Canadians: Mass Migration Makes Homes Unaffordable

Mass migration into Canada is inflating the cost of housing so rapidly that top leaders are calling for a slowdown.

 “We’ve exceeded our capacity to welcome,” said Francois Legault, the Premier of the Quebec region in northeast Canada. “We have problems with housing, places in schools, staff in hospitals,” he told reporters on February 15.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying to maximize international migration into Canadian society. In 2023, for example, he is trying to import at least 465,000 additional migrants into a nation that had only 368,792 births in the 12 months up to June 2022.

The Montreal Gazette reported on February 15:

Premier François Legault called on Trudeau on Wednesday to discourage the migrants who have been using Roxham Road from coming to Canada. He told reporters in Quebec City he thinks many people are claiming asylum in Canada because of a 2017 Trudeau tweet saying the country would welcome people fleeing persecution.

“It’s about time that Justin Trudeau makes a new tweet to say, ‘Don’t come anymore,’ because we’ve exceeded our welcoming capacity,” he said. He added that Quebec faces a shortage of housing and its schools and hospitals cannot handle the newcomers.

“Apartments have become extremely hard to find, with the vacancy rate on rental buildings now below 2% — the lowest since 2001,” Bloomberg reported on February 15.

Even business interests are worried that Trudeau’s immigration policy is politically reckless.

Migrants “want to establish a life here, [and] they need a roof over their heads,” said Victor Dodig, the CEO of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. His bank profits from the influx by lending money to construction firms, home buyers, and business investors, but he warned on February 14:

We need to get that policy right and not wave the flag saying, isn’t it great that everyone wants to come to Canada. The whole ecosystem has to work. If they can’t get a house, if they can’t get a doctor, if they are struggling to get a job, that’s not so good.

Canada’s painful experience is a warning light for Americans — partly because President Joe Biden’s border chief has repeatedly declared he wants to copy Canada’s high-migration, low-wage economy plans.

Some U.S. politicians are spotlighting immigration’s impact on Americans’ housing. On February 9, for example, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said:

in the context of housing, illegal immigration means theft of the American dream of housing when you have 25 million people who shouldn’t be here by law competing with American citizens to buy their first home, to rent a home, and that is a major problem that we should be talking more about in the context of the immigration crisis.

Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs

Quebec’s housing problem has also been worsened by President Joe Biden’s migration, which allows many global migrants to travel through New York up to the Canadian border. Almost 40,000 international migrants entered Quebec from the United States in 2022, nearly all through the Roxham Road border crossing.

The artificial rush of immigrants is stimulating the economy so helping to spike housing prices, inflation, and interest rates. This combination is also slowing down the production of new homes, according to TradingEconomics.com:

Housing starts in Canada declined 13% over a month earlier to 215,365 units in January of 2023, below market expectations of 240,000, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CHMC). The SAAR of total urban starts declined 16%, with 191,491 units recorded in January. Multi-unit urban starts declined 20% to 146,267 units, while single-detached urban starts increased 3% to 45,224 units.

Canada’s CTVNews reported in January 2022:

More than 80 percent of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 28 – also known as Generation Z – worry they will not be able to afford a home in their city of choice thanks to soaring real-estate prices and increasing cost of living, according to a recent survey conducted by Sotheby’s International Realty.

Half have already given up on the dream of owning a single-family home.

However, Biden’s border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — wants to extend Canada’s high-immigration economy throughout the United States.

On December 13, for example, Mayorkas told ElPasoMatters.org:

Our immigration system as a whole is broken. It hasn’t been updated or reformed in more than 40 years. We look to our partner to the north that has a much more nimble immigration system that can be retooled to the needs at the moment. For example, Canada is in need of 1 million workers and they have agreed that in 2023, they will admit 1.4 million … immigrants to fill that labor need that Canadians themselves cannot. We are stuck in antiquated laws that do not meet our current needs. And they haven’t been working for many, many years.

The federal government has long operated an unpopular economic policy of Extraction Migration. This colonialism-like policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries and uses the imported workers, renters, and consumers to grow Wall Street and the economy.

The migrant inflow has successfully forced down Americans’ wages and also boosted rents and housing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, and also contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.

The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because it allows elites to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.

A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to an August 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.