A slightly off-center perspective on monetary problems.
I don’t see why we are spending so much effort trying to sabotage the Chinese economy. (Xi’s already doing that for us.) Why not just try to make America great again?
PS. Check out the recent trends in Canadian immigration (from Brandon Donnelly’s blog):
Tags:
This entry was posted on January 04th, 2024
and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.
10 Responses to “Making Canada great for the very first time”
Leave a Reply
4. January 2024 at 17:37
I wish the US would auction off at least some of these slots. That would let people see how valuable the workers really are to the company, and also demonstrate that US citizens do benefit from the immigration.
4. January 2024 at 18:15
As I pointed out in the MR comments several weeks ago, the Canadian Q3 immigration numbers are misleading. The spike is mostly International Students coming through a loophole that is being closed for 2024.
4. January 2024 at 18:21
RAD, Yes, I know that. But Canadian immigration is rising sharply even if you don’t include that group. On a per capita basis it’s several times larger than for the US.
4. January 2024 at 19:04
Scott, I’m mostly nitpicking about the “sharp rise” part. The official yearly targets for permanent residents, the better measure IMO, are increasing incrementally until they reach 500K in 2025. They also announced the 2026 target will be frozen at 500K because of the housing crisis.
The spike in 2022 was partly the pandemic backlog and partly this International Student issue. This year’s spike caught Canadians by surprise. To be clear, I support even higher immigration numbers but I’m pretty sure that this accidental spike will undermine this hope.
Per capita growth when also considering fertility is still too low, IMO. Canada is far too small population wise. The anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and elsewhere is shocking.
4. January 2024 at 23:41
Check out Canadian house prices.
4. January 2024 at 23:45
Check out Canadian house prices.
$1,285,414
Average Home Prices in Vancouver
The average home price in Greater Vancouver has reached $1,285,414, reflecting a 7.2% annual increase and a 1.1% monthly decrease. The breakdown of average sale prices for different housing types in November 2023 is as follows: Detached Homes: $2,123,678 (7.2% YoY increase, -5% MoM)
oh, $2.1 million for a detached home. Big success story…for who?
5. January 2024 at 00:56
The H1B numbers are somewhat misleading. There has been a rise in applicants in recent years but not as sharp as the graph makes it look, because there has also been a rise in number of applications per applicant. It is technically allowed for a single person to have multiple H1B applications filed on their behalf, a fact that has been abused by many petitioners who use sham consultancies to file multiple applications for them. Technically the petitions have to all be legitimate and so this is fraud but in practice USCIS has not been able to investigate them all.
Some numbers: the number of applicants who only submitted one application rose from 211K in FY2022 to 350K in FY2024 (the most recent year). 66% over two years is still a lot of course. Earlier I read some figures on the change in avg applications per applicant but I can’t find them now.
This is a relatively recent problem, because a few years ago USCIS slashed the cost of filing a H1B petition to $10 and I think they also made it easier to do so procedurally. This created a market for consultancies (often in India for example) advertising to people who want to move to the USA, ‘pay us $100 and we’ll file a H1B petition for you!’.
There is a proposed rule change to allow only one application per person, tied to passport numbers, but I’m not sure if this will take effect before the next lottery.
5. January 2024 at 01:07
Russia has more land, fewer people, and it has no problem filling high-skilled jobs. The economy has low debt, stable growth, and people live very well. Nominal salaries are not that high, but purchasing power is higher because prices are low. There are christmas lights, trees, bells, caroling, lots of smiles and pleasant greetings.
How did they go from the old soviet union, the gangster of the east, the thug of the century, to a beautiful republic in thirty years? How did they go from immense poverty to abundance?
Did such a transformation require open borders?
Of course, not. They simply used capatialism as their mode of production, and reduced regulation.
Sumner’s busybodies always freak out whenever a country has a decrease in population; these weirdos beg Japan to import millions of whites, Chinese, hispanics and blacks, which will destroy their culture.
But countries like Japan don’t need immigrants; they don’t need to destroy their cultural cohesion, harmony and low crime rates, because they know that real growth comes from innovation in technology which increases the output for each unit of input. There is a fallacy in the Sumner bubble, which thinks the Japanese and the Russians, and other countries with decreasing populations will somehow not have enough labor to work the machines, and this will decrease growth and prosperity. It’s a dumb argument, because innovation will solve that problem. For example, we don’t need people to stock shelves anymore, because robots can do that. If there is one thing a nation doesn’t need by 2030, it’s a surplus of low skilled labor. Particularly, unskilled buffoons who subscribe to the communist utopia. It’s not a strength; it’s a weakness.
Population growth is only necessary to prop up social security and other government ponzi schemes.
Instead of recruiting foreigners to fill ‘high skilled vacancies’, which will be replaced by AI in two or three years, why not focus on training and educating our own people to fill those vacancies?
We have 350M. It’s more than enough.
5. January 2024 at 09:31
RAD, Agree with all that, but at least Canada will begin closing the big gap with America. It would not surprise me if Canada eventually became the world’s #3 tech powerhouse (behind the US and China, but ahead of Japan.)
Solon, Yup, they need more YIMBYs. But I’d rather have Orange County house prices and Detroit house prices.
Ten years ago, commenters told me that Canada housing was a bubble about to pop. So stupid!
Exister, Thanks for that info. The 85,000 H1-B cap is just ridiculously low for a country this large. We take in almost a million immigrants a year.
Sara, LOL, how much is Putin paying you? Does he know you are criticizing Stalin? That would make him very angry.
6. January 2024 at 21:44
Replying to Sara is usually not worth it. But this time: Russia is desperately courting migrants from eg Central Asia.
> Immigration plays an important role in modern Russian demographic processes, accounting for the increase in the population from 2011.
Says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia