More Refugees - Fewer Skilled Migrants - Sandra Kanck, SPA National President

So Sandra Kanck thinks cutting the intake of skilled migrants in favour of more refugees is the humanitarian course. She should take a look at research done on the impact of the immigration selection process for Canada and the United States. Professor Herbert Grubel in his seminal study of immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and 2002 came to the very same conclusion that Ed Rubenstein and Robert Rector did concerning the United States. Unskilled immigrants, who comprise 80% of all those who come to Canada, including the relatives of "professionals", impose a fiscal burden that was $18.3 billion a year by 2002, but now is probably close to $30 billion. They simply cannot earn enough income to reimburse the state for the services they consume. In fact, to break even, the government needs to have a taxpayer earn $25,000 annually. McJobs will not pay for our health care system, our children's education or our pension outlays. This deficit represents a huge opportunity cost, not only to Canadians who need those dollars for social services but to the investment needed to boost productivity. A Canada with higher productivity and a sustainable population would be better able to assist the world's poor, and poverty and overshoot are the root causes of the conflicts that drive people to flee their homelands. The Australian Conservation Foundation took the same position regarding Australia in recent years. The money deployed in providing services to unskilled immigrants is money that could also be spent in dispensing foreign aid made conditional on family planning. This money could reduce the 'push' factors that encourage migration in the first place, and would benefit the great majority of people who do not win the lottery of landing in North America. It is more cost effective to provide relief to people where they live rather than import their poverty to countries of high consumption and crippling welfare commitments. The money thrown at unskilled migrants in Canada could match the total sum spent by foreign governments in third world family planning programs, and benefit far more people than the 4 million foreign born Canadians who lack marketable skills. None of this, however, is an argument for recruiting skilled migrants. There is no reason that native born citizens could not satisfy the demands of the job market. In Canada, young Aboriginals are crying out for vocational training and are not getting it, while multinationals are able to hire foreign workers a mere stone's throw from native reservations that suffer an unemployment rate of 75-80%. Without the needed education, and a Canadians-First hiring policy, they are a generation without hope and most end their days as refugees in the cities. Ironic that. So many bleeding hearts worrying about global refugees when we are making refugees out of our own citizens. And still, so many environmentalists are willing to open the flood gates even further. Don't refugees have an ecological footprint? Funny how Dr. William Rees never mentioned that in his book. I suppose that he is so interested in reducing personal footprints that he is oblivious to the number of "feet'. We have no moral obligation to capsize our own lifeboat by taking on more passengers, skilled, unskilled, white, brown, English or non-English speaking. Closing our borders would be the best gift we could give to both ourselves and the world. Tim