The table below compares immigration to Canadian cities over 19 years to the real unemployment and the resultant immigrants that were actually needed and absorbed into employment. The data is for the 19 years to 2005. The real unemployment is the standard is 76% adult participation which has been reached by all cities with good employment. I allow a 3% baseline unemployment as full employment, that is an additional 3% of the urban population as absorbed immigrants in good cases.

…...........,,………………………Official………………Real……...............Immigrants….Immigrants
…………,,,......,,,,,,……………Unemployment……Unemployment……………….........absorbed
……………,,,,.....,.............,,,……………………………………………......…………………………into
………………,,,..................,,,,,……………………………………………......………………….employment

Montreal……......................8.7%.......................19.1% ……….12.65%............nil%
Toronto……........................7.0%........................15.1%.............25.37%………13.37%
Vancouver….......................5.7%.......................16.7%.............21.95%………..8.25%

Ottawa-Gatineau...................6.6%.......................12.8%………..12.72%............2.92%
Oshawa……........................6.4%.......................12.9%………..3.86%...............nil%
Hamilton……......................5.5%.......................17.2%………..8.8%.................nil%
St. Catherines.......................7.0%.......................22.2%………..5.24%...............nil%
London……………………................6.6%.......................14.5%………..9.9%.................nil%
Windsor……..........................7.9%.......................20.8%………..13.28%............nil%
Kitchener……........................5.7%.......................9.9%…………11.62%............4.72%
Sudbury……………………...............7.7%.......................24.1%……….1.69%.............nil%
Thunder Bay……………….............7.0%.......................19.2%………..3.05%.............nil%

Winnipeg……......................4.8%.......................13.3%………..8.82%.............nil%
Regina……….......................4.9%.......................10.9%………..5.2%...............nil%
Saskatoon……......................5.0%.......................11.2%………..5.2%...............nil%
Calgary………......................3.9%.......................6.8%…………11.36%..........7.56%
Edmonton……......................4.5%.......................11.7%………..7.93%............nil%
Victoria…………………….................4.4%.......................16.6%………..5.36.%...........nil%

St. John’s.…………………..............8.9%.......................21.1%………..2.7.%..............nil%
Halifax…………………..............…..5.8%.......................13.7%………..6.35%..............nil%
St. John…………………….............7.1%.......................21.1%………..1.63%.............nil%
Saquenay…………………..............…9.9%.......................28.9%………..2.54%............nil%
Quebec…………………….............5.6%.......................16.1%………...4.06%............nil%
Trois-Rivieres……………….......8.8%.......................22.6%………..1.72%.............nil%
Sherbrooke………………............….7.3%.......................20.3%………..8.09%............nil%

Over 19 years there were some 4,060,000 immigrants for which there were jobs available for 1,054,000 (that’d be a corresponding work force of 632,000 ).

Allowing that 15% of immigrants returned home, the immigrant population is similar to the Canadian population demographically so the same proportion will work (60%), and that immigrants earn as much as Canadians a figure for the annual cost to the economy of the unemployment associated with inappropriate immigration accumulated over 19 years is arrived at. It is well known that immigrants do not go on welfare disproportionately rather they work which means some else sits out of employment, so there’s that cost to family income of this employment musical chairs. Some 41% of immigrants were needed for jobs or returned home while 59% of immigrants were absorbed into unemployment. This unemployment is 8.75% of the 2005 jobs. I use the questimate that 10% of the GDP of $1.371 trillion is from income on investments. The cost to family income of the inappropriate immigration is thus 8.75% of $1.371 trillion less 10% for a sum of $108 billion annually circa 2005 (7.88% of the GDP).

…………GDP……………Cost of Unemployment……Federal Budget……….Peak
…………2005…………….due to inappropriate…………2005/06……………Federal
……………………………..immigration 19 years…….(for comparison)……..Deficit
…………………………......to 2005 -- annually………………………………..(1985)

………$1.371 trillion………...$108 billion……………...$175.2 billion……7.9% GDP

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

First, where did you get these stats?

Second, how do you define “Inappropriate Immigration?”

Third, this “Over 19 years there were some 4,060,000 immigrants for which there were jobs available for 1,054,000”—how do you know what and how many jobs are “available” for immigrants? No one makes a calculation like that.

