Like all subjects that happy-face liberal fascism has made politically taboo, immigration is long over due for unbiased study and institutional/policy scrutiny-renewal.

The confrontation cannot be forestalled any longer.

Immigration has only one national purpose, and that is to populate the nation with skills to do jobs and create enterprise for an abundance of opportinies fro which there are not enough natural citizens to fill or exploit.

It's one tool for growing the economy (not depleting it)

It's about being selective to fill the nation's needs and best interests.

It is NOT about solving the world's problems...it is about solving OUR problems and NOT about creating more problems than we are solving with our immigration policies.

Being allowed to be an immigrated Canadian citizen is a privilege, not a right...it carries civil obligations and nationalist duties...and to those who skirted the front door; NO we are NOT suckers and you did not put one over on us...we are just slow to anger, but we are losing our patience with the abuse of our generosity.

Well said, WLMR!

Japan needs to be examined in the immigration debate, they've been doing fine with hardly any immigration. Oh, and, they are an aging population too. The natives are working fast food counters and picking vegetables in the field.

There is a private report being made public tomorrow warning that immigration costs are "grossly underestimated" in the US:

ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=292204157102985

Finally, let's get some statistics in this debate. This shocker...."Of all prisoners in federal prisons, 27% are criminal aliens, he found, with a total cost of $1.5 billion. But that may be low-balling it"...alone ought to get some heads out of the sand here.

Criminals and slackers not welcome. Especially immigrant criminals. Can we not automatically deport someone who is convicted of a crime? Should there not be say a five year probation period in which we can have someone deported if they break the law? And I am talking a pretty low tolerance threshhold here. WLMR is right -- immigration is not a right, it is a privilege. Is it too much to expect honesty and integrity in the people we allow in to Canada?

Yes, I agree that immigration to a country is a privilege and not a right, and carries with it duties and responsibilities. Canada doesn't stress this.

Immigration has also changed the social and political structure of Canada, and the Liberal Party in particular has not recognized the deep changes. The Liberal Party remains mired in the population demographics of two eras: the post WWII of 1950 and the postmodernism of 1960-80.

The postWWII era population was about 11 million, with 8 million of that evenly divided between Ontario and Quebec. This enabled a Centralist govt, focused in those two provinces; the rest of the country was peripheral (only 3 million) based in raw resources (fishing, grain, mining). This idea of Canada as 'two provinces' to be centrally governed as such has remained the ideological base of the Liberal Party.

The fact that demographically, this is no longer valid, escapes them. The West is larger than Quebec yet has 11 fewer seats in the Senate; Quebec's population has shrunk, while Ontario's has grown. Centralism is no longer valid in Canada.

The 1960-80s era saw the rise of postmodernism or cultural relativism in Canada, as an ideology, which saw thousands of immigrants enter the country, to be ghettoized as Voting Blocks by the Liberals in the province of Ontario.
Most of the immigrants went to Ontario (Toronto), with a second choice to Montreal.

The Liberal strategy of dealing with immigrants was multiculturalism. This is a policy of cultural relativism that defines each population as a Set, a closed group, whose beliefs and behaviour are hereditary, cloned from The Old Country.

Multiculturalism allows the Set to settle in Canada and replicate those beliefs and behaviour; there is no expectation of assimilation, integration, collaboration with the current population. Or with other Sets of New Immigrants. Indeed, multiculturalism sets up barriers to assimilation and collaboration; each belief system is equivalent to another. The inequality of men and women is equivalent to the equality of men and women; it's just 'personal choice'.

Each Set is isolate, replicating itself in its old beliefs and behaviour. It's a policy that tells Immigrants: 'Don't worry; you are just changing the SPACE of your country. You aren't changing countries. You are bringing your Old Country to a New Space'. You can keep your old beliefs and way of life'.

To enable this spatial exchange, the Liberals encouraged immigrants to Stay The Same - by funding them to do so. Massive funding of private schools, community centres, religious schools enabled the immigrants to settle in isolate blocks. They then voted 'Liberal' to maintain these funds.

The result? We have developed, in Ottawa, a bureaucracy with power heavily vested in the centrally appointed rather than the elected, a mode of government that is top heavy and isolate, centralist in focus and indifferent to the population. That's centralism.

