'Ingen mohammedanere hos os? Naturligvis ikke! Sæt jer i forbindelse
med jeres nærmeste antiislam-organisation og forbered en national
stordemo! Målet er at tvinge de feje politikere, jurister og medier
til at bringe repatrieringen af alle mohammedanere på vej - inkl
bosniere og lignende, men også dem der har fået vores pas!'
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When immigration goes awry: Unless Canada cuts immigrant numbers, our
major cities will not be able to maintain their social and physical
infrastructures, writes
Daniel Stoffman
Toronto Star, Jul. 7, 2006
It's 2020 and, in Toronto, the days when everyone used the public
health-care system are gone. So is the time when a majority of
affluent, middle-class parents sent their kids to public schools. In
2020, vast tracts of suburban slums occupy what used to be good
farmland on the city's outskirts.
Traffic congestion and air pollution are unbearable. Toronto's
reputation as one of North America's most livable cities is a distant
memory. It's now known as the " Sao Paulo of the north."
This dystopian vision of the future of Canada's largest city is hardly
far-fetched. Toronto is already suffering severe growing pains, the
result of the federal government's insistence on maintaining the
world's largest per capita annual immigration intake - around 250,000
people a year of whom about 43 per cent come to Toronto. That's more
than 100,000 newcomers year after year after year.
It is impossible for any city to maintain its social and physical
infrastructure in the face of such relentless population growth.
By 2020, Greater Toronto's population will have ballooned from 5
million to 7 million, or even more if immigration levels are raised
higher still.
Every year Mercer Human Resource Consulting ranks world cities
according to their liveability. Vancouver always places at or near the
top of the list while the other big Canadian cities are among the top
30. Most of the top-ranked cities are relatively small - places like
Copenhagen (500,000) and Zurich (340,000).
None of the world's vast urban agglomerations of 10 million or more,
such as Sao Paulo and Seoul, is rated by Mercer as desirable places to
live. Smaller big cities are more livable because their residents can
enjoy the amenities of urban life without the congestion, crime, and
pollution associated with sprawling megalopolises.
Canada's livable cities are an unsung national asset. One of the things
that makes them special is the presence of immigrants from all over the
world who have contributed new energy and cultural diversity. But, in
immigration as in everything else, too much of a good thing isn't
better. Ottawa's policy of mass immigration, for which no reasonable
explanation has ever been offered, risks doing irreparable damage to
our cities. This policy of rapid urban growth is being implemented by
Ottawa even though it has no jurisdiction over urban affairs and even
though the policy has never been stated explicitly.
Yet the impact is already evident.
Highway 401 across Toronto has become the busiest road in North
America, the city can't find a place to put its garbage, and its public
schools can't afford to provide the English instruction newly arrived
children need. In Vancouver, meanwhile, controversy rages over the
British Columbia government's plan to expand the Port Mann bridge that
links the rapidly growing Fraser Valley suburbs to the city.
Amazingly, the local politicians who have to cope with the results
never suggest that perhaps the immigration intake might be lowered from
time to time as was standard practice until the late 1980s. To listen
to their silence, one would think the relentless influx of huge numbers
of new residents was a natural phenomenon like the weather rather than
a deliberate federal policy that easily could be changed.
Ottawa might claim it is not to blame for unmanageable urban growth
because it just lets the immigrants in, it doesn't tell them where to
go. But this would be disingenuous, because Ottawa knows Toronto gets
almost half of all immigrants while Vancouver gets 18 per cent and
Montreal 12 per cent. Many of those who settle elsewhere at first also
eventually wind up in one of the three biggest cities.
Attempts at dispersion are doomed because immigrants want to live where
previous cohorts of the same ethnicity are already established. They
also want to live in cities for the same reason Canadian-born people do
- they are more likely to find jobs there.
The country most comparable to Canada is Australia. Like Canada, it is
an English-speaking Commonwealth nation settled in relatively recent
history. Like Canada, it has an organized immigration program and has
used immigration effectively to enhance population growth and increase
the vigour and diversity of its major cities.
Australia's current net migration rate (immigration minus emigration
per 1,000 of population) is 3.85. Canada's is 5.85. Before the
Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney increased
immigration levels and made them permanent during the latter part of
the 1980s, a policy continued by the Liberals under Jean Chrétien,
Canada had an intake similar, on a per-capita basis, to Australia's.
There is no reason why Canada should have far more immigration than any
other country. Canada's existing population is younger than those of
most other developed countries and its ratio of working age people to
retired ones is higher. If Canada reverted to its traditional, more
moderate, immigration program, it could continue to enjoy the benefits
of immigration while sparing its cities the problems of unmanageable
growth. Immigrants would benefit too. Their economic performance has
been in free fall over the past 15 years.
Previously the number of new immigrants varied according to labour
market needs. Sometimes it would be cut to give the newly arrived a
chance to be absorbed successfully into the economy without intense
competition from more new arrivals. Not any more.
