These are exactly the kind of immigrants any country should be desperate to have.
The majority of costs a person will typically have on a country are their initial K-12 education, and their health care costs later in life. Immigrants like these will never cost the government that first major cost.
At the same time, they are far more likely to have higher than median salaries when employed. That means higher taxes paid.
So from a purely economic point of view, an H-1B immigrant is a perfect profit center for government taxes.
Meanwhile a Canadian who gets their K-12 education here, gets a highly government subsidized post-secondary degree, then moves to the USA to work and pay taxes there is a huge loss, economically.
We should shift our perspective on our native-born citizens. Because they're such a massive economic drain we should _stop_ investing in them completely. I know it sounds radical but hear me out. We can realize higher economic utility for our society if A) we stop all investments in non-skilled, non-working-age citizens and B) export those people who are a burden on our society (children, the elderly, the sick, people who enjoy EDM, you get it).
In this way Canada can achieve higher economic utility for itself. I'm imagining a system where everyone in the society is brought in on a temporary basis. They are imported after their post-secondary education and exported maybe 10 years before their retirement. In this way we avoid all the costs associated with having "people" in our country and instead we reap the economic reward of their labor!
I guess I shouldn't say "our" country. I would be exported fairly quickly... But! To those glorious (and brave) few on the executive committee entrusted to leading Canada Inc. through these difficult times, the society they get to inhabit will undoubtedly be the economic envy of the world!
And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.
You think our government respects people taking time to rear offspring? Of course not! They're not contributing their labour to our economy while being parents so we've structured the incentives to start families in such a way that they're driven back to work ASAP. Strictly speaking: having children is bad for our labour force and should be avoided.
This is the paradox of the child in modern society.
In terms of across the board consumption, there is nothing as productive as a modern child. Clothes, consumable goods, travel sports, recreations, hobbies, and diversions all lead straight to the consumption that is so vital to our economy.
And yet, with sicknesses, evening activities, and other problems, there is nothing that disrupts an individual worker's productivity as a child.
I'm not sure I am smart enough to come up with an equation, but, it's in there somewhere to tell us whether a child is a net positive or negative influence on our Economy than the other.
> there is nothing that disrupts an individual worker's productivity as a child.
I have two kids and it isn't that bad at all. Very small loss of productivity for me except when I took parental leave for 3 months. I have grandparents that live nearby and they can help with sickness and other babysitting though.
I have a feeling a lot of people don’t have that kind of support network. I certainly don’t. If someone’s taking care of my kids, it’s me (or I’m paying them).
Just so happened that my family had to move for work, health, etc. I love raising my kids so it’s fine. It has been the equivalent of drop kicking my career against a brick wall occasionally, if I’m being honest.
My country quite literally needs every able bodied man or woman in the workforce.
People with university degrees sitting at home raising kids is almost treason at this point considering it was the government who paid for their education.
Can I ask which country you’re in? That’s an interesting consideration when education is publicly funded like that. Where I am, it’s a bit of a both… Public money is a major factor up until post secondary school, then it’s part of the picture but there’s also substantial private tuition — especially for international students. I’m not sure anyone considers a duty to their country really, despite how much public money makes their education possible.
For all those taking this seriously, the parent comment was sarcastic and this comment is almost a direct quote from Dr. Strangelove about how to repopulate the Earth after a nuclear apocalypse.
This is one of those situation where I wish there was a good loan-word like "schadenfreude": The dilemma of choosing whether to explain a joke/reference for those who aren't getting it, versus playing along and extending it.
@babyshake, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Fully agree on it. Kids are another great source of profit center that have not been fully utilized. Also we need to explore if un-exportable olds can be mined for parts. That would another win-win.
The person in the article applied because of health problems.
>Denise said she hasn’t cancelled her MAID application because she still suffers from painful chronic health problems that haven’t been properly handled.
She's not going around doing cartwheels, but in a civilized country she wouldn't be applying for medically assisted dying. Her health problems are, at least arguably, manageable in fairly straightforward ways via a rational medical system.
She'll never have healthy-millionaire quality of life, but this isn't what medically-assisted dying is meant for.
In this case what she recognized as the treatment is managed by something other than the medical system. I would assume this is the same in other places, unless doctors in Europe can write prescriptions for apartments.
Given the current zeitgeist, I feel there's only a 70% chance that's an autocorrupt of Alzheimer's.
Or did, until I saw the alternative font in the comment box and realised that's a lowercase L not a capital i.
My mum died of that. Technically liver or kidney failure from dehydration, but that in turn was from refusing food in the care home and not having the awareness to get liquids separately.
I think it was worse for us than it was for her, overall, though there were a few occasions where her self-awareness of the nature of her condition caused her unhappiness.
Happy we are making progress with that and other degenerative diseases. I just wish we all had the opportunity to choose how our life ends, not just for our own suffering but also for those that suffer for us.
There is a far gap between the conservatives fixated on vaccines and the people pointing out that they have a physical handicap and otherwise want to live but are not being given disability benefits to pay for rent and food and feel forced into signing up to be euthanized.
Nobody is being Forced into Euthanasia. I sincerely hope you and no one close to you ever has to consider this as an option, but if they did should they not have the dignity to choose?
I'm not disagreeing that there's problems to be solved around how to support our sick and disabled.
But the recent outrage over it is definitely an overreaction, and is being brought up by the same people that were complaining about vaccines and masks 2 years ago.
I think, in your response of sarcasm you are brushing over a lot of valid points the OC is making.
They're not saying that we should get rid of natural-born folks. They're just saying that often times the people who most want their nation to not allow other folks in, don't appreciate all of the things that those other folks provide for them. i.e. Immigration is subsidizing a lot of the things you probably enjoy about your life, and we should probably be considering it more as a blessing than a curse.
Nobody is trying to replace you. They're just trying to help you, and provide a better opportunity for their children once they've bought into the same system your parents bought into.
I'm trying to replace me! Humans are first and foremost economic units. Fungible and replaceable. There's absolutely no reason to prefer any one human over another -- except for their ability to produce economic output.
Society is a vain illusion for the true foundation of civilization -- economic produce. Things like care for the elderly or education of children only exist to maximize the future labor of the young and to deceive the middle-aged. We should cut these vestiges from our society and embrace a new future where only the economically gifted are permitted to remain.
I know at first this is hard to accept but its only through this radical, but sensible, plan that every citizen in Canada will be able to afford a Netflix account with password sharing.
There's a meaningful point at which I think humans are going to have a reckoning. I think the cause of that reckoning will probably be Climate Change, but maybe I'm wrong.
Regardless, we don't currently see ourselves as the same as everyone else on this planet. We're too stuck on competition and being better than everyone else that we don't realize the only way forward is gonna be to accept people for who they are. There are ways to be selfish that don't mean making everything worse for everyone else. We need to have a symbiotic relationship with ourselves that's at least commensalist, and ideally mutualist. The parasitism that has been our goto for all of human existence isn't going to cut it.
This type of immigration is strictly for economic and quality of life purposes.
It’s pretty bonkers to say people who immigrate to the US on H1-B visas are doing so out of an altruistic desire to “help” anybody but themselves and their families (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
People seem to still prefer immigrating to the United States over Canada even though Canada’s immigration system is far more reasonable. They’re trying to scoop people up with policies like this but I think it’s worth taking a step back and reflecting on why that is. I think a big part of it is Canada’s cost of living especially wrt housing is even worse than the US’s and salaries are lower.
And I say this as an expat currently living in Mexico with a fair amount of Americans and Canadians. So this isn’t a pro United States comment, it’s just a reality check. The US has draconian immigration rules and hoops to jump through… but it seems like the demand is such that they can get away with it.
Yeah, I knew there'd be someone on here still terrified immigrants are trying to replace them. IDK what TF that even means, but I can promise you no one thinks that if they just remove all of the existing Canadians that they're somehow, ship of Theseus-style, going to have a brand new Canada.
And while they may not explicitly be trying to help you, their goals are such that "helping Canada helps themselves." Way more than you give them credit for. But that's okay, please join the fear-mongering of "the great replacement."