Bilingualism is a policy that operates within centralism. The reality is that Canada is not and never will be, bilingual. Bilingualism was valid only in post WWII, when the population of Canada was based in Ontario and Quebec, and evenly divided between them. That's no longer true. Yet, our government bureaucracy requires bilingualism. That means that the bureaucracy becomes an 'elite and self-replicating Set' located in the Montreal-Ottawa corridor. So, our government, with its heavy ratio of appointed to elected, is intellectually and spatially located in that Montreal-Ottawa corridor. The rest of the population is shut out of power.

And Ontario has been balkanized into isolate groups, unable to collaborate, interact and develop new strategies.

You know I'm glad I read Kates last para before writing. LOL

I'm currently going through the Oxford history of Great Britain and every time the population declines or remains stagnant the peasants are better off.

The peasants rents drop and wages increase every time, luckily no one setting policy in Canada has read a book.

When the population increases the costs go up far more than the wages time after time century after century.

These seem true all the way to the black plague and beyond.

Still at least a population increase is good if you happen to be very, very rich. Then you can pay lower wages and charge more rent.

Which is in a nutshell, why you can't afford a house in Toronto or Vancouver.

And the worst thing is who do you vote for to stop it? Mulrooney has the record for a single year of immigration and Harper is working towards it.

WLMR you are soooo wrong we are suckers. Well maybe not you and a few other knuckle-draggers, but Kanuckistan on the whole,...

I mean one of the slogans for immigration is that our population might decline even though stats can predicts that if not one immigrant shows up in the next 20 years all that time our population will grow.

We fall for it because we are suckers.

MAFTLR [my apologies for the long rant.]

It looks like Canada resettles radicalized muslims from Burma in the mean time.

http://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/put-rohingyas-on-deserted-island/

However, that's now what I want to talk about.
Immigration costs Canada billions of dollars.
I bet that the large portion of that is spent inside the CIC. If that money were dispensed to the young Canadian families, who want to have babies, but can't afford, we would not need immigrants.

It is impossible to rule law abiding people. The government knows that and it wants to make people criminals in order to rule. That rule comes in different shapes and forms, the most costly of which are the military and police.
In order to create more criminals to rule, the governments import the potential criminals from unstable retarded countries. That explains fascination of immigration officials with Somalians, Jamaicans, Iraquis, Lebanese, Palestinian arabs, Vietnamese, Indians, Chinese etc. I am in no way suggesting that all people coming from the mentioned countries are criminals! No way, I lived next door to, worked together, made friends with almost each of those countries' former residents living now in Canada. What I am stating is that percentage of trouble makers coming out of engineered ethnic communities created out of those immigrants in Canada is higher than that of local Canadian population.

Before you jump on your horse and call me a racist, try to think of how many of white Canadians you know who were planning to blow up parliament with fertilizer and to kidnap and behead the PM? Or how many Canadian youth you know who run around with handguns in their pants killing each other? Or how many white Canadians killed their sisters for dishonouring their families?

Policing, prosecuting and incarcerating is a big business in North America, the government bureaucracy that stuck to the trough, like every business, want to expand, not shrink. That's why in the face of failing crime rates they created whole new class of criminals out of thin air - the Bill C-68 was introduced when crime was at 25 year lowest, and it was not enough, thus multiculturalism and immigration.

It costs us dearly, the benefits are questionable.

It's not about total population but about demographics. If you don't have children, and want social programs or anything, for that matter, that will require taxation from working people, you will need immigration to provide those workers. Because Europeans (and Canadians) want cradle to grave social programs, they find themselves with a dilemma. It's Mark Steyn 101.

Canada's population in 1870: 3,625,000

Assume a 2% growth rate - low when you consider immigration and high birth rates of the era - since 1870, meaning the population should double every 36 years (72/i). Meaning in 1916 the population should be 7.25 million, 17.5 million in 1952, 35 million in 1988, and 70 million in 2024. It should be about 50 million in 2008, and yet it is only 33.5 million.

Where did the 16.5 million go? America, and back to where they came from. Compare with America's population growth; noticeably higher because everyone who comes to America stays.

2% growth is an arbitrary number, of course, but it illustrates a point. It's a little discussed fact that a lot of people don't actually like Canada very much and move to a better country at the first available opportunity.

It's been said for years there are a million ex-Canadians in Los Angeles, for example. The vast majority of Canadian NHL players choose to live in America after retirement, because they have the money and visa to do so.