Fourth, by saying “The cost to family income of the inappropriate immigration is thus 8.75% of $1.371 trillion less 10% for a sum of $108 billion annually circa 2005 (7.88% of the GDP)” are you trying to claim that immigration lowers family income? No study I have ever seen shows that (except a long dismissed one put out a few years ago by the fraudulent Fraser Institute).

Fifth, do your figures take into account that working-age immigrants often arrive with children who are too young to work and need to be in school? If not, you better, since that would effectively negate the numerical differences.

I don’t know where you get this from or entirely what it’s supposed to mean. On the surface—and maybe it’s just my own paranoia—this looks like another xenophobic attack on immigrants as the evil pariahs who “steal ‘Canadians’’jobs.”

scapegoating? in fact canadians love the idea we're an immigrant country. this is more of a problem than the scapegoating.

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 28 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

quote:

---

Canada’s failure to recognize the credentials of qualified, skilled and professional foreign-trained immigrants in the workforce is harming the economy and immigrants alike, limiting the contribution and earning potential of immigrants contributes to unacceptable levels of poverty,” said Olivia Chow

---

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

An immigrant family who arrive in Canada are immediately in need of housing, furniture, food, and so on. They make purchases here which would otherwise be made in Finland, Trinidad, or Peijing.

It may be that there is some lack of syncronicity. Canada may recruit workers in January, but by the time they get here, the jobs may have temporarily disappeared due to downturns, etc.

However, experience shows that the economy is cyclical. Therefore, an immigrant may arrive "too late" for one upturn, and "too early" for another. Normally an adjustment occurs within a year or so.

quote:

---

GENEVA (ILO News) - The number of people unemployed worldwide climbed to new heights in 2005, as robust economic growth failed to offset an increase in people seeking work - especially among the vast and growing legion of jobless youth, the International Labour Office (ILO) said in its annual Global Employment Trends (Note 1) released today.

What's more, the ILO report said the weakness of most economies to turn GDP growth into job creation or wage increases, coupled with a spate of natural disasters and rising energy prices, hit the world's working poor especially hard.

The ILO trends report showed that despite 4.3 per cent global GDP growth in 2005, only 14.5 million of the world's more than 500 million extreme working poor were able to rise above the US$1 per day, per person poverty line.

In addition, in 2005, of the more than 2.8 billion workers in the world, 1.4 billion still did not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$2 a day poverty line - just as many as 10 years ago, the ILO said

---

In Toronto in the 1990s they imported 500,000 new immigrants before the local economy recovered to the 1989 levelin 1997. Officially this didn't cause unemployment because people dropped out of the labour force.

Lots of proworker sentiment on this board. Lots of pseudo proworker sentiment actually. Inappropriate immigration causes over supply, lowers wages and creates unemployment and the proworked sentiment disappears.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:

Lots of proworker sentiment on this board. Lots of pseudo proworker sentiment actually. Inappropriate immigration causes over supply, lowers wages and creates unemployment and the proworked sentiment disappears.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

---

So what do we do, Bruce ?. Do we stop the free flow of labour from the democratic capitalist third world into Canada ?. It's not that easy getting into Canada as it is. And yet, we have engineers driving cabs, and other skilled immigrants who are underemployed and performing mind-numbingly repetitive tasks for low wages. We have physicians with internationally-recognized credentials who can't find practicums in our hosptials ... because we don't have enough of those either after years of belt-tightening since successive Conservative and Liberal governments in Ottawa saddled us with massive national debt in the 1980's-90's. And Canada is less economically competitive than ever before.

quote:

---

Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
I spent 3 weeks poking through two Statistics Canada CDs. The Labour Force data and also the Demographic data. The key is the labour force level yo yos wildly, making the official unemployment which relates to the actual level of the labour force meaningless. The other thing is economists ignor this wild variation in the labour force level, making them not so meaningful. I have shown this analysis to rather a lot of people and my data has passed. The consensus is that one problem is there are few funded economists in the country so this analysis has never actual got done.

---

The information I have is the situation is the same world wide. I know that in the EU there is much lower employment than in the United States, something like 10%, but it is not counted as official unemployed. Economists don't deal with this grey area of hidden unemployed, they kowtow to official measures.

I'm not anti-immigrant, just anti-poverty. All the immigrants here are in agreement with that. Lets take care of the immigrants here first.

