Amnesty for illegal immigrants is a bad idea

The coconut model: a hard exterior and a soft interior

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen

Rise of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric to Blame for Liberals’ Delay on Giving Undocumented Workers’ Status, Advocates Say. Emily Leedham, Press Progress, July 2024.

I don't think amnesty ever made sense. It would be incredibly politically toxic, especially with immigrants. Immigrating to Canada is not easy. For people who followed all the rules and went through the immigration process legally, hearing that people who bypassed the process and overstayed a temporary visa can now stay would be completely infuriating.

Canadian institutions depend on trust and cooperation. One of the most corrosive ways to undermine people's trust in our institutions and their willingness to cooperate is to make them feel that they've been played for suckers.

Joseph Heath, in a 2017 talk on Canadian support for immigration, observes that it depends on a number of underlying factors: Canadian support isn’t unconditional. In particular, Canadians are quite hostile to illegal immigration. He suggests that an appropriate goal is the “coconut model”: a hard exterior (strong border control and limited use of temporary foreign workers) and a soft interior (accommodating cultural pluralism).

Heath also notes that historically, Canada hasn’t relied heavily on temporary foreign workers, which has helped to limit illegal immigration. People overstaying their visas is a significant source of illegal immigration.

If Canadians are not willing to support amnesty, and temporary residents are not willing to leave, then deportations are the logical outcome.

I think at this point, the most important priority is to re-establish control over immigration and temporary residents. The federal government is currently imposing province-wide caps on international student numbers and aiming to reduce total temporary residents by -200,000 per year. Canadian public support for immigration has already been severely strained by the housing shortage.

What happens next?

To summarize options:

(1) Cut further the number of new temporary residents, in particular temporary foreign workers and international students.

(2) Give permanent residence to temporary residents. A lot of them are low-skilled; this would mean lowering requirements for temporary residents, and cutting the number of other permanent resident applications to zero for two to three years.

(3) Make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to work without a valid permit.

I'd suggest that there's some room to reduce the number of new temporary foreign workers. Temporary foreign workers make sense for specific roles such as seasonal agricultural work. But if we need more workers in specific areas, such as healthcare or construction, we should be admitting them as permanent residents rather than temporary workers.

In April 2022, as the economy reopened, the federal government loosened restrictions on temporary foreign workers, presumably because they were worried about post-Covid labour shortages aggravating inflationary pressure.

The US picture in December 2021

But we’re now in a different situation. The economy is now cooling (tighter monetary policy worked!), and inflation is down.

There's a distinction between pro-business policy and pro-market policy. I can understand why businesses such as restaurants would want to be able to continue hiring low-skilled, low-wage temporary foreign workers. But given the cooling economy, and the fact that we have a severe housing shortage, I don't understand how it would make economic sense. Mike Moffatt argues for ending the low-wage temporary foreign worker program entirely, other than agriculture.

I understand that there may be businesses like coffee shops which can't survive when there's few workers willing to accept a low wage - they can't raise their prices enough to pay higher wages and stay in business, and independent businesses are the most vulnerable (compared to the big chains). But that doesn't mean that keeping them going should be driving labour-market policy.

In addition, there's a connection between housing costs and low real wages. When housing is scarce, housing costs are high, driving down real wages. So there's a potential addiction dynamic, where a short-term fix aggravates the underlying problem: housing is scarce, so real wages are low, and we get a labour shortage. Businesses push for more temporary foreign workers, which aggravates housing scarcity, driving down real wages further.

It sounds like the major constraint on reducing the number of new international students further is that it would cut income for universities and colleges even further. In the short term, there may still be some room to cut. Ontario's allocated 96% of its permits to public institutions, but BC's allocated roughly half to private institutions.

Christopher Jencks suggests that it's particularly important to put the onus on employers to make sure that employees are legally able to work. The Immigration Charade, New York Review of Books, 2007.

There are two basic strategies for limiting the number of illegal immigrants in the United States: policing the border and policing employers. Policing the border antagonizes people who have little political influence. Policing employers antagonizes people who have quite a lot of influence. Thus while immigration reform usually promises more policing of both the border and employers, it usually delivers bigger changes along the border than at worksites.

People move where the jobs are. If there's few jobs where illegal immigrants can work without authorization, they'll need to leave - it's difficult to survive without income.

A subset of this problem is cracking down on scams where workers are basically paying employers for permits to work in Canada.

The human cost

Some discussion from another forum:

• There was a major surge of additional temporary residents from 2022-2024, maybe 1.8M.

• Perhaps half of temporary residents will leave on their own. (This is based on past history, e.g. international students from China would typically leave after graduation, and it may or may not hold in the future.)

• So then at least 900K temporary residents will be competing for a relatively small number of additional temporary-resident-to-permanent-resident spots (maybe 50K?) each year

Expect the major news story in 2025 will be “Kicked out: millions came seeking a new future through a Canadian education, now they are being shown the door”

And:

What's also just generally upsetting to me here is that I know tons of people whose whole existence in Canada has been defined by the precariousness of their status here. I get that you can argue about what numbers and trends are appropriate but blanket statements that ignore their human experiences make me sad and angry and I wish we wouldn't do that. All of these people came here and immediately contributed to society.

If we don't want to find ourselves in this situation again in the future, where we have to be the bad cop - preventing people from working legally, cracking down on people working illegally, deporting people who desperately want to stay - then we cannot and should not be admitting large numbers of people as temporary residents, whether as workers or as students.

More

• Joseph Heath, Canadian exceptionalism, 2017. Describes the factors underlying Canadian support for immigration. It’s a mistake to think that it’s unconditional (the “we’re just great” explanation).

• Christopher Jencks, The immigration charade, 2007. Describes the situation and reform efforts in the US.

• The economic case against low-wage temporary foreign workers. Fabian Lange,

  Mikal Skuterud, and Christopher Worswick, April 2022.