Immigration Secretary Sean Fraser recently announced Canada’s future immigration target of 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025, a historic record that nothing warrants.
Immigration does not raise our standard of living and has no impact on labor shortages. Immigrants sometimes fill jobs that couldn’t find takers. Except that they consume goods and services that require more labor to produce. So we have to recruit new immigrants, whose presence means greater labor needs, and so on.
On the other hand, this situation gives employers access to cheap labour. This also increases housing prices. The pace of housing construction cannot keep up with the influx of immigrants. There is not enough supply to meet demand and prices are rising.
birth rate
Immigration therefore has positive effects for employers and property owners and negative effects for the poor. But it also affects young couples. The Australian journalist Claire Lehmann investigated this question in the daily newspaper The Australian. Her text, published last April, entitled No home, no kids, and nothing left to lose, discusses studies in Britain and the United States that show rising house prices would lead to a fall in the birth rate.
A decades-long Australian study is also cited. This country has received many immigrants in recent years and real estate prices have skyrocketed. The birth rate fell from 1.95 to 1.58 children per woman between 2010 and 2020. During this period, the researchers interviewed the same men and women in their 30s through their 40s. At that point, more than half said they hadn’t had as many children as they wanted.
Surveys show that too many couples here are not having as many children as they would like. This represents a personal misfortune for them. With a birth rate of 1.6 in Quebec, this situation is also a collective problem. The generation replacement rate is 2.1, and a higher birth rate is the best way to rejuvenate our population.
Disappear
Even if it wanted to use its powers in this area to lower immigration thresholds, which it doesn’t, the CAQ government would not be able to do that. Ottawa illegally smuggles tens of thousands of migrants through Roxham. Federal authorities are also increasing permits for temporary workers and students unless they are French speakers; in this case, they are systematically rejected because their presence in Quebec would help strengthen our language. These temporary workers often stay with us. In fact, Quebec chooses less than 10% of its immigrants.
The real reason Trudeau is welcoming so many migrants is that he wants to make Canada a so-called post-national country. Indeed, the immigrants eventually assimilated massively into the growing Anglo-Canadian nation. Drowned in a growing mass of English Canadians, the nation of Quebec will eventually disappear.
