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Yes. But the influx of people also means that now two jobs need to be done, and you're no worse off. That's the core of the argument — there is more labor, but there is also more work to be labored on.
Same goes for housing — new people? They are willing to pay for building more houses!
Of course, the time horizons and other restrictions do matter. I'm not saying that the housing market isn't broken, or that sudden shifts in worker availability do not have temporary effects. What I am saying is that blaming it on immigration is not an accurate model of reality — and, even more importantly, Trump is exploiting that for his personal gain.
But I mean, this is not what we actually see; what you are expressing is what we keep getting told will be the case with immigration, but somehow never actually seems to materialize. When I was a child, I had a family doctor; now, I'm part of roughly 20% of my province that does not, and the lineup to get a family doctor is in the range of years. When I was a kid, the weekly grocery bill was around $100 CAD for a 5 person family per week; it's now around $100 CAD for a single person. This is far in excess of nominal inflation.
The time horizons matter too; I'm currently 33, and moving into a place that is not big enough to raise a family. If the immigration jobs end up stabilizing in 5 years, I'll be 38; if I wanted a family with 5 kids, I'm kind of out of time at that point. It doesn't actually matter to me if everything will be better in 5 years; I only have one life.
I think your theories only make sense if the only immigration is net contributors (people who are likely to pay more taxes than they consume); however, Canada supports both spousal unification, as well as family unification (including the extremely elderly). We also have an average wage of $49000 for new immigrants (as opposed to the $55000 for native Canadians). As such, the immigrants are literally making us poorer on a per-person basis, driving up the cost of our resources that cannot grow at the same pace as immigration (housing, health care), and bringing their racial and ethnic tensions to our streets. Our GDP may be higher than it would've without them; but that doesn't help when my wage doesn't go up, and everything is more expensive (and in Canada, our GDP per capita has actually gone down).
You describe genuine issues. But the question is: Are these really caused by immigration? I mean it, for real. You can have the firmest belief in the perception that these issues are causes by immigration. But reality simply does not care what you believe. What if you seriously entertain the possibility that you could be wrong on this? What if stopping immigration simply doesn't do anything on the above issues?
That is the essence of my point: There is a good chance that the issues in housing and health care that you are experiences are not caused by immigration, and — there are people out there who want to profit from your belief on this matter, that's what my quote by Henry George is about. Trump is such a person.
I mean, to turn the question on it's head - is there any evidence that would persuade you that it is caused (or at least, worsened) by immigration? From my perspective, it doesn't have to be caused solely by it in order for it to be aggrevating the situation.
An important thing to remember is that Canada has had approximately 1/8 of its residents added in the last 5 years (2019 census has 37.5 million population, 2024 has 41.8, but there was also a report that approximately 1 million people had overstayed their visas). During that time, I've seen housing prices go up by around 65%. (The place I'm buying was last listed at 315k in 2019, and is 485 today). The housing market began to get out of control with Harper, who dramatically expanded the TFW program; with Trudeau, who went into overdrive with TFW and international students, it became way worse.
Every province in Canada is currently suffering from this, regardless of their provincial leaders. We've had a dramatic increase in coethnic violence, including marches to support Hamas and similar groups.
We had a fairly big outrage recently over Indian international students raiding food banks for meals - this directly reduces the resources available for our population that uses them (which has gone up to about 20% of the population).
Do you think it's possible that immigration could be making things worse for the average person? I can't find you definitive proof that this is the sole cause of every word, because it isn't - all I can do is show you the ways we can see direct negatives from it.
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