It's precisely the immigrants who come to a country like Canada, education already completed who pay for the investments for others. An adult Indian programmer costs the Canadian taxpayer nothing but contributes immense amounts, and is even more likely to start a business than a native.
This notion that Bob from Podunk rural Canada with an IQ of 80 competes with an immigrant with a PhD makes no sense. The latter finances the welfare of the former. You need to create wealth first before you can redistribute it and keeping the strongest wealth creators out of the country is one of the stupidest damage you can inflict on yourself.
This sarcasm drenched replacement fantasy is the exact opposite of reality. Only if you have a strong economy you can continue to maintain public welfare.
That's incorrect, Canada has literally published data on the question:
"Garnett Picot and Yuri Ostrovsky revealed based on data from 2016 that immigrants are 41.7 per cent more likely than Canadians who were born in Canada to either start a business or be self-employed.[...]Leaving aside self-employment, immigrants were found to be 30 per cent more likely to own a privately-incorporated business that provided jobs for others than were native-born Canadians."
And maybe even more important, from US data:
"Immigrants have started more than half (319 of 582, or 55 per cent) of America’s start-up companies valued at $1 billion or more,"
IIRC among AI related startups the number of immigrant founders or co-founders is even close to two-thirds. Attracting top tier human capital is pretty much North America's greatest advantage.
I'm referring to Indian Programmer who came to Canada to start their own company to stay with the context.
Not "in general, Immigrants formed corp more than Canadians born in Canada".
US is different. Cost of business in Canada is high due to red-tapes and lower RoI than US (plus less Capital to go around).
The romanticization of Indian programmers creating a successful tech company in Canada (just like they did in US) is just that for now, romanticization.
Indian, specifically Punjabis, done better as Entrepreneur in non-tech in Canada.
You kid, but it’s a valid argument. I’ve known a good few Canadians over the years who went down to the U.S. for work experience and some have even lost their PRs because of some newer policy requiring that they spend half their time in Canada. It’s something that really backfired hard. I’m actually really sad and disappointed for Canada that it is like this. Historically it’s much easier to leave the country than enter it if you’re a skilled person.
This is a big deal. Back in the early 2010s, software developers moving to SF pretty much willed into existence the tech industry up there. Before then, companies would start in SF and move down to the valley. If skilled folks want to move to your area, it can be a boon, and if I’m not mistaken, Canadian tax policy is better suited to redistribute the gains from that than U.S. tax policy.
> some have even lost their PRs because of some newer policy requiring that they spend half their time in Canada.
Not a new policy. Gotta put in your time as a PR to qualify for a citizenship (that mostly can’t be taken away from you ever).
It anything, the physical presence requirements have been diluted because politicians realize they’re more likely to get your vote if they have you citizenship.
So the point your making is that the government shouldn't concern itself with increasing the number of citizens that are net contributors to the system?
I have two words for you. Tundra. City. That's right; we did it. We took the Canada you love and made it _more_ Canada. Up to _twice_ as cold as the previous generation of cities. More that _six_ times as remote. No other competitor is offering this kind of performance. I want to be clear this is a _generational_ leap over the competition. We're at least five years ahead of other major countries. And, boy, you better believe we patented it!
I'm picturing a rail line that just goes north, and in every town along the way the people are a few years older than the last. You can still live wherever you want, but the subsidies for your age group make it a sweet deal to keep moving down the line toward Centenarian City. Known for its large glue factory and landfills.
> How can you export the people who are a burden? You can’t leave them stateless.
Sure you can. The only reason nations avoid allowing people to become stateless is an appreciation of the burden that places on those people. But if we're pursuing a modest proposal where the government shifts its perspective to focus on "realize[ing] higher economic utility for" itself, that becomes less a concern.
At the very minimum you can "export" those low-economic-utility people by sticking them them on a barge and towing it to well into international waters where the currents will take it away (and if you're a nice government, just outside the territorial waters of some other country).
As you know, its impossible to prove a negative, so who's to say they won't wash ashore a luxurious beach resort where they will be welcomed with daiquiris and sexual favors?! I say give them this once in a lifetime chance!
I hear Britain is taking all types and putting them up in 4 star hotels, as long as you land on a British beach by a boat. Just chuck em all that way, problem solved.
"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout."
Have worked with quite a few H1-Bs with absolutely no special skills. Large off-shoring firms soak up quite a few of them for people coming out of degree mills.
The only advantage to businesses is that these people are modern indentured servants, due to their immigration status being dependent on their employer. I'm all for getting rid of that but I also think there should likely be a smaller number with a salary based bidding system (e.g. if you aren't paying in the 80th percentile or above for a person in the industry of that age, you're not getting H1-Bs, and yes age not years of experience since the latter is easily fudged). Otherwise, it simply continues to be a way for companies to suppress wages.
Then theoretically, these changes for H1-Bs should both protect them from the indentured servitude, and by removing that leverage, remove the motivation for H1-B abuse.
If companies can't bring someone over that they can overwork and underpay at threat of deportation, they'll rethink the MBA-brained "optimizations" and be forced to create a more resilient workforce rather than a loose collection of people to rugpull every time the rate of profit increase dips by .0004%.
These days H1B is strictly a wage suppression tool and filled with low skill workers from India based degree mills and body shops. Actual skilled workers are coming in on L-1 or O-1 visas.
The issues are complex - but one of the side affects are indeed artificial suppression of wages for citizens.
We have software titans bursting at the seam with imported labor - yet our domestic universities are also churning out more CS graduates than ever before. Some of these graduates are indeed from foreign countries - but not all.
It's very hard to believe companies need to import labor for commoditized software engineering positions when there are plenty of available workers already here.
We should be importing top-tier talent - the types of folks that are working in complex fields, inventing new fields, developing things that haven't been done before, etc. We should not be importing basic CS graduates and filling basic SE jobs.
H1B's are often cheaper to hire, and do not enjoy the same mobility freedoms a citizen does. In some ways, they are beholden to their sponsor company, and whatever wages that company offers - which may not necessarily be market wages.
Clearly H1Bs are suppressing wages as proven by the fact that software engineers have seen wages rise more than any other job profile in the country for over the past decade.
Just as much reason to believe it would be lower than higher. There aren't a fixed number of jobs. A talented engineer who comes to America can go on to start up his own company (and there are many examples of this occurring), creating many more high-paying jobs for other engineers. A company that fails because they can't hire enough engineers puts the engineers they do have employed out of work.
I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.
> Just as much reason to believe it would be lower than higher.
That seems like some wild calculus. Fewer people willing to accept lower pay and be stuck at a specific company = higher pay. There's no other way to make the math work, particularly for extreme-demand positions like SE.
> I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.
there would be fewer/no startups and fewer jobs with less wages, as H1Bs themselves create jobs via startups and product development at traditional companies.
if you carefully look at silicon valley companies (even large ones) - most of product R&D and IP and innovation comes from immigrants. Native born americans are mostly working in admin jobs like HR, Admin, Sales, Operations, Finance, etc
R&D is exactly who H1B is supposed to be for - ie. highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions. Not regular SE jobs.
If you look at your Googles, your Facebooks, your Microsofts, you will find a glut of H1B's working regular SE jobs, such as maintenance and feature development. That's exactly who H1B's are not supposed to be for - and that is the issue.
Mega corps laying off huge engineering teams while simultaneously importing more H1B's tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money, as they say.
Most companies call a significant amount of their SWE work as R&D. R&D isn’t always “inventing totally new things” but rather closer to “an investment of resources in which there is some amount of novelty and for which the outcome is uncertain”. A lot of SWE qualifies for that, even software that we’d consider fairly mundane and un-exciting.
H-1B is for regular skilled immigration, those with bachelors degrees or equivalent, e.g. regular software engineer jobs. For more highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions there exist O-1, EB-1, and EB-2 NIW visas.
