Have you guys actually thought about this?
You mean the people who are responsible for making the decisions? I doubt it. It's got the status of orthodoxy here, so it's really not questioned.
It's conventional wisdom that the fact that the birthrate is below replacement level spells doom for the economy. I'm not sure about that -- if for no other reason than conventional wisdom is usually wrong.
The feds are responsible for immigration, but it's the lower levels of government, the provinces and municipalities, that are responsible for providing services like ESL. The Liberals like immigration because immigrants tend to be Liberal supporters. The "beauty" of the present system is that they don't even have to pay for it.
Your point about how quickly we can integrate people is right on. A hundred years ago we were taking proportionately more people, in an effort to settle the prairies. The difference then was that they went to their homesteads and worked the behinds off and sent their kids to school in English. Now they settle in cities, and there are cases where the immigrant communities have attained critical mass, so that members can avoid interaction with the broader society if they choose. E.g. in Richmond, B.C., where you don't need English at all in your daily life, you can get by in Cantonese. At some point, if you want to retain the characteristics of the society that attracted the immigrants in the first place, you have to pass them along in a process of integration. At 1%, that's probably not possible.
There was a suggestion on the thread that we can control immigration, that the mix of people from relatively more similar cultures, like western Europe, can be tweaked. All I can say is that if that were actually proposed as public policy, there wouldn't be enough firewood in Canada for the number of people who would want to burn the proponent at the stake. |