And thanks for reading my post.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

Statistics Canada reports labour force data monthly and people such as the MPs rely on it but guess what, it’s no the labour force. It drops out hidden unemployment. The labour force survey asks if a person is unemployed and currently looking for work. If you might like to work but are not looking you are not considered unemployed rather you are hidden. Most changes in unemployment levels are actually in the hidden data. Even the changes in hidden unemployment are so large that they completely skew the actual labour force. Statistics Canada ignores this and it may be our most dangerous institution. The difference is semantical.

As an example of how large an oversight this is I worked out the changes to the hidden data over the troubled period of the early 1990s. In all cities hidden workers dominated the employment changes. This is changes in the hidden work force only and does not include structural hidden unemployment.

The data is the worst years for each city.

unemployment increase but hidden……………….ratio of hidden increase
…………and not reported…………………… to official unemployment increase

St. John’s…………………...5.9%......................was all of it
Halifax……………………...4.6%......................was all of it
St. John……………………..6.5% …………….5.4
Saquenay……………………10.6………………..7.1
Quebec………………………6.8…………………2.4
Trois Rivieres………………..5.9…………………was all of it
Sherbrooke…………………..10.6………………..2.9
Montreal……………………..4.5………………….2.4
Ottawa……………………….8.6………………….4.54
Sudbury………………………5.0…………………was all of it
Oshawa……………………….8.0………………….was all of it
Toronto……………………….8.0…………………1.65
Hamilton……………………...10.0………………..was all of it
St. Catherine’s…………………5.9…………………4.9
London………………………..6.9………………….4.9
Windsor……………………….8.6…………………was all of it
Kitchener………………………8.7………………….3.3
Thunder Bay…………………..9.8……………………was all of it
Winnipeg………………………2.8% (only……………1.1
Regina………………………….4.9…………………….. was all of it
Saskatoon………………………3.7………………………2.9
Edmonton………………………4.2……………………was all of it

quote:

---

Originally posted by bruce_the_vii:
Statistics Canada reports labour force data monthly and people such as the MPs rely on it but guess what, it’s no the labour force. It drops out hidden unemployment. The labour force survey asks if a person is unemployed and currently looking for work. If you might like to work but are not looking you are not considered unemployed rather you are hidden. Most changes in unemployment levels are actually in the hidden data. Even the changes in hidden unemployment are so large that they completely skew the actual labour force. Statistics Canada ignores this and it may be our most dangerous institution. The difference is semantical.

---

The jogging around you noted (I'll just take your word for it there) could just be monthly variations in areas with high levels of seasonal emplymemnt (like resource dependent areas) or single imndustry towns going through 'downsizing' or reinvestment from new owners or it could be other factors. Immigration levels don't vary that much month by month or even year by year in Canada, and new imigrants generally tend to settle in larger urban centres which also tend to be doing better economically than smaller rural areas. Weaker performers like Winnipeg by coincidence have lower immigration levels than Vancouver, Montreal or TO, or the inter provincial migration of Calgary. (largely because their economies are more diversified and less dependent on always lower paid resource sectors, most probably, with the notable exception of the energy sector OC)

Immigration may not in every case be immediately benficial to every sector, as that too depends on how official policy goes about integrating them into the economy, what Kind of 'immigration' is favoured at which points (Vancouver tried to attract a more wealthy capitalist class in the nineties, while now theyre looking for more labour) or the general state of neighbouring economies, like Mexico and the US etc. Most the wealthiest, most "developed", economies however, traditionally support relatively steady levels of immigration, and needless to say, our particular country is 97% composed of relatively recent immigrants.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

The population is still going up. It might decline in the future. One of the reasons the birth rate is down is people cannot afford children. Improve the economy and the birth rate might go up.

If the economy improves and there are x jobs coming up that are not bad you could import x immigrants. I'm proimmigrant in that sense.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
And again: immigrants to Canada are generally better off than the would be if they had been obliged to stay in their countries of origin. Why doesn't that matter?

---

Well for one thing, it's not saying much for progress of democratic capitalism in their countries of origin. A study has shown that well-educated immigrants in Canada suffer twice the unemployment rate as lowly skilled and educated immigrants. And immigrant women to Canada will suffer a major health setback in the first fifteen years of living here.

I don't believe Canada welcomes just anybody. We want doctors, engineers, plumbers, brick layers, teachers and technologists, and it's because our own system here isn't producing them in the numbers needed. Which isn't saying much for the way Ottawa and provinces have been running the show in Canada.