Further reading:
www.fraserinstitute.org/researchandpublications/researchtopics/immigration.htm

Canada has imported virtually all of its crime and poverty....

Consider our expats as well. Doctors and nurses, gone to the USA. After our investment to educate and train them. And we have a shortage. But by all means, one must not speak of the stupidity of this. Please, just step into the voting booth and vote Liberal.

It's a popular misconception that immigration helps address our aging population. The stats from the government show, however, that the average age of immigrants is older than that of native-born Canadians.
http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/cs/sp/hrsd/prc/publications/research
/2000-001263/page06.shtml

And those stats only go up to 2000. The accelerating pace of family class immigration has surely widened this gap.

So immigration does not make our demographic profile younger. It makes it older, thus exacerbating the problem of who is going to pay when all these people hit 65.

This is the most pressing issue in Canada right now, in my opinion. In any discussion of reforming immigration, I think the focus should be on:

1) refugee intake, where we are more likely to get people who have no chance of succeeding economically in Canada due to utterly incompatible languages, way of thinking, and lack of education. Further, these people often come from some of the most lawless parts of the world, and would be at a much higher risk of bringing that here. I feel sorry for them, but not sorry enough to take them in. It is not fair that a refugee coming to Canada will get more money and support than a WWII war vet or any lifelong Canadian who has contributed and then retired.

Canada has no obligation to help a minuscule fraction of the world's poor - I'm certain the money we spent on them would have helped far more people if it was spent in their home countries to try to improve the situation there.

2) family unification, which brings in significant numbers of elderly relatives that will never contribute, and are guaranteed to drain our stressed health care and other support systems.
Again, I have some sympathy for people wishing to have their parents and other family members come here after them, but not at the cost of bankrupting the nation. Further, I believe a strong family unification policy is actually counter-productive to a goal of promoting integration and assimilation.

3) immigration legal system reforms. There are lawyers and paralegals who make all their money out of manipulating our immigration system. Speaking to those who are aware of these issues, I am told that these people are the absolute bottom of the legal barrel in terms of ethics and honesty. They make their money and then walk away leaving our society and the taxpayer to deal with the mess.

You're only partially correct, Aaron. "In order to create more criminals to rule, the governments..." create 'crimes' out of thin air. They make the laws so complicated and contradictory that it becomes virtually certain that everyone is a criminal.

Look at tax law: if you fill out your taxes incorrectly, then you have committed a criminal act, and yet the tax laws are so complicated that it is virtually certain that over the course of your lifetime you will make errors.

Look at drugs - sheesh, there's a whole essay right there.

And then there's C-68. Considering the weakness of the Liberals right now, I'm amazed that the long gun registry law is still in effect.

I could go on and on and on without ever mentioning immigration as a source of crime. Your main point that government creates "criminals" in order to rule the population is valid on its own, and you don't need to bring immigration into the issue.

Dismantling the long gun registry has become a cash cow for Harper, the way I see it. He shows us some hope, we send cash, but nothing happens and it's always the Liberals' fault we still have it. Shame indeed.

I am very involved with the US politics for several reasons, that's why I emphasize immigration as a factor in creating criminals - it's more prevalent in the US than in Canada. For now!

"Of all prisoners in federal prisons, 27% are criminal aliens, he found, with a total cost of $1.5 billion. But that may be low-balling it"

Quite right Penny.

"In the first ever sociological study of Islam in French prisons, Farhad Khosrokhavar (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), estimated that between 50% and 80% of French inmates are Muslims [3]."

That's France. Britain is similar. In fact all western countries with any sort of Muslim population has a spectacularly inordinate amount of Muslims in prison.

So, here's a fact: Our prison system cannot handle immigration of certain groups of people. Neither should we allow certain groups who represent a negative criminal trend to immigrate, regardless if the majority of those people are nice and moderate.

Here's another fact published in the Star last year: Immigration is costing taxpayers $4.6 billion a year in settling costs and various other costs.

And another: Muslims largely vote Liberal. I would imagine other groups prone to commit crime do as well.

Switzerland recently brought in a law that if an immigrant commits a crime, not only are they deported, but their family is as well.

That reverses immigration amongst certain groups. Which in the case of those prone to commit crime, is a very good thing.

This is our country and Canadians have a responsibility and a right in determining safety for ourselves and for generations to come. This trumps misplaced altruism and Liberal power mongering.

