Juno News - May 24, 2020


Is immigration the only solution for economic recovery？


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

147.97896

Word count

853

Sentence count

5

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss why immigration is not the answer to Canada's economic woes, and why we should focus on other economic and social issues rather than immigration as a means to solve our economic problems. I discuss the economic benefits of immigration, and argue that immigration is neither good nor bad for the economy as assessed by its impact on the living standards of current citizens.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 our parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux was originally estimating that Canada would face 252
00:00:12.120 billion dollars in federal debt because of the coronavirus pandemic but he recently admitted
00:00:17.580 this estimate of 252 billion was too optimistic and that in all likelihood our federal deficit
00:00:24.840 will be 1 trillion dollars or more and meanwhile because of the coronavirus shutdown measures
00:00:30.720 Canada's unemployment rate has risen to 13% for comparison it was 5.5% in January of this year
00:00:38.820 and in April alone we lost 2 million jobs this has many questioning how are we going to get on the road
00:00:46.500 to economic recovery well immigration minister Marco Mendicino hinted at an answer earlier this
00:00:53.520 month Mendicino said immigration will absolutely be key to our success and our economic recovery we
00:01:01.380 continue to rely on immigration it will be an economic driver and this will be the north star 0.99
00:01:07.080 of our policy going forward now if you ask me it's gonna be hard to convince Canadians who
00:01:12.840 are facing an unemployment crisis that we should be pleased about resuming the plan to welcome 1 1.00
00:01:18.660 million new immigrants in the next three years so it's my prediction that we're going to be 0.99
00:01:23.220 facing heavy government messaging trying to convince us of the economic virtues of
00:01:28.740 immigration and I think we need to have an understanding of the facts minister Mendicino and the minister who
00:01:35.700 came before him Ahmed Hussein as well as other immigration enthusiasts often cite Canada's aging population
00:01:43.140 as the reason why Canada needs higher immigration levels so for Canada's population to replace itself
00:01:49.780 every woman would need to have an average of 2.1 children and this figure currently sits at 1.54 1.00
00:01:57.780 Canadians are having fewer children for a variety of economic and social reasons but this has made people
00:02:04.180 concerned that we're not going to have enough workers and thus taxpayers to fund our social programs down the road
00:02:11.780 many are proclaiming immigration is the only answer and minister Mendicino said just as much in March when
00:02:19.540 he said immigration is the only solution Mendicino's predecessor Ahmed Hussein echoed this sentiment when
00:02:27.140 he said why do we need immigration well five million Canadians are set to retire by 2035 and we have fewer
00:02:35.380 people working to support seniors and retirees however a policy piece authored by three economists concluded
00:02:43.460 immigration is not a solution to demographic problems such as population aging and what a large body of
00:02:50.820 evidence indicates is that immigration is neither good nor bad for the economy as assessed by its impact on
00:02:58.420 the living standards of current citizens so you can you can say well immigration results in higher gdp 1.00
00:03:05.300 for the country but that doesn't mean per capita gdp is higher that doesn't mean people's individual
00:03:10.180 circumstances are better just because the country's gdp is higher immigration is not a solution to an aging
00:03:16.420 workforce because working age immigrants bring along dependents with them whether that's a non-working spouse
00:03:22.740 who is taking care of children or parents and grandparents who are coming through family reunification
00:03:29.380 programs and those sorts of things so when politicians claim that immigration will remedy Canada's demographic
00:03:36.340 challenges they either have not looked at the research or they're lying the liberal government kind of acts as if
00:03:43.540 bringing over immigrants will instantly repair our economy and help us repay our debt so they kind of 1.00
00:03:49.140 treat them as if they're economic tools but they're going to be disappointed by using this approach
00:03:54.500 because it's very likely with higher immigration we will actually see a higher deficit this is from
00:04:00.660 the policy options piece newly arrived immigrants are a net drag on government budgets they pay less 1.00
00:04:07.780 in taxes on average and make average or slightly above average use of government services and benefits
00:04:13.220 second generation immigrants do well however which may offset this net drag to some extent
00:04:19.140 but the initial impact of a large increase in immigration should be expected to be
00:04:23.940 an increase in taxes a decrease in services an increase in deficits or some combination of the three
00:04:30.580 and when we're discussing immigration a lot of people bring up how
00:04:34.340 well a higher labor supply means that wages are depressed because now the market is flooded
00:04:40.340 however more canadian research is needed on that topic so if you have any resources feel free to drop them in the comment section
00:04:47.780 but one paper that's actually a phd dissertation found that for every 10 percent increase in new
00:04:54.660 immigrants in canada the wages of previous immigrants decrease by 2.6 percent so this means that an influx of
00:05:03.300 immigration does affect wages but it affects the wages not of the native-born population but of previous
00:05:11.540 established immigrants who came here 10 years ago or or prior if politicians wish to promote
00:05:19.220 immigration based on social factors that's a totally different story but when it comes to the
00:05:23.940 economics their claims that immigration is going to cure all of our financial woes simply do not hold
00:05:31.220 water i'm lindsay shepard with true north thanks so much for watching and i'll see you next time