Guarantee it's below average at most outsourcing firms. They may play games like advertising a position as a "junior engineer" but require 10 years of experience and then bill clients for a senior engineer but, knowing the billing rates for several vendors, there's absolutely no way they pay market rates.
You understand that immigration is fundamentally different from standard supply and demand? Immigrants create both supply and demand. Producing more eggs doesn't increase the demand for eggs.
The parent post doesn't dispute that - it's just adding that in addition to the plenty of skilled engineers part there are also a bunch of low skill workers from degree mills coming as well.
Even if that was true, that would be absolutely fine. Getting one Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Lisa Su, Sundar Pichal, etc. would make absorbing 10,000 or even more low/mediocre skilled workers along with them worthwhile. The technological and economic benefits makes it a no brainer.
Jensen Huang emigrated at the age of 4, Lisa Su at the age of 3, Satya and Sundar both came over as part of college visa programs.
I don't see what that has to do with mass importation of low skill workers to hammer down high middle class wages in the US?
They might have moved here as part of college visa programs but they needed H1B to work and build their skill set. The college visa (F1/ J1) does not come with a work authorization beyond 3 years.
The H-1B situation is also a problem for people who come from overseas to study for their degrees in the U.S. They get F-1 OPT, and join US companies that then cannot retain them because of the over-subscription of the H-1B.
It's also bogus to say that H-1B is more problematic than L-1B for body-shopping: all the well organized body-shops do massive amount of intra-company transfers.
In theory yes but if the premise for why we allow disproportionately large immigration from certain countries is that we're bringing in unique skills, and we decide that premise is flawed, then it would also be cause to reevaluate the immigration policy.
If you’re already in the US and eventually want a GC (typical Us graduate), both of those are not very good option and H1-B is better bc of its dual intent.
If the visa does not require sponsorship from a company (like the current H1-B does), does that help reduce the 'indentured servants' part and lessen the appeal of it for certain types of companies?
It is always a matter of perspective. As a tech worker, the average H1-B worker you know is probably close to the average of the other tech workers you know like you.
But you have to compare their skills and education to the global average of society to understand the benefit they bring.
As a patriotic American, I applaud Canada's plan. The H1-B is a badly run program in many ways, it is a vehicle for large tech and staffing firms to commit graft, entrench their market dominance and enrich themselves, by exploiting H1-B workers and pitting them against Americans. Like so many things it masquerades as beneficial for America but in reality the benefits accrue mainly to the small parasite class which makes the rules and revolves between Washington and private industry.
If what's needed to shake this program up and shine a light on the corruption is some competition from our neighbors to the north, sounds great to me. Maybe Canada should extend this program to Americans who don't have health insurance, too. The resulting surge of expatriates just might force the parasite class to rethink America's archaic and corrupt health care system as well.
>”The majority of costs a person will typically have on a country are their initial K-12 education, and their health care costs later in life. Immigrants like these will never cost the government that first major cost.”
Something about this is horribly depressing. It’s bad enough that the private sector is doing everything humanly possible to maximize profit.
It makes me wonder what the point of citizenship is if government officials and elected representatives see the cultivation of those born in the country as more expensive and burdensome than just bringing people in. And, it sounds like the government is more interested in higher salaries for new arrivals than longtime constituents.
And it’s not like this is sustainable either. All these much more profitable immigrants are going to become settled and have their own children, who will then become just as expensive to educate.
It's not as simple. My country (UK) has skilled workers visa that has wage requirement set often at half the market rate for given job. For instance, company can pay a software developer as little as £35k.
Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native, the government somewhat pulled the rug from underneath the locals who spend a lot of money to go to uni etc and were hoping to have a decent return on their investment in education.
This also creates disincentive for locals to learn these in-demand skills.
If you combine this with the fact that companies can rent out these cheap workers at £500 or more a day, while avoiding paying taxes it is a poor deal that only benefits big corporations.
I mostly agree but 'half the market rate' glosses over a lot of things.
For example, according to WhatUni [1], the average computer science graduate salary after leaving uni is £27K. Even after a year or two of pay increments, the average (median? not sure) CS graduate could be earning less than the £35K threshold. It's not just the "unis" that deserve double quotes with this kind of salary range: Exeter is Russell Group, but the same site says their graduates have a £28K average starting salary.
Staying with Exeter, their 2023 pay scales [2] have postdocs starting at £31K, and lecturers in the £40K-50K range; by the time you're earning double of £35k, you're well into associate professor territory.
Sure, you won't get a good senior developer for £35K. But if your business model is lots of juniors and high churn, you'll get plenty of people in that range.
Now consider that why would company hire a CS graduate for £27k, if they could get a seasoned developer who will be happy to work for £35k and get the foot in the door? Also see that the threshold for a web developer is only £26.8k.
Please won't you think about the economic utility of this arrangement? There's more to life than "concern" and "care" for your relatives, neighbors, and the "next generation". What about money? We can make _more_ money this way. I know _you're_ not making more money but have you considered that you just didn't work hard enough? Maybe if you immigrated to Bangladesh you could re-tread tires while you studied computer science. One day you might earn yourself an H1-B visa in the UK. I hear that's a nice country.
>Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native
We can go abroad to study it for much cheaper. Alternatively, foreign nationals can come to study here: they'll pay twice as much as us to do so. Our higher education is subsidised. Likewise, we don't have to work in this country. Immigration is not a one-way system.
The number of companies that can sponsor a Tier 2 Visa is limited. Those that do have to pay £1000pa for each individual they sponsor. The individual themselves will have to pay >£600pa to subsidise the NHS for you and me.
We no longer have the Resident Labour Market Test - it was abolished because unemployment rates were extremely low - but most people who have passed the 2 year curfew to be allowed to take an employer to tribunal are in a job where their employers first had to prove the job couldn't be filled by local talent.
Perhaps the government should update the SOC code for software engineers to be higher. They determine the going rate to hire into these 'skilled occupation' roles.
Right, someone will go abroad to study cheaper only to come back and get a poor wage. Sure.
> The number of companies that can sponsor a Tier 2 Visa is limited. Those that do have to pay £1000pa for each individual they sponsor.
Tier 2 visa has been replaced by Skilled worker visa and there is over 80,000 companies registered as sponsors. The £1,000 pa is nothing if you take into account how much profit company can make on such worker.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody starts suggesting this. Since the rulers have determined that it is better to hire foreigners as it is so expensive to educate locals, then it shouldn't take long before a business genius comes up with the idea to send all native children to these foreign countries at birth, to be educated for cheap and then sent back to work. I mean, it only makes business sense, doesn't it?
Yes: his wage is artificially depressed by "market conditions" due to the willingness of foreign workers to make less. This is especially harmful to entry level developers who haven't had time to build up a niche/profitable specialty.
> So from a purely economic point of view, an H-1B immigrant is a perfect profit center for government taxes.
It is just all things being equal and they are specially not equal in this case.
If they were so great countries producing them would have used them for no-downside profit but it is not happening. US being hub of thousands of high tech companies also not finding much use of them lately.
I guess good on Canada for finding such a profit booster in times of economic downturn.
The problem is that for a productive H-1B holder in the US, they have no incentive to move to Canada if they're already doing well. Canada's wages will be less than half of what they would get in the US and healthcare in the US is better if you have good insurance.
What's more likely to happen is the people who take Canada's offer will be the ones that were let go for performance reasons or have other productivity or efficiency issues.
While I would agree with you in an otherwise normal year, in the year of layoffs, this policy may be the kind of fast-thinking that actually makes sense.
Or those from the wrong country with extreme green card waiting times, those who roll the wrong lottery number, or were working at companies that went under.
Man this applies to me. I got an bioengineering degree and had to go to the US to find work. I started at $30K in the US and now I'm up to over $350K/yr. Would love to come back to Canada but the horrible expereince of applying for over 100 jobs and no interviews was disheartening.
5 years to Canadian citizenship is a strong reason to stay. Indians on H1B in the US are looking at about 7-10 years for a Greencard, and then an additional 5 years after that for citizenship.
