Thursday, October 24, 2024

the canadian government announced a 20% drop in immigration. sounds substantive.

is it enough?

well, that means going from 500,000 to 400,000. that is legal, official immigration; it is a cut of 100,000 legal new immigrants, officially.

i hope they don't just come anyways, or sign up as a temporary workers or foreign students. those numbers are not included in that number of 500,000.

canada is a big country geographically but has a dense population around the american border of around 40 million people. that would have been about a 1.5% increase in population, and is being instead reduced to about a 1.25% increase.

so, it amounts to a 0.25% decrease in projected immigration growth.

we need immigration reform in canada, there's no question, but the immediate issue in front of us is building enough housing, not making political decisions about immigration targets that are functionally trivial and will have next to no actual impact on anybody. the over-population issues we're dealing with took 20 years to build and cannot and will not be solved with minor tweaks over night. we need a major government-directed public works building project using public sector workers, land seizures via eminent domain, etc.