Immigration benefits immigrants economically, but less since the strong immigrant surge of the past 30 years

Immigration benefits immigrants economically, but less since the strong immigrant surge of the past 30 years

It is obviously a truism to claim that immigrants are economically advantaged. Their income in Canada is generally more than what they would get in their country of origin. On the other hand, relative to natives, their economic performance has deteriorated markedly since 1980.

The detailed historical analysis of this evolution produced in 2011 by Professors Beach and Green, of Queen's University, and Worswick, of Carleton University, for the CD Howe Institute attributes to the sharp increase in levels of international immigration to Canada since that date a significant part of this deterioration in the relative performance of immigrants in the labor market. They point out that the more immigrants Canada accepts, the less the last on its list have adequate education or training. According to them, an increase in the annual number of immigrants of 100,000 people in Canada (therefore, 20,000 in Quebec) would result in a decrease of $ 1,500 in the average annual salary gain of newcomers. It should therefore be noted that too many immigrants can adversely affect the wages of immigrants and, consequently, their economic productivity.

Natives are unlikely to gain significant economic benefit from immigration

What is the consequence of immigration for the host population now? The scientific literature has great difficulty in clearly proving that it derives an economic advantage from it. Professors Boudarbat, University of Montreal, and Grenier, University of Ottawa, produced in 2014 an overview of relevant research on this question. It goes without saying that with more immigrants working, the total volume of economic production increases. On the other hand, the value of what they produce, immigrants receive in their own income. It ends up in their pockets and not in those of the natives. As a first approximation, logically, it is therefore the immigrants themselves who capture the increase in GDP that they produce.


The general conclusion that emerges from the statistical studies reviewed by Boudarbat and Grenier is consistent with common sense: the gain that natives derive from immigration, if there is one, is unlikely to be very large. I have no hesitation in saying that organizations like the Conference Board of Canada claim that the prosperity of Canadians depends crucially on immigration and that advocate an immediate increase in the annual number of immigrants to 400,000 (more than 1% of the Canadian population, which would make 90,000 in Quebec) are wrong. In this case, the Board acts as a lobby and not as a scientific body.

Immigration is a net cost to state finances

In fact, if we measure the impact of immigration on state finances, we must conclude that immigration represents in total a net cost and not a net economic benefit for the host population. Most of the existing research leads to this conclusion (for example, Dubreuil and Marois 2011; OECD 2013; Grady and Grubel 2015). This is because the value of public services received by immigrants over their lifetimes is greater than the cumulative amount of taxes that immigrants pay to governments.

For example, Figure 3 shows that the unemployment rate of new immigrants is twice (in Toronto) to three times (in Montreal) higher than that of native-borns. Government spending on income support is bound to be all the more important for immigrants on arrival and then during their long period of integration into the labor market. The figure also shows that integration is slower, and therefore more onerous for governments, in Montreal than in Toronto.

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Immigration is not a solution to the problem of an aging population

Among the presumed economic benefits of immigration to the host population is the widespread belief that it is a solution to the problem of an aging population. This idea does not hold water. Aging is expensive because it means the senior population, which needs financial support, health care and social services, is growing faster than the working-age population that pays taxes to fund these public services. increased. A simulation by researchers at the CD Howe Institute (Banerjee and Robson 2009) demonstrated that preventing the elder / youth dependency ratio from increasing as predicted by Statistics Canada would require that the annual number of immigrants to Canada be immediately multiplied. by 5. In Quebec, this would mean a colossal increase which would reduce international immigration from 45,000 to 2