As a datapoint: I immigrated to the US in 2008. After 5 years on an F1 visa and 10 years on an H1B, I'm still at least 10 more years away from being freed from the immigration and visa hassle.
Could it be because you and I both know that FAANG companies' Canadian offices are basically places to stash those who cannot and will not ever get US visas, plus the occasional native Canadian who does not want to move to the US for family reasons?
> and overestimating how high salaries in the US are compared to Canada
As an American STEM worker in Canada: salaries are definitely higher in the US. Not even close in some cases, easily a 40%
difference for high-end roles. And while COL is high in SF or NYC, it's just as crazy in Greater Toronto or Vancouver but the salaries have not kept up.
Make no mistake, you can still do pretty well, but I could probably double my salary if I moved back to the big US East Coast city that I'm from.
Long-term I'm not optimistic about the US economy and culture, and my wife wouldn't be a fan, so I'm willing to miss out -- but sometimes it stings knowing what options are out there.
I feel you, it can be hard knowing that you could be making more money across the border.
However, I don't know if I agree with you about SF and NYC being equivalent to Toronto and Vancouver. They're just not. We complain about rent in Canada, but SF/NYC rent is another level of bullshit. And general expenses are definitely more expensive as well, I know I feel it whenever I travel to the US.
The other thing is that in most US cities you have to pay for a car. That's just not true in Canada. This makes up a huge part of the income gap.
First, your answer has nothing to do with my question to xbonez about why, despite his being stuck in the US H-1B morass, he did not mention planning to take up this offer.
Second, your supposition of my under/overestimation has nothing to do with the factual composition of FAANG and other US tech companies' Canadian offices. As I said, they are a) mostly people who cannot and will not ever get US visas (i.e., those who didn't make the first hurdle that xbonez was lucky enough to cross), and b) a few native Canadians who for one reason or another don't want to move to the US.
I am a US citizen who moved to Vancouver from the Bay Area three years ago.
I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half. Yes, Canada has its issues, but I'm overall happier living here than I was in the Bay. We have a regional train system that runs every 3-6 minutes instead of the 15-20 you get from BART and better accessibility to the outdoors (I can get to a ski mountain on the bus). I had better accessibility to healthcare in California, but here I don't have to worry about being out thousands of dollars for healthcare if I get laid off.
I work for a smaller tech company founded and headquartered in Vancouver, but I've seen the big tech companies making huge investments in this city over the last couple years. Amazon is in the final stages of building a new tower that will house 6000 employees [0] and Microsoft recently moved into 75,000 sqft of office space and is working on another 400,000 sqft [1]. The tech industry in this city is booming and it's certainly not all driven by companies stashing employees who can't get US visas.
Can totally understand wanting to leave the Bay Area for a Canadian city or any other developed place. Personally I went to San Diego instead, and I'm happy with that.
Yeah it's definitely an A-tier part of the US. I would've settled for pretty much anywhere outside the Bay Area, but SD is even better than the nice parts of LA I used to live in.
> I took a small pay cut when I moved (from ~135k USD to ~125k CAD, after a few years of raises I'm over 140k CAD now), but certainly not cutting my salary in half.
125k CAD is 94k USD. Going from 135k to 94k USD is not trivial, and Vancouver is pretty expensive as well. Skytrain is pretty awesome though.
The relative costs didn't change for me significantly, I was paying 2600/month USD in rent in the Bay and 2700 CAD in Vancouver, so while it was a significant paycut if you look at the value in USD, the day to day wasn't noticeable.
So in absolute terms, you took a paycut, and in relative terms, you still had to pay more? I hope you really like Canada, because that sounds like a bitch slap to say the least.
Again, literally not true. There's plenty of people that would hate to live in the US, and much prefer Canada. Plenty of immigrants. Those people work in the Canadian offices.
I don't know if you know this, but the rest of the world considers the US to be kind of a terrible place. Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
> There's plenty of people that would hate to live in the US, and much prefer Canada.
For what reasons?
Having worked with a lot of Canadians over the years, I've discovered that a significant number of them have this very negative perception of the USA that is not accurate. I can see a lot of these reasons being based on incorrect assumptions, especially when considering how educated upper-middle class people live.
I spent a lot of time in Toronto about 7-8 years ago and I couldn't imagine living there as an American. Everything is so expensive (housing in particular), traffic is terrible, the weather sucks, and my role in Canada paid like 25% less. The food was pretty good, but that's about it.
Sure mate, you can think the assumptions are incorrect, but you're clearly biased towards the US. Everyone else isn't. If a bunch of people are telling you they don't like your country, maybe believe them.
Sounds like you moved to Toronto and tried to live like you were in the US. No wonder you had a bad time.
I presume he's among those I wrote about, the ones stuck in Canada because they cannot and will not ever be able to get a US visa. And/or believes everything he reads in /r/worldnews and /r/politics.
Are you saying it's harder to get Canadian citizenship, and that's the only reason people go to the US instead? A lot of my college friends were Chinese-Canadian-Americans alleging that Canada was just their stepping stone to the US, but that's only my experience.
> A lot of my college friends where Chinese-Canadian-Americans alleging that Canada was just their stepping stone to the US.
Basically, yes. According to the Canadian government <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...> (table 1), for every two Canadian-born people moving to the US, one person born outside the US or Canada moves from Canada to the US. Given that during 2001-2006 20% or less of Canada were immigrants <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/g-a00...>, that implies that a Canadian resident born outside the US or Canada is about 50% more likely to move to the US than a Canadian native.
I've heard that New Zealand is similarly used by those seeking to move to Australia.
No, that's what the guy I'm replying to is saying. I disagree, plenty of people go to Canada as a first choice and love it there.
The Chinese Canadian thing does happen. It's usually 1st generation immigrants with very few ties to Canada and highly competitive families. They're parents usually barely speak English, and their entire families are still in China. Canada let a lot of Chinese immigrants come in during the 80s, and did very little to integrate them, and this is the result I guess.
I'm Canadian and every single Canadian with a computer science degree I know either has moved to the US or is actively trying to. We are essentially trading in highly skilled developers with low skilled ones, with some exceptions, of course
Well, I'm Canadian and I wouldn't move to the US over Canada so you can add me to the list! Now you know someone!
Also, most highly skilled Canadian devs I know just negotiate remote positions with US based companies. That's what I used to do: US salary living in Vancouver
> We are essentially trading in highly skilled developers with low skilled ones, with some exceptions, of course
The exact same thing happens across the board, as I cite elsewhere <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512411>: The best Canadian scientists move to the US, while an equal number in absolute terms of (presumably not the top) American scientists move to Canada.
>Sure, it might be better than home, but Canada is way better than both.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but historically, every year four Canadians move to the US for every American going the other way. According to the Canadian government, this has not changed in the 21st century <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/article/11287-...>.[1] According to Reddit, Texas is basically one step from Nazi Germany, but Texas is those Canadians' fourth-favorite state <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2010002/t/11287/tbl002...>; if you exclude Florida and its retiree-heavy flow, it is their third.
From the Canadian-government analysis:
* "Canadian-born persons who emigrated to the United States between 2000 and 2006 were relatively young", with a median age of 31. Unsurprisingly, "Nearly two-thirds of recent Canadian emigrants to the United States were employed".
* They are also younger than Canadians in general: "Lastly, Canadians who emigrated recently were also generally very young compared to the Canadian population where the median age according to the 2006 Census was 39.5."
* Canadian migrants have become younger in recent years, implying that retiring is further decreasing as a cause of migration: "While the median age of all Canadians residing in the United States was 49 in 2006, the median age was only 31 for Canadians who emigrated between 2000 and 2006. In addition, many of these recent emigrants were of prime working age: over one-half (approximately 53%) were between 20 and 44 years of age. Only around 10% were aged 60 or older."
* While retirement was an important factor for Canadian migrants to Florida and Arizona, those states only received under a quarter of all Canadian migrants to the US, with correspondingly higher median ages.
According to that above-mentioned survey, if you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance <https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...> that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat:
*16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US.
* They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best.
