Which Immigrants We Choose Matters To Young Canadians, And Seniors Too

The current debate over immigration focuses on international students and temporary workers – but who we choose to let in for the long term matters as well.

Economists such as Mikal Skuterud argue that raising GDP per capita should be the priority of Canada’s immigration policy, and we should only let in highly skilled immigrants to achieve this. He also argues that high immigration lowers GDP per capita, in part because there is less capital per worker.

But with an aging population and low birthrate, and a need for better alignment of skills with demand, bringing in only highly skilled immigrants is problematic. First, it means more job competition for highly skilled Canadians (whether born here, brought here with their parents, or recently immigrated) leading to higher unemployment, and particularly underemployment for skilled youth with student loans.

Prioritizing high skill immigration also means a shortage of people for crappy low skill, low wage jobs – the jobs Canadians generally do not want to do, and which parents and grandparents of Canadian youth do not want to see their kids doing. Setting aside seasonal jobs, such as in agriculture, these low skill positions are mostly manual labour jobs in sectors like cleaning, home renovations, landscaping, restaurants and services, childcare – and most importantly for seniors, caregivers for people not fully able to look after themselves.

The US has no shortage of unskilled, low wage labour because of the presence of 14 million illegal immigrants, 2.5 million asylum seekers, and a legal immigration that is oriented towards family sponsorship (the US does not have a points-based immigration system like we do).

If Canada does not bring in some low skilled cheap labour, seniors will have a problem finding caregivers, people to clean, people to house paint or do minor repairs, people to mow the lawn or do landscaping, and so on. With a shortage of such labour, the costs per hour will be higher, and there will be greater difficulty in getting the work done.

You may recall as well that, during the pandemic, most of the workers in nursing homes and retirement communities immigrant women.

Letting in low skilled immigrants in modest numbers lowers the cost of living for seniors and people in the middle class, including parents who need childcare.

It is fundamentally a win-win proposition. Canadians avoid having to work in low wage, low skill jobs and have more opportunities to get jobs in areas where employers pay more and where their education will be fully used. Low-education and low-skill immigrants win as well, because they are happy to be allowed into Canada and do work at higher pay rates than the poor country they left, while experiencing a higher standard of living in general. Further, these immigrants know their kids will have a Canadian education and a Canadian standard of living.

My mother passed away in 2016 at the age of 92, and I experienced caring for her and seeing her needs in her final years. She had three adult children to help her. Because of Canada’s declining birth rate, which has fallen since 1965, in the future seniors will be more dependent on the government and the private sector for care and help, a factor which we should think about when setting policy – including immigration policy.

The ”Canadian Dream”, like the American Dream, has historically been upward mobility, namely that each generation will do at least as well as their parents.

We are now seeing Baby Boomers being blamed for the problems youth are having today. Certainly, this ignores the bad times we Boomers had after the 1973 OPEC crisis with 1970s stagflation, the 1981 economic crisis, and persistent high unemployment in the 1990s. I contend that the current problems experienced in Canada – a housing crisis, declining GDP per capita, and lack of opportunities for youth – are mainly due to the high immigration policies since 2015 (with the influence of the Century Initiative), or even going back to Mulroney’s immigration policy in the early 1990s.

Canada needs to lower immigration to a far greater degree than outlined in the Carney government’s latest Immigration Levels Plan, and public opinion supports this.

However, a policy of only bringing in highly skilled labour would actually hurt highly educated Canadian youth, as well as increase the cost of living for Canadian seniors and hamper their ability to stay in their homes, get the care they need, and stay out of nursing homes longer.