The Economic Argument Against Mass Immigration to Canada

Not long ago a nation was said to be experiencing economic prosperity when per capita income was rising together with increases in population. This was the "Western" conception of economic well being. But as our Western elites became obsessed with the promotion of race mixing through immigration, economists have come to downplay the importance of per capita income growth while singularly identifying prosperity with increases in population size and in the gross domestic product. 

The only economic justification Century Initiative (CI) makes in favor of a massive increase in immigration numbers to Canada is that a bigger population means a bigger market for goods, more real estate, more highways, and more shopping malls, all of which they equate with prosperity, without considering how sustained increases in the supply of labour may freeze or lower real wages and per capita incomes. 

Century Initiative claims that a Canada with 100 million inhabitants created through a massive increase in immigration will be a prosperous "model" to the world. The sole article CI relies upon to make this claim, Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant (New York Times, March 2015), is intrinsically flawed not only because it is not about Canada's economy but because it equates economic well being with increases in the gross amount of goods and services produced. China, India, and Brazil are ranked higher than Canada in terms of their gross domestic product; Norway, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are even lower than Mexico and Indonesia. Yet, all these (still) White nations have far higher per capita incomes, higher levels of education, cleanliness, and civilized state of existence. 

The author, Adam Davidson, opens this article condemning his "racist and homophobic" grandfather for believing in the "illogical" idea that "immigrants were stealing jobs from Americans." In the "model nation" our elites will make out of all Western nations through immigration, indigenous Whites will be expected to turn against family members who don't agree that aliens are harbingers of prosperity. 

While Americans may not be as racist today, Davidson can't understand why "most anti-immigration arguments" are still variations of 

the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else.

Immigrants don't cheapen labor, claims Davidson. Immigrants only bring economic benefits and no costs because they increase demand for a whole range of goods: 

using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy.

This passage contains in a nutshell the economic argument for immigration. The "economic benefits of immigration may be the ­most settled fact in economics," writes Davidson. Polls of leading economists, he says, show that everyone agrees with this argument. George Borjas of Harvard is the only exception with his observation that low-skilled native workers don't benefit from the importation of cheaper labour. But Davidson adds that Borjas's argument, which was about short term costs, has been misused by "anti-immigration activists." He wants us to believe that the United States, which has been welcoming in recent years about 1.2 or 1.3 million legal immigrants annually, would become far wealthier if 11 million immigrants per year (!) were brought in. 

It cannot be denied that in our cultural Marxist age the overwhelming majority of economists now think that immigration is good for the economy. But don't be fooled by the claim that this is an idea established by the discipline of economics; rather, this is an idea propagated by Western economists. In the non-Western world there are no economists arguing for the benefits of mass immigration to their homelands. 

Read the rest of Richardo Duchesne’s article here.