[1] It is true that from 2010 to 2012—during which the Canadian economy genuinely performed better than the US's—70,000 Americans moved north while only 20,000 Canadians moved south <http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/americans-mov...>, but this still puts the per-capita ratio considerably in the US's favor.
You claim I'm the one with Reddit comments, but you're the one vomiting a bunch of numbers to support your stance at me hahahaha
Anyway, I'm not denying any of those things. That still doesn't mean people think the US is a good place to live. They think they can make more money there, and the tradeoff is worth it.
But there's also plenty of people for whom that tradeoff is not worth it. Those people don't use Canada as a stepping stone, they just like living there. Because the US is kind of a shithole.
"Meatball Ron's Floridian dystopia" has one of the highest share of immigrants living there of any us state. 21% of the state is immigrants. Compare to 27% California, and 23% NJ/NY. Given that NJ/NY and CA have the two largest cities in the country which are natural destinations, I actually think florida looks all the more impressive. Miami is large, but not LA / NY large.
Look... we get you don't like him, but his state is home to more immigrants than most of the country, and pulls above his weight. How about we let the immigrants decide what state best suits them?
Doubt it. It’s not only about money, and Canadian salaries are improving dramatically. I moved to Canada in 2019, already have permanent residency with plans to get citizenship this year. There are many non-monetary reasons to live in Canada (healthcare, Childcare for $10/day, etc).
All statements are true. The thing that is glossed over and usually just dismissed is the impact on locals and impacts those immigrants have on wages and unemployment rate.
If we trying to maximize profit for the government - that's correct.
On another hand, extra people would make extra pressure on the housing market (especially well paid developers, especially on the overheated market in Canada).
So, that means inflation and it is bad for the regular citizens. If before they needed to work forever to afford their own housing, now they would have to work even more.
To play devil's advocate: why should I care what immigrants my government is desperate to have? My government would probably love to deport me, a native-born citizen with disabilities. I'm not as valuable as a H1-B AI developer. So by this logic, what right do I have to stay here?
Canada does have an issue with brain drain. It's kinda funny how the US has awful K-12 education but world-class university and post-grad opportunities, so immigrants come here once they're almost ready to be productive.
H-1B and other immigration paths make sense if the goal is to collect the most tax money. But the country has to (at least somewhat) work by the will of its people. Even many immigrants who have gained citizenship are opposed to easing the immigration policy.
Yeah, I'm thinking of private schools too, but not many people go to them. Otherwise I would say the education is decent. End of the day, average American graduating grade 12 probably didn't get much. Everyone I know from other countries loves the US except for the K-12 public education.
There are (or were?) second or third world countries where private is the majority and only really poor people go to public.
Canada is doing this wrong. What will happen in practice is someone who lives in the US with an H-1B will move to Canada to get that "easy" job, all the while applying for jobs in the US. As soon as they find one in the US, they will leave again. This solution is a band-aid and Canada will be used as a doormat, as it often is.
No, unless there is a worker shortage which would push up wages in the shorter term but reduce the number of jobs in the longer term as companies flee to countries that have available workers, or implement automation.
Basically there isn't a fixed number of jobs. As you add people you need more jobs to provide goods and services for those extra people.
Totally not a scheme to keep wages suppressed and avoid having to pay market rates to people who are already in the country, and have the skills needed.
It’s also not a big risk at all as the US has basically already vetted them by way of the H-1B visa application. Really it's a win win and as you say, minimal cost.
Purely economic points of view were also used to justify slavery. Many times with exactly the same arguments that are used for labour migration today.
I've heard your arguments time and time again, and sadly most people think like this. Even though any economic advantage of labour immigration is mostly reaped by big businesses.
A society has failed completely if it depends on abusing foreign labour to function. Let's not pretend that they are hiring the foreigners because it would be too expensive for them to hire locals of the quality they need. You can either side with the employers and think that this is great, or you could side with the people and think this is wrong.
I was born in a place were the school children are in the absolute top of the world in their knowledge as measured and awarded by Pisa. And I know from hiring local people, that the youth there are smart, hard working and honest. At the same time it is a place where the media together with politicians and businesses continuously blast out how there is a "shortage of competent labour" and that they need more immigrants. The truth is of course that they don't want to pay. I think it's just audacious to claim there is a shortage of competence, when there is nothing wrong with the stock material. There is a shortage of willingness to pay a decent salary for labour. And there is a fairly high amount of hatred from older generations towards younger generations. A hatred that I have never understood, but it is there out in the open.
Nobody has the right to cheap labour. If your business cannot turn a profit without paying lower than market rate salaries - you are simply a failure. You don't go demanding more immigrants so you can cut wages. You don't go demanding child labour so you can cut wages. You have to improve your business or admit that you are a failure and close shop.
No sympathy for businesses and sectors that cannot survive without abusing labour. They are not needed.
The talk about expensive education for native children is completely false, and just weird. Children are not expensive to educate anywhere in the world. Education turns expensive because corrupt practices of the governments that administrate education. The same government that then turns around and says the country needs more foreign labour because their own children are too expensive and incompetent.
Let's compare it with a farm. The owner of the farm notices that he can get more milk to sell by not letting the calves have any milk, letting them die instead. So soon he has no more cows and he goes on buying more cows from another farm. "Great! These cows start milking right away, no need to feed them for a year like I would have to with those annoying calfs"
And so on the farmer keeps milking his cows dry and just buying more from his neighbours. All the while people are complementing him for what an economic mastermind he is and how horrible those calfs where that were just drinking all his milk. That is the idea that has taken hold today.
In my opinion this will only worsen Canada's tech scene, compensation bands for tech workers, and the type of work done here, while undermining our university system and local talent development. It will just push us more in a mediocre "near shoring" direction and undermine actual local innovation and discriminate against homegrown talent.
Here's why:
Remember that Canadian graduates from engineering/CS university programs here can go directly south to the US without much hassle under a TN NAFTA VISA. They have a lot of advantages over H1B holders.
So what this really ends up being is an exchange between local talent -- who will go south to where the salaries are much better under TN -- for immigrant talent that currently struggles in the US.
Remember that the local talent was developed under subsidy by Canadian universities. Our tuition rates are a fraction of the US private universities -- while being very high quality. And while they're not free, they are highly funded by the gov't. So... indirectly, we are subsidizing US tech employers with Canadian taxpayer dollars.
I've heard numbers as high as 75%, 80% for the number of e.g. University of Waterloo (highly respected CS/SWE school) graduates who go south after graduating.
Meanwhile H-1B type candidates who come up to Canada will likely be doing it only as a stop-gap before returning to the US; because compensation here is on the whole not competitive with the US, the US was the destination they likely had in mind in the first place, and the selection of employers and interesting companies here is far worse.
And this will only worsen the compensation gap between here and the US by flooding the market with talent; which will thereby encourage more of our own homegrown talent -- who wants to get fair compensation -- to go south ... along with a bunch of these H-1B holders. Vicious circle.
The structure of things are such that Canada has already simply become on the whole a "landing pad" for talent before they relocate to the US. This only further entrenches that.
While I'd say this was not the case for Google Canada (where I worked before) it is the case for most other large US-based employers. And the local companies are on the whole choosing to underpay and take advantage of fresh-off-the-boat talent from overseas at lower cost.
Most shops here aren't doing much of interest, and the VC community here is fairly insular and conservative. The kinds of businesses that will generally succeed here will be places that can take advantage of large work forces of 'meh' imported talent, while the high quality talent finds ways to get to Silicon Valley.
It's also not a great deal for the immigrants who come here; they will find that cost of living here is terrible while compensation rates are lower. There's already a growing recognition/bitterness among many that the Canadian gov't is selling an image of prosperity and potential to skilled immigrants that it can't deliver on when they arrive. And it used to be that at least one could hope one's children would prosper, but the state of the real estate market here is such that most will never able to own a home or get out of debt.
That said, remote work may change this somewhat for some. At least it has for me, giving me a wider pool of (American) employers to choose from.