An endless stream of newcomers arrives in the big cities with few
options but to work in poorly paid jobs such as cleaning houses and
driving taxis. Wages of these jobs are thus kept low and the occupants
of them have little chance to get ahead.
Previously, poverty levels among immigrants were about the same as
those of the Canadian-born. Now they are much worse. According to a
report by the Canadian Council on Social Development, whereas the
poverty level of those who arrived before 1986 was 19.7 per cent, or
slightly lower than that of the Canadian-born, the poverty level of
those who came after 1991 was an alarming 52.1 per cent, while that of
people born in Canada remained unchanged at around 20 per cent.
If this trend is not reversed, Toronto and Vancouver will by 2020 be
home to an entrenched underclass living in slums. Because of
gentrification and rising property values in the central cities, these
slums will be located in the suburbs, requiring long commutes for those
fortunate enough to have employment.
Fan Yang, a reader of the Toronto Star, shrewdly analyzed the impact of
federal immigration policy in a letter to the newspaper in 2003. He
accused the federal government of "dumping more cheaply acquired labour
into the domestic labour pool, regardless of whether there is a healthy
demand. Businesses welcome that enthusiastically as they bear no direct
cost of unemployed immigrants and only garner the rewards of lower
labour costs."
Even skilled workers are doing poorly. According to the 2001 census,
male immigrants with a university degree who came to Ontario in the
late 1990s were earning after six to 10 years in Canada only 54 per
cent of what native-born Canadians with similar qualifications in that
province earned.
Remarkably, immigrant labour market performance has declined during a
time of increasing shortages of skilled workers. But, as the above data
suggest, just bringing in huge numbers of people doesn't solve skills
shortages. Mexico has a worse skills shortage than Canada yet it has no
shortage of people. The trick is to match immigrants to jobs and our
current immigration program doesn't do that well.
Luckily, Canada doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. It merely needs to
emulate the solutions that Australia's more successful immigration
program has already found, such as requiring the credentials of skilled
immigrants to be approved before they come and imposing strict
requirements for language skills.
In addition to creating poverty, mismanaged immigration is weakening
our public health-care and education systems. By 2020, the huge baby
boomer cohort of Canadians will be entering its stage of heaviest
reliance on the health-care system. The boomers will not tolerate
interminable waits for hip replacements and cancer treatment.
As if the challenge of caring for impatient boomers weren't enough, the
presence of millions of new immigrants will intensify the demands on
the system. Many of the newcomers will be old because Canada is the
most generous country in allowing immigrants to sponsor elderly parents
and grandparents.
There is no chance that our health-care system can survive in its
current form given the demands on it from these demographic changes. As
a result, by 2020 a full-fledged, parallel, private health-care system
will be in operation in the major immigrant-receiving cities which are
also where most of the boomers live. Private health care will be relied
upon not just by the wealthy but by much of the middle class as well.
A similar transformation will occur in education. A report last January
conducted for the Elementary Teachers of Toronto said teachers were
spending the equivalent of one day a week trying to make up for the
lack of English as a second language support for their immigrant
students.
"The more time the regular classroom teacher is having to devote to ESL
students ... it detracts from the level of service we want for all of
our students," union president Martin Long told The Globe and Mail.
In other words, the lack of support for ESL students is hurting all
students. This is certainly not the fault of the immigrant children. It
is the fault of rash and ill-conceived federal policy. As a result, by
2020 most middle-class families will have abandoned the public system.
This will be an unfortunate development because the public schools are
where immigrants and Canadian-born get to know each other. They are an
important force for social cohesion.
A seemingly plausible argument for boosting the population of at least
one Canadian city to 10 million or more would be that the truly great
cities of the world are very big. But London and Paris grew to their
current size gradually over hundreds of years and their greatness is
the result of the wealth of the empires of which they were the
capitals.
You don't build London and Paris by adding millions of bodies over a
short period of time. That's how you build Mumbai and Mexico City.
Ontario's environment commissioner, Gord Miller, issued a warning last
year about what the future holds for Toronto given current trends:
"The environmental impacts of this magnitude of growth ... will
compromise the quality of our lifestyle to a stage where it will be
unrecognizable," he said. "We already have trouble dealing with our
waste right now ... What about another 4 million tonnes a year? What
about another 4 million cars?"
The new Conservative government's immigration minister, Monte Solberg,
told a House of Commons committee in May that he was concerned about
the "huge burden" high immigration levels place on our major cities. He
thus became the first immigration minister in at least two decades to
show any sensitivity to the impact of immigration policy on the urban
environment.
Now it's the turn of local officials to abandon their ostrichlike
refusal even to mention immigration when discussing urban growth.
Perhaps they fear being branded "anti-immigrant" if they do.
But Pierre Trudeau, in his last year as prime minister, cut immigration
by 25 per cent and no one called him anti-immigrant. In that case, good
management trumped politics. It's an example the Conservative
government would do well to follow.
--
>.)
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