Australia and Canada descend into mass immigration madness

In the lead-up to the Jobs & Skills Summit, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) urged the Albanese Government to aggressively compete with Canada for migrants:

Temporary skilled migrants now account for around 0.7 per cent of the labour force, less than half the level when temporary skilled migration peaked shortly after the mining boom.

The global migration landscape is also changing. Canada significantly increased its permanent migration intake through the pandemic to provide greater certainty to temporary migrants already onshore and send strong signals to prospective future migrants offshore (see Figure 2)…

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil expressed similar sentiments, claiming many of the “best and brightest minds” were choosing to migrate to Canada and other nations instead of Australia. Australia, therefore, needed to compete harder in the “global war for talent”.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likewise said “we need to be more attractive in the global labour market, particularly for the skills that we need, and one way to do that is to provide people with a path to permanent residency and that’s what we intend to do”.

The comparisons with Canada are curious, given the nation’s extreme immigration program has been blamed for Canada’s lackluster wage growth:

The country’s GDP may be expanding but individual Canadians aren’t getting ahead…

Why, when the country’s GDP is expanding, have individual Canadians not been getting ahead? Why is their wage growth projected to lag so far behind citizens of other nations? And why are millennials taking the brunt of it?

“Past generations of young Canadians entering the workforce could look forward to favourable tailwinds lifting real incomes during their working lives. That’s no longer the case”…

“Rather, they face a long period of stagnating average real incomes that will last most of their working lives” [said David Williams, policy analyst for the Business Council of B.C.]…

Ottawa’s economic strategy is based on several “shaky pillars,” which include using “record immigration levels to turbo-charge population growth and housing demand in major cities,” Williams said.

“The political class appears to have lost interest in efforts to raise workers’ productivity and real wage growth through higher business investment per worker”…

The Liberals’ commitment to record immigration targets focuses mostly “on the benefits immigrants provide to older Canadians,” [Analyst Stephen Punwasi] said, including in the form of “strong housing demand and tax revenues.”

But he cautions that Ottawa’s policies often exploit newcomers, who end up coming to the country unaware of flat wages, especially for the young adults who make up the bulk of immigrants, foreign students and temporary workers…

Donald Wright, the freshly retired head of B.C.’s provincial civil service, notes discouragingly that six out of 10 Canadians recently told Nanos pollsters they expect their standard of living to worsen. “Isn’t it time we took Canadians standard of living seriously?” Wright asks…

Policymakers are over-relying on population growth and cheap labour. It’s not helping the middle classes, he says.

A separate article argues that a “rush of low-skilled foreign labour” is killing Canadian wages, while forcing up the cost of housing for young Canadians:

Voters can thank Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for handing certain business lobbyists what they eagerly seek: A huge supply of low-skilled temporary foreign workers to fill jobs in supermarkets, coffee shops, kitchens, hotels, construction and residential care, for which some bosses don’t want to pay serious wages…

There has been a 65 per cent increase in guest workers arriving into Canada in 2019 compared to 2015, when the Liberals were elected…

And while [former Prime Minister] Harper once restricted temporary foreign workers to 10 per cent of certain sectors, and allowed them only in regions where unemployment is under six per cent, the Liberals have done away with those limits even for temporary foreign workers, say Lange et al in a Policy Options article titled, “The economic case against low-wage temporary foreign workers”…

Foreign student numbers at the end of last year stood at 621,000. That’s a five-fold increase since 2000. Most apply for three-year work permits following graduation. Their presence is felt most strongly on the job and rental markets in Canada’s big cities, where educational facilities are concentrated…

About one in six foreign students in Canada, or more than 100,000, attend schools in Metro Vancouver, where the majority also work, typically in the service and hospitality sectors. Many put up with the low wages because Ottawa portrays it as a prime route to permanent resident status…

Instead of employers relying on “a ready source of cheap labour” from outside the country to fill low-paying jobs, the economists advance the supply and demand concept that employers who have trouble finding workers should instead lure them by paying more, offering better conditions and hiking productivity through innovation.

As we know, the Albanese Government used the Jobs & Skills Summit as a trojan horse to open the temporary and permanent immigration floodgates, in a bid to compete with nations like Canada in the “global war for talent”.

Much like Canada, the Albanese Government will flood the labour market with lower-skilled and lower-paid foreign workers, in turn lifting the unemployment rate, killing wage growth, and worsening housing affordability.

Why do centre-left governments like the Trudeau and Albanese administrations hate the working class so much?

With friends like them, the working class sure doesn’t need enemies.