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Notes -
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.
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