All in all, I don't think this is much of a good move for Canada. Canadian employers need to learn how to compete with the US for quality talent by offering quality interesting work with better compensation that matches the insanely high cost of living in cities like Toronto or Vancouver -- cities with Bay Area real estate prices & rent but with compensation ranges far lower.
You clearly haven't been following the Canadian tech market. Salaries have been SKY ROCKETING the last 3y in Tech. Very reasons:
- Due to COVID and people being able to work from anywhere/choosing Canada. As as well
- Companies tired of US immigration system
- etc.
100k for senior was good 5y ago, nowadays 300-400k is very doable
> These are exactly the kind of immigrants any country should be desperate to have.
People of often having a cultural, religious and moral background completely different to more-or-less original value Canadians? How will that work?
Oh i guess by appeasing everybody to create that multicultural society with less & less identity of its own, just the same bland globalized aftertaste. The major Canadian cities beside Montreal and Quebec are already taken.
"Original value Canadians" sounds like a dog whistle to me but ignoring that, I grew up in a melting pot city and all of the different cultures intertwining ends up creating a unique culture in itself. LA is different from NYC. Seattle is different from Toronto. All of these cities have many different types of immigrants co-mingling but none of them are the same.
Eh, democratic values and norms are not universally held and essential to the health of a republic. The proper question is whether the inbound population is statistically different from the native one; in America, I’d argue immigrants strengthen our democracy.
The people I grew up with in North Carolina are much less committed to democratic norms than the immigrants I currently live with and among. As well, those "native" folks were virulently anti-intellectual and tormented me for loving mathematics and working hard to learn mathematics and computers, something very few immigrants seem to find sensible.
Many immigrants do come in order to work extremely hard to gain prosperity for themselves and their families, which honestly seems pretty in line with US values, but many come explicitly for the culture of freedom, freedom to do and think as they choose without having to constantly battle neighbors relatives over every little thing unconventional thing they want to do. They have given up the convenience of living near family, often given up the social status of being top in their society, for freedom, as embodied in the US culture of fast cars, eccentric geniuses, rock and roll, artistic and intellectual freedom and expression, and so on. The very living avatars of the US thirst for freedom, free of the entitlement and fear of hard work that seems to be a common outcome for growing up here.
I don't think it's surprising in all this debate about free speech on the internet over the last few years, a lot of the 'anti-free-speech' enforcers that Americans complain about are immigrants. To be frank, some of them like Vijaya at Twitter and Sundar Pichai at Google have expressed views on free speech (not the legal concept... the social one) that rightfully shock most Americans. And yet, when I've asked other H1B holders about how they view 'free speech rights' (A very basic American value) many of them seem to agree that their ought to be legal limits on non-threatening political speech! Most are shocked to learn the United States has no laws against shocking the public conscience (which are common in Asia and Europe).
Being a second-generation immigrant of Indian-American parents myself, I see how different the H1Bs are compared to my own family. My family left India because we were mistreated. Now, the very people that mistreated them are coming here and bringing their regressive values with them. We value the rights we have in this country because they were denied to us in the old country. We honestly need less skilled migration, or if we do have skilled migration, we need to show that those skilled migrants are from a class that is being oppressed in their own country. The last thing we need are high-status foreigners with the means and social capital to bring their own foreign values. Better to have poorer immigrants, like my own family, who adapt to the culture. Moreover, those who fled their own country don't need to be re-terrorized here.
So many times my dad has been told to basically go to hell by other Indian immigrants because we're not the right caste. Once we had a wife of coworkers pretend to feel ill just speaking to my mother because of the caste difference; in professional environments! Hearing white people speak about all these things in the abstract is one thing. Having them actually play out is another. To come to this country, you should have to prove that you were not a racist, casteist nutjob in your own country. And realistically, many Indians are going to fail that test.
I was about to respond similarly - original Canadian (children of past immigrants) may need to deal with an influx of immigrants. Immigration has more benefits than downsides especially for aging countries with low birth rates and the ability to pull highly educated immigrants is a net positive for a country and I haven’t got to the cultural benefits that they bring.
They don’t co mingle though. They segregate themselves into “Mexican neighborhoods”, “Indian neighborhoods”, etc. They marry and socialize amongst themselves.
Ignoring the inherent racism in your repeated use of "they", the second generation absolutely joins the "melting pot". Say what you will about Texas, I'm not sure I've ever encountered more mixed race/mixed culture couples than I did during a week spent in Houston. And I've lived in at least four different major US metros in my lifetime.
And what is your contribution to addressing that? It is easy to call entire groups of people "they", but they are people to and maybe the rest of society needs to welcome them with an open heart before they'll integrate.
I think you're overestimating how sensitive immigrants are to this stuff. Comarriage is way more about preserving their family culture than it is about finding someone accepting. Religion and spoken-at-home language will matter.
Sizeable chunks of some immigrant populations simply won't melt, which IMO is fine in a place like Canada or the US. They'll still work with everyone else, and I feel like profession and class are both way bigger dividers than ethnicity anyway. A white SWE probably knows more Indian SWEs than white janitors.
Religion is somewhat a concern, but it's completely dwarfed by issues around the religiosity of non-immigrant populations.
Speaking a different language at home is a really good thing. Kids are going to pick up English through immersion anyway, so they're going to turn out bi/multilingual. That's great.
So, most of my extended family is from the Middle East, mostly Christian with some Muslim in-laws. My understanding is that those immigrant groups are far more religious and traditional than the average non-immigrant (though less than the extreme parts), which of course I'm fine with cause they're my own. But I'm not sure what you're expecting from them.
I'm not expecting anything from them! Just pointing out that the actual problem with religion in, say, the US, is white Christian nationalism, with fundamentalist Islam a distant second.
(By the way, I do think immigrants integrating into society is a moral good! I'm very left-wing and it's one of my most conservative beliefs. But the burden of that should be on the hegemonic/native-born population, not on immigrant communities.)
I can understand this sentiment in many countries, but Canada is in the Americas, where very few families have actually been settled for long. So I don't get it.
- the primarily French and British traders with First Nations?
- the colonizing religiously oriented Europeans that committed genocide (forcibly removing all native children from their homes & putting them in schools where many died of neglect)?
- the over 600 current First Nations governments?
- the refugees Canada took in, from the Underground Railroad to the Kosovo genocide to today?
- post World War II Italians, draft-dodging Americans, a huge Irish influx, and before all of that Chinese immigration (which primarily built the railroads used to this day)?
Btw, what do you consider original Canadian values? Do you mean the Chinese exclusion in BC, which has lasted all the way into 1947? The genocide against First Nations people? The ongoing neglect of missing and murdered First Nations women? The significant Ukrainian population (the largest out of ukraine)? The generous refugee policy? The anti slavery stance which welcomed Underground Railroad refugees? The national railroad (from sea to shining sea) built by primarily Chinese labor?
Well yeah, so what? America already doesn't care a lot which cultures the immigrants are from. They just try to make it work, uphold the Constitution, and don't overly pander to anyone.
> People of often having a cultural, religious and moral background completely different to more-or-less original value Canadians? How will that work?
Most are not interested in western culture, they come here specifically for the salary, while maintaining the culture and social networks from where theyre originally from.
And there are 1.5 billion Indians and 1.5 billion Chinese people.
How that will work is: as they become the dominant culture your country will simply become either China west or India west.
In America they let the population of an entire state every year of immigrants into America.
I’m just saying “an entire states worth of immigrants are let in annually” may actually be not a very large number because some states are sparse. It is impossible to tell if the number reasonable to worry over based on this measurement.
> Most are not interested in western culture, they come here specifically for the salary, while maintaining the culture and social networks from where theyre originally from.
This is sometimes true, but irrelevant, because their children adopt the local culture and are fully integrated. This is anti-immigration red herring.
Right I forgot all people who immigrated from China live in Chinatown. All of them. Millions of immigrants, all living in Chinatown in one part of downtown.
