sets Musk and Huang apart from the average H1B is the entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps there could be a way to admit people like that selectively for them to start businesses bere, but note that Huang's success is at least partly thanks to the guys he met at his second job.

It's entirely possible that you have to either err on the side of letting in too many or too few, although there may be some obvious gains by cutting down on clueless imported cognizant employees. At least, I am not aware of any cognizant H1Bs that went on to do great things.

That makes sense to me. I wish you would post more top level content here. As much as I hate you needling my comments, I think you are a clear thinker.

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Got through an Ivy League university with 2 degrees (economics and physics) in 5 years? Yeah, he definitely seems worth considering. I'm not the immigration restrictionist some are, but there's a big difference between someone who can do that and the average body-shop grind.

If you think that every ivy league (or more?) diploma should come with a green card we can discuss that.

I agree that your average Cognizant H1B holder is probably not worth admitting into the country, however I don't think it's true that you can figure out who is a top talent a priori, before they've done something world changing (after they've done it they probably wouldn't want to emigrate unless they really hate their country).

The other important point is that top talent should be allowed to start their own ventures (as Musk did illegally) and they will probably not reach their full potential working for the man. This is another shortcoming of the H1B system.

If you think that every ivy league (or more?) diploma should come with a green card we can discuss that.

I didn't say that. I noted that Musk's undergraduate achievement was far above the ordinary run of H-1Bs. Though if Ivy League degrees hadn't gotten queered by the culture war, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.

however I don't think it's true that you can figure out who is a top talent a priori, before they've done something world changing

This is true, but it's not cause to admit all the Cognizant H-1Bs in the hopes of picking some of the top talent out from among them.

I'm pretty sure the US DOES have immigrants building houses and taking care of old people.

Those immigrants will themselves need houses and taking care of. When you run the numbers, you’ll see that immigration has a trivial effect on median age. Are we really willing to permanently change the demographics of the country to buy ourselves 6 months of additional elder care runway?

I don't think the demographics of the United States are sacrosanct. We should be a lot more selective than we are, and we should be far less accommodating of foreign cultures and put more pressure to assimilate, but demographics (meaning race) per se I don't care about. As an HBD believer I figure being more selective means there will be racial effects, which I'm fine with.

As for elder care, it's actually possible another 6 years would be sufficient (as the Boomers are reduced) to avoid problems, also.

I think we largely agree, but I just want to note that for once I am the bigger black pill. I think I should get some sort of badge.

is only going to make everyone poorer.

In the long run, sure. But in the short term it is going to make a few very rich people much richer, and those people will then trickle down some of their wealth to the politicians who helped them out. This might seem like a minor quibble but I feel like it is important to point out that there are people who profit substantially from all of these policies.

Housing prices have soared, making owning a home an unreachable dream for almost all young people. Rents for apartments have seen similar increases.

This is the fault of zoning ("greenbelts" or "urban growth boundaries"), not of immigration. 1 2 3

Adding 6 million immigrants to a country of 35 million absolutely makes a difference. How could it not?

Of course they will also compete for housing in the metropolitan areas. But the core of the problem are NIMBYism and people buying houses as investment. If the six million left Canada tomorrow, the rents would still be too damn high.

The real solution is building new houses (YIMBYism) and a Georgian land value tax to make unproductive hoarding of properties unattractive.

People who want georgist taxes think that's the answer to every problem though. It's the new MMT for /r/neoliberal posters now that "inflation doesn't matter" doesn't pass the laugh test.

Georgism doesn't pass the laugh test either. It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone. We'd have to revert to 1776 levels of taxation. Maybe not a bad thing overall, but kiss social security and aircraft carriers goodbye.

Nevertheless, more Georgist-esque taxes are a good thing. In major urban areas, we should tax land more and buildings less.

Will this "one weird trick" fix the fertility and housing crisis? No. But it might help, slightly.

It's impossible to fund a modern government with land taxes alone.

Source

America's annual land rents are sufficient to cover 18–40 % (Fed) or 34–78 % (Smith) of annual federal spending. The low-end figures come from 2020, which was a major outlier in federal spending thanks to COVID.

But wait, what about state budgets? Many states are funded by property taxes, so if we're going to shift to land value taxes, we need to take states into account, too. So let's add state budgets into the mix (minus federal funding to states so we're not double counting). If we do that, we drop to 18–30 % (Fed) or 36–58 % (Smith) of annual spending.

Georgism is equivalent to the elimination of private real property. I don't think that's going to fix the fertility crisis. If it "fixed" the housing crisis, it will be by accelerating the process of putting us in pods. This is why urbanists like Georgism, it forces property "owners" to develop "their" property to the utmost or pay taxes the property's income cannot support.