Take a look at the Star's editiorial cartoon today.

Britain has an elitist tradition of bringing in immigrants to do the work they do not want to do.

My Dad was recruited from Galway (he was a cattle driver at the time) to work on the big fishing trawlers out of Milford Haven because it was hard to find people who were willing to spend 3+ months at a time fishing in the North Atlantic (it was dangerous work when serious storms sprung up - but it paid very well).

A lot of Brits don't want to do manual labour even when it pays alot of money.

Looking at the link, the 50’s saw a growth of approx 4 million, every decade after that has been a steady 3 million.

My wife moved here from Malaysia to marry me, she never took citizenship as she does not want to give up her Malay citizenship and is not allowed dual citizenship. She does find it a bit frustrating as she would like to vote for Harper and the CPC. Speaking to a lot of immigrants, they are basically lied to by the embassy staff that their credentials will be worth something here. In fact I see a lot of hardworking well educated immigrants leave Canada because of the roadblocks preventing them from working. We could easily fill the doctor shortages using Indian doctors if we wanted to deal with the problem. Immigrants are not the problem, it’s our picking of immigrants and the obstacles we put in place to prevent them from working.

Colin,

The idea that lots of doctors are driving taxis because of obstacles to certification is largely a myth. The fact is that only some 10% of these docs pass the basic entry exam to practise here. There are great doctors in India but mostly they do not have the same standard of medical education to enable them to work here.

If only our immigration bureaucrats were a little less clueless.

"Consider our expats as well. Doctors and nurses, gone to the USA. "

And engineers and programmers and scientists ( and i'll ignore ignore newscasters and actors, but heck them too) and even accountants and talented managers.

...then again if more Canadians stay home because of a lack of work due to economy slowing down due to slowing down immigration, maybe we'd start having a population increase?

"In the first ever sociological study of Islam in French prisons, Farhad Khosrokhavar (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), estimated that between 50% and 80% of French inmates are Muslims [3]."

"Muslims largely vote Liberal. I would imagine other groups prone to commit crime do as well."

How many of them were muslims before they went to prison, and how many converted in there?

Studies in the US show a lot of criminals convert after going to prison, which renders your causality incorrect. They dont go to prison because they are muslim. Rather they become muslims after they goto prison.

"Neither should we allow certain groups who represent a negative criminal trend to immigrate, regardless if the majority of those people are nice and moderate."

Only Muslims? Or do African Americans count by virtue of their high incarceration rates in the US? Stop hiding behind trasparent pillars.

"Switzerland recently brought in a law that if an immigrant commits a crime, not only are they deported, but their family is as well."

Hilarious. I wonder how there are any bankers left in Switzerland. I mean the country can only attribute its prosperity to the fact that every known despot and tyrant of the 20th century has dumped his blood money there. But thats okay, because Swiss law sees nothing wrong with profiting of Nazi loot.

Immigrants bring some money. The ones who have skills get their passports and leave. The ones who dont, stay. Its akin to writing off 3 years of your life for a passport. Canadians of convenience. The Canadian economy is largely to blame. Its too protected and comfortable. Not ambitious enough for people who have no problem with upping and leavng when they see an opportunity. Thats how they got here in the first place.

Englands a mess becuase of its wussie parlament

"Studies in the US show a lot of criminals convert after going to prison, which renders your causality incorrect. They dont go to prison because they are muslim. Rather they become muslims after they goto prison."

There's no doubt that Islam appeals to the unreformed criminal mind. However, you type a 'study' with no evidence to support and then make an assertion as if it was fact. Ridiculous.

"Only Muslims? Or do African Americans count by virtue of their high incarceration rates in the US? Stop hiding behind trasparent pillars."

Blacks do not rely on so-called holy texts to justify crime and murder. Neither are they organised by a so-called religious club called the Ummah. What "transparent pillars" are you you making up?

The only thing that's "hilarious" is your idiotic post. What do Swiss bankers have to do with Swiss immigration law? Is there some sort of irrelevant equivalence argument you are suggesting, that somehow wins the day? Once again, ridiculous.

Ted Turner says that in 20 years people will start eating each other, I wonder if Immigrants will be able to help us avoid that future - they seem to be capable of solving all of our other problems according to blowhards who think cheap third world labour is good for an economy.