I don't think Canada replacing its native workforce with H1Bs who got purged from jobs in the US will do much, if anything, to change the problems in the US. H1B staff are so entrenched now in companies like Mastercard, Chase, Citi, BofA, etc that they are the ones that do the technical screening and interviews. As long as those companies can easily get fresh approvals for H1bs (and they give lots of money to elected officials to retain that privilege), the only "qualified" people these H1B screeners will pass are other H1bs.
I would never live in the US, but I'm free to be angry at what the last 20 years of provincial and federal governments have done to this country -- especially the under-regulated real estate market which is out of control relative to the rest of the G7 and driven cost of living through the roof.
Not so much for me as I'm mostly mortgage free at this point, but for my kids someday, I despair.
That, and underfunding the health care system and underbuilding infrastructure
It's a corrupt and mediocre country. But it wasn't always like this. And no, I don't blame Trudeau. Both major parties and the entire corporate & political class are implicated.
It's just catching up with other big cities. Owning a house in London/UK, SF/US, SYDNEY/AUS etc. has been out of reach forever. Canada has a lot of challenges, as have other countries.
People in that thread are saying their retirement plan is MAiD (the new Canadian assisted suicide program). People talk about being depressed, sobbing regularly over how unaffordable things have gotten.
There are more posts like this in every major BC city subreddit as well as /r/britishcolumbia and /r/canada
Yeah, I lived in Vancouver until last year too. I'm aware of that kind of post, and many of my friends who recently graduated from uni worry about that too, but it's a stretch to claim they're sobbing and depressed and in tears over it.
Second, nobody is saying their retirement plan is euthanasia other than as a joke, or a dogwhistle.
No, people in software are currently mostly not at that breaking point (though they might get there). Maybe even most fresh graduates in (most) other fields whose optimism hasn't been crushed by the unceasing grind of day-to-day life with no progression.
I assure you a lot of people do break down over how hopeless it feels here. And I don't even think people are joking about MAiD as a retirement plan (and the people relying on MAiD as a retirement plan are also the people who support MAiD)
It's the people in their 30s who have no savings (I'm one of them). People in their 40s who work for <$24/hr and have had to rent at near-market for the majority of their time, for one reason or another. People who have been paycheck to paycheck despite busting their asses every day, and maybe even getting a bachelors degree that did nothing for them (again, I realize CS grads have been relatively unscathed here to date)
Vancouver has gotten much worse even in the last year, in terms of homelessness, mental health issues, rent prices, and overall affordability, so maybe if you moved away > 1 year ago you aren't even aware of how bad it's gotten.
I see where you're coming from and I agree, Vancouver can definitely feel soul crushing if you're not making a lot of money. There's huge problems with the city right now.
But I also think it's important to maintain perspective. Nobody is talking about killing themselves in retirement. This is literally not a thing. Don't pretend it is, it'll only make you depressed and susceptible to conspiracy theorists.
Vancouver sucks, but it's also the most desirable city in Canada. There's a reason real estate is so expensive and keeps going up, it's because people keep moving in.
You can replace Vancouver with any other city and your post would remain the same. Again, go touch grass and plug out of reddit, that shit isn't good for your mental health.
Vancouver is a WONDERFUL city by 99% of the world standard, that's why so many people CHOOSE to live here. Just like Canada is an amazing country.
I've been in Vancouver for 10y now, have lived in many other cities across the first world and wouldn't want to be anywhere else. It has its challenges like any other city
> Vancouver is a WONDERFUL city by 99% of the world standard, that's why so many people CHOOSE to live here. Just like Canada is an amazing country.
Well.. I've been in Vancouver for 10 years now also.
The city has gotten much worse.
I'm relatively privileged in that I'm able to pay bills right now, but many people aren't. I have so many friends working for less than $25/hr who are one renoviction away from homelessness (they can't afford the market rate).
And I have recently-homeless friends who have decided to live in their car rather than compete for rent.
Several friends on PRs have decided to go back to their home countries (India, Australia). Lots of young people who don't have parents to fall back on have left the city. Other friends have retreated to the interior or the island (though the affordability of everywhere in BC is abysmal right now)
I'm not saying there aren't more people coming than going (Canada's aggressive immigration goals have ensured that), just that most people who get here find it's a struggle.
> Again, go touch grass and plug out of reddit, that shit isn't good for your mental health.
I'm basing this on the experience of people I know outside of the internet, but obviously that's not something I can link to in Hacker News.
Most people I know IRL don't consider Vancouver a desirable place to live now. Perhaps more desirable for weather than other Canadian cities, but not on par with the major cities of other first-world countries (again, I have friends from other countries who have said this is why they were going back).
Right, and most that I do know do consider, including people who migrated recently from other cities in the world -- Sydney/AUS, Madrid/Spain, SF/US, Lon/UK. So anecdotes vs anecdotes huh ?
Have you read other reddits ? If you read the Amsterdam one, London, NY, Sydney.. it's all the same. It's a GLOBAL problem.
Life is much less affordable now than it was 10y ago. Nothing unique to Canada.
Go ahead and find me as many doom and gloom posts about the economy in Amsterdam as here... I'll wait. Looking at the Amsterdam sub, it looks like the number of posts from people freaking out about work/homelessness/affordibility has been relatively consistent (and low volume) over the last 10 years. Vancouver on the other hand...
I'm not denying it's a "global problem" in that many cities are affected.
Yes, many other west coast cities are having a tough time (though at least jobs pay more relative to CoL in every other west coast city... even SF).
But cities like Amsterdam aren't, and people struggling in Australia are largely doing so for different reasons (politics / social attitudes rather than economy). The minimum wage there is much closer to a living wage. My friend who prefers Vancouver for nature/vibe is going back to Australia to work so he can save up some money to come back with.
Edit: Interestingly, people in the Amsterdam subreddit seem to think that Amsterdam is overall better/more affordable than Vancouver:
> "As a Vancouverite that left for Amsterdam 11 years ago, moving to Vancouver is a horrible idea"
For the last year, the only time I've seen posts in /r/vancouver (from people who live here) talking about it being a great city, the praise is tempered by caveats about how it's going to be a struggle unless you're wealthy
You're delusional. There are people like your friend in Australia moving to Canada for the same reason.
Amsterdam has a wait list for one year for rental, there's zero availability, rents are through the rough and salary is way lower Vancouver for any tech person, apart from their tax credit in the first 3y you move there the taxes are bigger than here too, ask me how I know ;)
Well.. I brought receipts. Why don't you try doing the same?
I'm not talking about tech specifically, just overall liveability/affordability for the average person trying not to die on the streets.
Is there some reason people in the Amsterdam sub seem pretty content and the people who have lived in both Amsterdam and Vancouver think Vancouver is unaffordable?
Reddit isn’t receipt, in fact is basically the opposite of signal. Go live in Amsterdam and draw your conclusions — I’ve lived around and know:work with people from all over
In fact I would recommend you looking at other reddits that aren’t as bad of an echo chamber of whining — British Columbia , Coquitlam , Surrey , new Westminster
I work for a FAANG company where highly-paid full-time engineers will still complain in a similar fashion (yes even mentioning suicide occasionally). Moral of the story, a small chunk of people will always complain.
I've got nothing against Canada, but I do prefer the US.
How do you think governments fund themselves? Though taxes on consumption and income, as well as other things.
All immigration is GDP positive and incrementally increases tax income. On the other hand they increase the costs of providing services and infrastructure, but that is not connected to immigration per se, but economic and population growth. Unsurprisingly if the government makes money it also incurs expenses.
If you don't like immigration, say so, but don't try to blame them for government finances. Locals having children has the exact same effect, but it's even more expensive for the government. But in wealth countries people aren't having enough children, so immigration policies are used to maintain growth. You could do without them, but your economy would tend to shrink or stagnate along with the level of population over time.
Your logic is that governments depend on funding themselves by recapturing money that they print for circulation? That's adorable. They do recapture money by way of taxes and redistribute it to themselves, but they aren't limited in their self-funding by recaptured domestic currency.
