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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
If you think about other hypothetical scenarios like, an area that was predominantly White sees an increasing number of Black or Indigenous people moving in. So a longer term resident objects saying that they want to conserve the look or culture of the place - not because they're racist or anything, but they don't want the area to change. "I just don't like going to the grocery store and seeing all these people who look and sound different than before". The main focus should be on how healthy our objection should be?
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Well, I think your scenario will tend to raise more alarm bells in people, but it's different in important ways. Canadians are allowed to move where they want, whereas immigration (new or renewed visas) is a live policy decision that should have democratic buy-in. There's also much less of a plausible language or culture gap there, even though there might be some cultural differences, and these are small minorities, not major cultures that utterly dwarf Canada and could produce influxes of millions per year.
I also don't think it is or should be about "race" per se. The issue is more about supportable rates of immigration, not number of people of some race. Historic minority groups like African NSians or Chinese who have been in Vancouver for generations are not immigrants.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
But that can still be discussed in terms of general growth policy and targets. Countries have trouble handling too high a rate of natural reproduction too. In fact, China famously instituted the "one child policy" for many years for that very reason. So it's too much growth that's the issue, not immigration specifically. And honestly, not singling out immigration makes the issue easier to discuss rather than harder because then you're not pulling in a lot of people who are biased against anti-immigrants in general so you're able to focus on actual substantive discussions on growth policy.
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It can be the issue but there can be other bottlenecks and it's not the same even for housing, etc. When parents have a baby for example the baby usually lives with the parents, but when immigrants come they tend to form new households immediately. There is also the capacity to absorb immigration and it depends on factors like skills match between the immigrant and the economy. Then yes there are cultural integration aspects (like capacity to learn English and navigate society) which we have historically not worried about because Canada tended to handle this well. But it's not guaranteed to work out.
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