Canada, the World and Immigration

The movement of money is no longer a mystery. Ever since economist David Ricardo started looking at international trade in 1817, we've known what happens when money moves across international borders, the benefits and detriments of letting it flow freely and the very limited extent to which we can control it. But on the movement of people? We remain in the dark.

This week, we saw heated debates over the quantity and quality of immigration taking place in Canada, Britain, France and the U.S. The language recalls the way people once talked about money. Our popular thinking about immigration tends to be based on a set of long-standing myths.

The myth of the wall: People tend to believe, and politicians often promise, that immigration can simply be turned on and off, like a tap. I am supposedly living in "fortress Europe," which allows free movement of people within its countries while blocking most outsiders. The United States has actually built a physical wall to do something like this.

Can it be done? Not unless you want a North Korean level of isolation from the world. When the economy needs people, it gets people. At the moment, France and Switzerland are enacting laws to evict non-European migrants and punish people for arriving without documentation. But other corners of Europe are doing the precise opposite.

Poland has signed an agreement to recruit skilled immigrants from India, because Polish tradespeople have moved to Britain or Ireland. Spain is happily taking in tens of thousands of North Africans every year, and granting them quick citizenship. Germany and Italy, suffering the economic pains of population shrinkage, are now seeking non-Europeans.

A 10th of all British workers come from outside Europe. All these workers, and their families, will become Europeans, with the right to work in any European Union country, including France. Politicians can deal with falling birth rates, aging populations and pension crises in two ways: By lowering the standard of living and raising taxes, or by bringing in immigrants. What do you think most will choose?

Canada is structured a lot like Europe. Immigration is not clearly a national matter. If the federal government tried to shut the doors, do you think Alberta would allow it? No, Alberta would do what Quebec has done and create its own immigration program.

I recently heard Steve Snyder, the chief executive officer of energy giant TransAlta Corp., make the case: "We don't lack jobs in Canada, we lack people. We've got 30-year civil servants who've spent their whole lives saying, 'How do I create a job?' And now they should be asking, 'How do I create a skilled worker?' - and, quite frankly, an unskilled worker.  "Because one of the big problems we've got is that we can't get unskilled workers - you can't get someone to give you a hamburger." Alberta's industries want 400,000 unskilled workers, pronto. Do we really think they won't get them?

The myth of the filter: The phrase "Canadian-style points system" has become something of a mantra among European politicians lately. Are immigrants unpopular? Well, then allow only high-quality immigrants, who fulfill certain standards of education, fluency, professional qualification, skill or wealth.

Britain is introducing a points system modelled on Canada's on Jan. 1, and France will soon have its own. (In neither case will the restrictions apply to the 450 million citizens of the EU.) There are good reasons to have an active immigration policy that goes out and finds people. But the idea of a filter is completely misleading, in two ways.

First is the problem, noted by Mr. Snyder above, that a booming economy doesn't just need skilled workers: It needs quite a lot of unskilled workers. Second, when you carefully select an immigrant worker, you are also bringing in her family. Family reunification is the largest category of immigration in the world. It can't be filtered - or prevented.

About 40 per cent of Canada's immigrants are "family-class." And we have one of the world's lower percentages. For the past 30 years, nearly all the official immigration to Germany and France has been of the family-reunification variety, hundreds of thousands of people a year. France is trying to restrict family-reunification, through mandatory DNA tests on applicants and other harsh policies. But it won't have a major effect.

The idea that you can allow a worker to enter, as if he were a machine part, without allowing his mother or children is pure mythology. The myth of return: So why not bring in "guests" rather than immigrants? Canadian and U.S. leaders now talk about guest-worker programs - people who are borrowed from their home countries, like library books, and then returned.

One thing we do know about immigration is that guest workers do not leave. Well, about half of them do, if they're wealthy.  But we're dealing with humans here - nice ones, we hope - so we should forget the idea of attracting a commodity known as a "worker" who doesn't develop ties, get married, have children and generally act like a human being.

In the 1960s, Germany, with its booming economy, needed hundreds of thousands of workers, so it introduced the world's most carefully controlled guest-worker program. Of the 500,000 Turkish "guest" workers who arrived, 86.6 per cent of them said they wanted to go back to Turkey. About 12 per cent did.  The program ended in 1973, and Germany stopped all immigration, declaring that it was "not an immigrant country." Over the next 30 years, 1.5 million more Turks would enter.  France had a nearly identical experience with north Africans.

Monte Solberg, Canada's minister responsible for immigration, admitted that this is the nature of guest-worker programs: "Maybe ultimately if they're here for a time [on a work visa] and they're doing a good job, we'll permanently land them."  He knows very well that this is certain to happen. The inconvenient thing about immigrants is that they happen to be people.  Canada has a rich history of treating all types of 'people' fairly and we hope this continues.

By: Doug Saunders, globeandmail.com