Surely there's a middle ground.

Imagine some lord who owned land in central London in 900 AD, used it as a sheep pasture, and then passed it down to his sons for 30 generations, each using it as a sheep pasture onto the present day. There's no property taxes because taxes = theft. The lords never sell or convert their land to non-pasture since the value goes up every year.

Why not just kill the lord, build a park everyone can use, and then piss on his rent-seeking grave?

Surely there is a place for reasonable accommodations to common sense in any system, even if we should err on the side of ancient liberties. For example, I think that on balance the electoral college is a good thing, but the pre-1832 rotten boroughs of England take things too far.

This comment undercuts the moral argument for Georgist taxes pretty severely. (I've long been suspicious of the practical argument in general, although the practical argument of "we ought to incentivize the medieval sheep farmer to get the hell out of the middle of London" still makes a huge amount of sense in your hypothetical.)

A tax that can be framed as "We're just taxing the value that the rest of society has provided to you" feels like a huge moral advance over the typical lesser-of-two-evils "We can't make civilization work without lots of money so we're raising the amount of yours we'll take; pray we don't raise it further". And this moral justification for land-value tax makes some sense, for land uses where most of your revenues (and/or at least your use-value for a homestead residence) really come from the value of proximity to your neighbors. But what if you just wanted to farm sheep, and the main thing your neighbors have done to aid that is dump a bunch of air pollution into their lungs and their wool? Asking you to pay ever-increasing taxes for that service seems almost cruel.

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What rent is he seeking? He's passing up taking advantage the value of the land by pasturing sheep on it (surely, in the modern world, an activity with very low economic value). For what reason should his land be expropriated? If Richard Branson wants to build an apartment building there instead, let him make an offer.

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We have some of these: Lord Cadogan and (the Duke of?) Westminster. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that such people are far, FAR more responsible and long-termist landlords than the politicians and private equity companies that would like to replace them.

Why not just kill the lord, build a park everyone can use, and then piss on his rent-seeking grave?

Because the lord, who is aware of the limitations of aristocratic power and is also a normal human being who quite likes parks and doesn’t need more money, will build parks of his own accord. The politicians will build ugly vanity projects and the equity people will build unobtainable buy-to-lets for the Chinese.

I can see the case for lost economic productivity, but how could using your own property as a sheep pasture despite opportunity to develop it be in any sense rent-seeking?

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If the six million left Canada tomorrow, the rents would still be too damn high.

That's not accurate. Small changes at the margin lead to huge swings in price. For example, if world oil production were to decrease by 3%, prices would double in the short term.

6 million is 15% the population of Canada. That's a huge change at the margin. Rents would absolutely crater if they all left tomorrow.

I agree with all the other stuff about needing to build more, Georgian-esque taxes, etc... But since that's not something that any progressive democracy has ever done correctly, maybe don't import 15% of your population over a 1 decade period?

If those immigrants were building homes.

Of course, unlike Texas in 2005, these are college degree holders who don’t want to work with their hands. Also the government is unfriendly to building more houses.

A lot of the immigrants in Canada are unskilled though from what I understand. They are working retail and Uber eats type jobs.

Sure, they’re not doing construction.

One idea of how it could work is that the points system only gives points to construction workers. Then house prices rise at first, when every-one turns up, but they get jobs building houses. Eventually, having imported too many construction workers, builders' wages fall, and construction gets cheaper. House prices fall, or houses get larger :-)

That isn't going to work for immigration from India to Canada. Even if the construction workers are genuinely qualified, the Indian construction workers know how to build houses to withstand monsoon rains, but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.

but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.

This is really above the pay grade of your average hammer swinging construction worker. People who design houses need to be aware of this (and the million other housing code regulations) and presumably have to be licensed.

I think the bigger issue (because people can be trained to build houses) is that the Indians will game the system, work for the minimum number of years required, and then melt into the general population.

Then we'll need to bring over even more Indians to build houses for them and all their chain migration relatives, etc.. until Canada is basically just a northern outpost of India.

The better method to build houses without destroying your country would be to incentivize actual Canadians to build houses. Failing that, temporary workers with strict enforcement could work, but I don't think the government could credibly promise strict enforcement so citizens should be unwilling to accept that deal.

Then bring in more Mexicans. We don't have that many Mexicans in Pittsburgh, but do you know how many are in the building trades? All of them. Okay, some own restaurants and I used to work with a Mexican lawyer, but walk around the areas with above-average Mexican population (i.e. 10% Mexican, 90% white) and they're all driving beat up pickup trucks with sheets of plywood in the back. Hell, if you want to hire a contractor for anything smaller than a $20,000 renovation, Mexican handymen are pretty much your only option.

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