Um, youre making a few too many assumptions yourself guy, based on what youve shown so far. You really believe that 'the natives' will have more kids again if their own domestic economy improves again -and that via lower immgration and presumably less competition for low end jobs?? Most long developed economies, including Western Europe, have trended downwards regardless of how well were supposed to be doing at any one point (though nice to see some doubts about how 'well' we really are doing now) while the poorest countries continue to trend up. (with some Slowing in the increase, for fewllow pedants)

Reasons for this have been debated for sometime, but one highly significant factor usually accepted is that women, given more education and choices, would rather have fewer kids with better prospects, but existing poverty means the extended family is the only social safety net elders and children can expect.

ETA: And these fluxuations in emnployment you refered to Should be averaged over some time, when we're talking immigration, as new immgrants aren't even allowed many employment opportunties till they've cleared all the hurdles, let alone the time it takes to start new businesses they traditionally take on; while longer term benefits pretty much have to be factored in over longer time periods. Luckily large relatively wealthy countries like ours can compensate for local disparities in a number of long established ways, especially ones which may only be temporary.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: EriKtheHalfaRed ]

I have additional facts of life in my quiver. In fact most growth in Canada is in businesses with less than 50 employees and these tend to be poor paying. So growth itself is dysfunctional at this time if fueled by immigration. So these long term benefits of immigration may be a thing of past decades.

Thanks for responding to my posts Eric. I'm talking big numbers here and they are quite exciting. You could squeeze another 10% out of the existing labour force. This amounts to some $135 billion a year. The tax revenues would make many things possible. The conditions at the bottom should be improved if still fairly mean.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: bruce_the_vii ]

quote:

---

Statistics Canada has projected that by 2011, immigrants will account for 100 per cent of the growth in Canada's labour force. As it stands though, more than one quarter of skilled immigrants are working in jobs they are technically overqualified for, and their foreign-acquired skills aren't being used even though they are transferable to Canada. ...

---

Based on Canadian census labour-force data, foreign-educated immigrants earned $2.4 billion dollars less than native-born Canadians with formally comparable skills, because they worked in occupations that were below their skill levels.

And with global warming effects, hundreds of thousands of refugees from the third world are expected to emigrate to rich countries. Global warming and cash crop capitalism will displace millions of people from fertile land that has sustained them and their families for centuries. Capitalism is misery and will continue overriding people's basic rights to exist for some time to come.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Just before he stepped down as Prime Minister, Paul Martin admitted that Canada is still a hewer of wood and drawer of water economy.

[ 29 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

....Thee Missing Idea in Western Economics: Upward Growth in the Mix of Jobs

The very useful economic concept I have become focused on is upward economic growth in the mix of jobs in the nation. This is after the Japanese model of their post WWII development where the entire nation moved up to a higher class of industry. When there’s growth in good jobs, skilled positions or unionized posts, the people that get promoted to them leave jobs which are then filled, typically from below in turn. Then there’s a domino effect all the way down to the bottom, in fact the very worst jobs available. The workers do the selection, move out of the worst jobs with haste. As long as there’s adequate training, including on the job, any job growth affects the companies with the worst jobs by labour mobility. The labour mobility quenches shortages and inflation in better jobs. When unemployment dries up and labour shortages develop the problem will be focused on the most marginal businesses at the bottom that won’t be able to compete for workers. The mechanism is these worst businesses won’t be able to raise prices because of their marginal market power. As their people move down the street to better jobs these worst businesses will have staffing difficulties and eventually close. Thus they’ll then “add” to the supply of labour and solve any shortage problem. The worst business are gotten rid of leaving behind on average a higher quality of business, of higher value added jobs. Labour shortages can thusly contour the mix of industry in a county. It’s Adam Smith’s invisible hand – people looking after their self interest increasing the national wealth. People are upward aspiring, economically rational, so when there’s economic growth, population increases or, alternatively, population decreases, it is always impacts at the bottom by virtue of domino effects. This is economics. This is capitalism at work. This is how society works.

When the government enters the labour market through immigration it does so at the very bottom, at the worst jobs, by this fact people are upward aspiring. This includes skilled immigrants as there’s generally enough training going on in the pipeline to full the need so there’s displacement of people with skilled immigration. It took me sometime to pencil in the above mechanism as all there was in the economic literature was immigrants will take rough jobs that the indigenous do not want while in fact there is this elegant chain reaction going on all the time.

