Polls show that Canadians have sharply reversed their pro-migration views as their housing costs are deliberately spiked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s elite-backed policy of maximizing immigration.
“About 2 in 3 Canadians believe an increase in the annual target of [legal] immigrants as permanent residents will have a negative or somewhat negative impact on the cost of housing, while one in five believe it will have a positive or somewhat impact,” said an August poll of 1,081 Canadians by Nanos Research Group for an August 8 article by Bloomberg News.
The poll summary reported 68 percent opposition and 20 percent support:
A majority of Canadians believe increasing the annual target of [legal] immigrants as permanent residents from 465,000 in 2023 to 500,000 by 2025 would have a negative (42%) or somewhat negative (26%) impact on the cost of housing. One in five believe it will have a positive (8%) or somewhat positive impact (12%), while seven per cent say it will have no impact.
The 20 percent support is sharply down from 52 percent support in February 2023, Bloomberg reported.
The huge legal inflow of new consumers, renters, and workers has expanded the economy, so generating more taxes for Canada’s government.
But Trudeau’s massive legal inflow has spiked housing prices, forced down wages, crowded schools, and caused large backlogs in the nation’s supposedly free healthcare system. One result is a dramatic rise of homelessness in once-prosperous Canada:
Trudeau’s inflow has also shifted much of Canada’s wealth to the stock market and to real estate investors.
“You can create this mirage of economic prosperity [by importing migrants], but in the end that’s what it is, a mirage,” David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Rosenberg Research, told Reuters. “The Canadian economy on a per-capita basis is flat on its back,” he said.
Biden’s elite-backed, easy migration policy has had similar wealth-shifting damage in the United States as millions of legal, illegal, quasi-legal, and temporary migrants flood into U.S. housing, workplaces, schools, and retail stories. So U.S. public opposition to migration is also growing as federal migration policy deliberately forces down Americans’ wages and pushes up their housing prices.
Pro-migration policies have also spurred real-estate bubbles in California, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and many other locations.
Trudeau’s radical pro-migration policy will continue, Trudeau’s immigration minister said, according to an August 3 report in Bloomberg:
“I don’t see a world in which we lower it, the need is too great,” said [Marc] Miller, who’s expected to announce new targets on Nov. 1. “Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at. But certainly I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.”
But the wealth-shifting policy is fuelling public opposition to migration.
A second pollster told Bloomberg that Canada’s radical policy is shifting public opinion:
A recent survey by Ottawa-based Abacus Data showed 61% of respondents believed Canada’s immigration target is too high, and 63% of them said the number of immigrants coming to the country was having a negative impact on housing.“What’s driving this is really rational concerns, not xenophobia,” said David Coletto, Abacus Data’s chief executive officer. “From many people’s perspective, the growth that Canada experienced hasn’t been matched with an increase in infrastructure. It’s putting a strain on public opinion toward immigration more broadly. We’d be foolish to assume that Canada’s immune to the same forces that have affected other countries.”
A third poll, published in July, showed that “39% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a political party that promised to reduce immigration numbers … compared with 24% who said they’d be less likely to do so and 30% who said it’d have no impact,” Bloomberg added.
The massive Canadian wealth shift is backed by Canada’s establishment, Diane Francis, a Canadian economic journalist, wrote in FinancialPost.com:
Between 2016 and 2021, the Trudeau government admitted a record of over 1.3 million permanent immigrants into the country [of 36 million people] …
This push to significantly increase the population was concocted at a weekend gathering in 2011 in Muskoka, Ont., led by Dominic Barton, who served as global managing director of McKinsey and Co. before becoming Canada’s ambassador to China for a time, and former BlackRock Inc. honcho Mark Wiseman. They created a Toronto-based lobbying group called the Century Initiative, which believes Canada’s population should reach 100 million by 2100.
The economic harm to Canadians is “all going according to plan,” said an August 4 report by Michael Cuenco at Unherd.com:
…how did policymakers in [Canada] figure it would be a good idea to welcome 1.5 million new residents by 2025? A big part of the answer is that it’s all going according to plan. For the main overriding (if unsayable) goal of Canadian policymaking across all levels of government is to do everything possible to boost real estate values and rental prices rapidly and radically for the benefit of established homeowners and investors — and to the detriment of everyone else.
The predictable result is a massive shift of wealth from young Canadians to older, Boomer-era Canadians, said Cuenco:
This cleavage, a primarily economic rather than a cultural or identitarian one, pits older home-owning Canadians from the Boomer and Gen X cohorts against struggling Millennials and Gen Zs; landlords against renters; long-settled immigrants against those fresh-off-the-boat: in other words, the insiders against the outsiders.
The growth in the economy has predictably lowered Canada’s per-capita income, noted economists. “We’ve already seen a drop in our [economic] growth rates on a per-capita GDP basis,” Francis told Breitbart News. “We’re the lowest in the OECD now — it is all self-inflicted.”
She continued:
Taking enormous numbers into a welfare state like Canada is ruinous … It is taking people six months to see a doctor now. Tthat wasn’t the case before COVID a few years ago.
However, Trudeau’s high-immigration policy is also backed by Canada’s right-wing or conservative party, said Cuenco: “The bad news for Canadians is that the alternative, the Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre … [who] is a card-carrying member of the investor-rentier oligarchy ”
Extraction Migration
The U.S. 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, reduces beneficial trade, 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 contributed to the rising death rate of poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow also reduces the political clout of native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves from the needs and interests of ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
Migration — and especially, labor migration — is unpopular among swing voters. 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.