Your immigration GDP logic isn't accurate. Immigration only increases GDP insofar as it increases foreign currency influx to Canada. Does it do this? Sure. But not in the prior implied rate and manner. More people making less domestic money doesn't magically increase GDP.
Blaming my critique of "more domestic labor = more government profit" talking point, typed without a hint of irony, on anything else is lazy. Especially combined with a warning not to critique that point.
As a Canadian farmer I struggle to grow my operation because there are 100s of other farmers lined up in front of me, champing at the bit to do the same, with not enough resources to go around. I could more than double the size of my operation without breaking a sweat. I spend most of my days working in tech because there isn't enough farm work to do. In fact, nearly half of all farmers in Canada have an off-farm job, with 68% of them working full-time off the farm.
Those who have bitten off more than they can chew likely think we need more farmhands, but they could also downsize and let other farmers pick up the slack.
As the environment policies kick in many farmers won't agree so someone has to take over.
Similar to what's happening in cities where companies can't find people as many people left, Toronto, so all your retail is immigrants. If someone grew up here 20 years ago and was making minimum wage they could buy a house, that same job doesn't even pay for a bachelor today, they have no incentive to stay.
Some of the policies that are passing will reduce your profits significantly and someone from another country will be willing to work for less.
What's the difference between a farmer and a farmhand? Like, why do you work in tech instead of being a farm hand on your surplus time? I assume since you are experienced, they'd offer you a good salary? Or is the matter not that they need farmhands, but more that they need cheap labour to exploit?
A farmer owns a farm business. A farmhand works for a farmer.
While it is not completely unheard of for farmers to also be farmhands, there is difficulty in that the farms will generally share the same busy seasons. Meaning that your employer will want you on the job most especially during the times you will want a vacation to work on your own farm.
For me, it is also questionable how much I want to help out the competition. While farmers are generally good spirited and try to work together for a greater good, there is still only so much resources to go around, and I want to see my business thrive. I'd jump in and help in a pinch, but to make it a career...
But it is also true that tech will pay me more than other farmers will. That certainly seals the deal.
That's what I'm getting at a little bit. Everybody wants to be the business owner and then demand that cheap labour should materialize, ready to work for them. Ideally working just during the season when they're needed and then get lost.
They need a constant stream of desperate people to abuse in order for that business model to work out - and I guess that's why farming historically has been the main industry for slavery. Or a family business where the profits of cheap labour one day ends up in the hands of the labourer when he inherits the farm.
> Everybody wants to be the business owner and then demand that cheap labour should materialize, ready to work for them.
I don't know if the labour is cheap, exactly. Tech is kind of an outlier among few other careers in the level of pay. I expect being a farmhand would still be my second best choice in terms of pay opportunity.
Of course, being the owner is more fun. The thrill of the gamble is like no other.
I'm sure that what you typed here is non-sequitur. Taxation is not government profit. If you have the ability to print unlimited IOUs for other people to exchange for goods and services, and you recapture a portion of what you distributed through taxation every time a transaction occurs, did you "profit"? No. You shrunk supply to raise the value of your IOUs. Taxation of domestically derived income is almost entirely a money supply mechanism. The government doesn't need to create more salaries to do this. They could simply encourage higher salaries (like tightening immigration), and if that wasn't enough they could raise taxes. They have other mechanisms of shrinking supply, as well. While tax money is also redistributed back to various government functions, governments commonly print non-tax money to fund their functions.
Labor pool immigration, in the context of an abundant labor pool, is what it has always been: weakening of labor bargaining, undercutting of market salary, and a separate slew of political motivations.
100m by 2050 reads like incoming feudalism. Best of luck with it.
Taxes have to be increased slowly or people complain. So instead of increasing Federal taxes we increase the gas tax so you see it in the cost of your food.
It's not so easy just to raise taxes. Raising salaries doesn't increase output, only gdp.
Taxation was tongue in cheek, but moreso our strategy is tax the blood out of immigrants to keep the country going, as really when you first come here, you don't earn much.
I am in a similar situation in a EU country, where I just live and pay taxes to, my income comes from a company located in another country.
The inefficiencies of the country where I live and the quasi-xenophobic sentiment towards foreigners (mostly Americans foreigners) made me decide to plan to leave.
I agree with your points, and I think that Canada will have to work smartly to retain those people otherwise they’ll end up leaving.
Canada won't do the work needed to retain them. Talking to lots of people it's mostly the combination of unaffordable housing (Canada has a far larger housing crisis than the US does with our two largest metro areas containing 25% of the country's population not having non-condo homes under $1 million) and high tax rates. People have some tolerance for paying tax rates in the 42-44% range plus sales tax plus property tax if their life is overall affordable, but when home prices are staggering high and that life becomes out of reach people move somewhere better. You can't fix housing when you want to import people faster than you can build homes for them (and Canada wants to grow to 100M people over 50 years) and you can't lower taxes when you want to pay for things without crushing debt and Canada seems to want more government programs not less.
The Canadian government still holds crown land that they will give away for free to anyone willing to settle it. That provides an option of last resort. Any location in the country that compels one away from free has got to be worth it. While one may complain, as people love to do, they are still pulling out their purses because they know it is worth every penny.
Should the balance change, people will leave for greener pastures before worrying about rioting. Canada's whole legacy is built on people moving around when certain locations become too expensive. Its ancestral people have done it over, and over, and over again. There is no reason to think this time is different.
It's called homelessness and the american republicans want you to feel like it's because of lax law enforcement instead of, you know, the median salary in my city not being enough to actually live in the city.
You probably haven't even heard about my city, because it has only 60k ish people and still runs into that problem.
"But but but but zoning and developers can't build cheap housing because they aren't allowed to!". Funny, that didn't stop them from building hundreds of units of assisted living facilities right in some of the most expensive land they could find. Maybe it's because, in a capitalistic system, it's more incentivized to build a structure that can charge the state $12k a month per resident that they neglect than one that can charge each resident $2k a month because they actually have to be able to afford it.
Meanwhile grandma doesn't even know where they are.
Canada's population is already 23% immigrant, highest of any G7 country. There may be less of that 'quasi-xenophobic sentiment towards foreigners' than where you are.
> Canada's population is already 23% immigrant, highest of any G7 country. There may be less of that 'quasi-xenophobic sentiment towards foreigners' than where you are.
Australia is even more immigrant than Canada – around 30% overseas born.
But I think part of why Australia (and maybe Canada too) have less of a problem with xenophobia than some countries with less immigrants – greater selectiveness in the immigration intake, and skewing it more towards highly skilled/educated people.
If you take in 100,000 university graduates from China and India, versus 100,000 random refugees and economic migrants from anywhere at all – it is unsurprising the former cause significantly less social problems than the latter, and those social problems tend to fuel xenophobia.
I’ve heard before immigrants take quite negative stances on “illegal”/“undocumented”/“irregular” immigration, saying “I had to jump through all these hoops to come here, I have no sympathy for people who break the rules instead”. Is that xenophobia?
Years ago, I went on a business trip to the US, and while there an Indian-American colleague said some very Islamophobic things to me. I guess he probably brought some of that with him from India, although certainly there would have been things in the US to reinforce it. Also, he was a 9/11 survivor and this was only a few years later, so that was likely a factor too. There is some obvious overlap between Islamophobia and xenophobia - although not all Muslims have an immigrant background (converts), and there are billions of non-Muslim foreigners
Of course. But it might mean that the 77% of the population that is born in Canada is more accustomed/acclimatized to immigrants. They are not a weird/rare thing, and so they are accepted/liked by a bulk of the population.
The majority of costs a person will typically have on a country are their initial K-12 education, and their health care costs later in life. Immigrants like these will never cost the government that first major cost.
At the same time, they are far more likely to have higher than median salaries when employed. That means higher taxes paid.
So from a purely economic point of view, an H-1B immigrant is a perfect profit center for government taxes.
Meanwhile a Canadian who gets their K-12 education here, gets a highly government subsidized post-secondary degree, then moves to the USA to work and pay taxes there is a huge loss, economically.