The issue becomes labour mobility. Formal schooling is subsidized everywhere these days and will thus tend to be over invested. The focus should be on whether or not business is adequately doing on the job training. This is key to 100% labour mobility, inflationless growth.

Tightening the labour market at the bottom and relying on upward growth helps the proletariat. Productivity growth has raised the standard of living for everyone else and the problem now is the bottom, not productivity, although you wouldn’t know it by reading economic literature. At the bottom labour markets set the wage and productivity is immaterial. Upward growth to better businesses is an alternative paradigm of progress to improvements in productivity. In addition the universal social programs are about wage disparity but this seems to have been forgotten. The Immigration Dept. directly sets the price of labour at the bottom and this is a moral and practical challenge it is not up to. Immigration is central planning of the economy; it has nothing to do with free markets. Before any country has large scale immigration there should be family appropriate jobs at the bottom.

Japan after World War II is an exciting example of how this upward growth can be achieved by a whole country over time. In Japan they shifted the entire country up from second rate businesses such as cheap toy manufactures to world class ones such as Honda and Sony. In fact it’s the whole economic paradigm the Asia Pacific Tigers are emulating of industrializing in low technology first, then moving up the ladder of opportunity to knowledge industries and high tech on a country wide basis. This idea of upward growth in jobs is an observation not a theory and it’s not up for debate really. The market is complex and its behavior is usually surprising but the dynamics of the labour market is known and it’s to inflate the worst paying, worst working conditions and least competitive enterprises out of business. There’s actually no upper limit to this growth, you could always just improve an economy rather than expand the population, get richer rather than bigger. However the concept is missing from the Western countries where the urgency of its application is marked by their infamous McLabour camps. Every economist in the world knows that upward growth in jobs was the tiger model of economic development but not a single one of them applied it specifically to immigration cities in the West. It’s the missing link in Western economic development. The idea I champion is straight forward application of the Asian Tiger industrialization strategy to the lead cities in the West – the current immigration destinations.

There’s articles around abut how the emerging nations are going to move up the ladder of opportunity over time. There are articles specifically about how South Korea is becoming too expensive for some labour intense businesses and they could be moved to the north. This is tooted as the mechanism where by the peninsula will be healed and then reunited. However, I have spent years waiting to see a single mention in print of how an improving economy in North America is going to benefit the worst off workers. It is simply absent.

In the case of the Japan and the Asian tigers growth was robust and there was a general improvement in wages so some better paying business but without market power went bankrupt as well. In the modern situation growth is limited and there’s a lot of training in the state schools so there’s isn’t going to be this general chaos rather the soft economy at the bottom will be the first to go.

The upward growth scenario is intuitive. Workers know that the economy doesn’t need awful employers and that these should just go out of business. They have expressions for this: “burn the place” and “the shop will close; good”. This rough idea is around but hasn’t caught on. I articulated upward growth as a potent idea in a strong economy and the mechanism Japan had developed from a second rate economy to a modern one.

The expansion of the modern economies now tends to be in small businesses. Small businesses aren’t out competing corporations rather they just pay less. The low paid workers responsibilities as citizens is the whole tax load but this is over looked by economists in favor of calculation of direct subsidies only. In fact the low paid workers are very heavily subsidized in the nanny state. So this problem of growth being in poor paying small businesses that don’t carry their load in taxes is actually a second pat argument against the notion of immigration. It’s a simple and obvious idea but untouted and a second stone for my sling. In the Western economies the population is aging and immigration is being touted as a solution, to expand the economy and the number of workers there are to support the retired. This whole strategy is quite backwards and will lead to increased nanny state liabilities. Contracting the economy and squeezing the bottom would ease the tax burden. So this is the modern situation. The idea that economic growth always leads to economic and social progress is one monster rogue macro economic idea on the loose in the West today.

quote:

---

OTTAWA (CP) - A new study says immigration has tended to lower wages in both Canada and the United States, but it found the impact of immigrants on the wages of domestic workers depends to a large extent on the newcomers' skills.

In 2001, about four in 10 people with more than an undergraduate degree were immigrants in Canada compared to about one in five in the United States. . . .

In Canada, immigration has tempered the gap between rich and poor but in the United States, it has exacerbated it.

---