Vibes Based Immigration Policy

When you’re told growth is everything, don’t be surprised when everyone chases growth.

There’s a lot to what’s going on in the USA, and Los Angeles in particular right now. Declaring emergencies seems to be the everything proof shield that allows a democracy to become a dictatorship, maybe there should have been a higher bar to declaring one. Democracy at work. Cracking down that hard on immigration probably makes no rational economic sense.

There’s a general problem with declaring “immigrants bad” that applies across the entire developed world. People aren’t having enough children to replace themselves, and they haven’t in a long time. 2.1 births per woman is regarded as the replacement metric, Canada dropped below that in 1972.

Enter a lot of people trying to figure out why. Most summaries will declare multiple reasons that are likely all true; too expensive, lack of time, lack of interest. It’s likely an area that needs super deep dives to avoid being completely off base or simplistic. But if I were to get simplistic, after years of fighting for their rights women were offered a choice and they took it. If you don’t want kids, that became an option available to you. Add to that children becoming an economic drain on their parents as the economy and norms changed (bye free labour). A rant for another day is how I don’t think we’re doing many people a favour by letting kids under the age of 16 work at Burger King.

To be extra clear, that is all a good thing. I will not advocate for a JD Vance “take away rights to make line go up” approach. Women and children shouldn’t be miserable so that we can perpetuate that misery until the death of our planet or sun. Whichever comes first.

I bet some men didn’t like to be forced to have kids either, although they would have had an easier time getting away from it. Why don’t people think of men?

If a family in the 1950s could support a family on one salary maybe women entering the workforce should have either made those households rich or both spouses have more time off. You might create a natural circumstance for people who wanted kids to have more. That’s kind of our best case now, if you want kids we can make it easier for you to have more. But the shareholders require value creation so get back to work.

And stock photo families seem to be having so much fun.

That preamble was all to lead to the natural outcome, without immigration we start dropping population pretty fast. Ask any politician, federal or provincial, if they want population to go down. With NS just a bit over 1 million people at the moment, Houston had previously said he had a goal of hitting 2 million by 2060. That’s some boom time growth, I’m just not sure what the boom is yet.

Growth is good. Because the economy just dies if it doesn’t grow. That’s surely sustainable. So we need people moving to NS, but at the national level the other provinces want the same thing. So the country needs to bring in people to avoid a winners and losers situation.

There is likely ideal immigration targets. I think it’s been worked out to something like “as many as possible, until people get mad”. Was it too many in the fallout of COVID? How should I know? In some places probably, in others it didn’t feel like it. It’s quite possible a lot of people got caught up in the “no one wants to work anymore” trend of the time. If Burger King is out of cheap labour the government is going to hear about.

It’s vibes all the way down, because if we put the effort in we could probably handle it. Enough housing, enough infrastructure, enough support and high numbers would probably be fine. But just bringing people in with no plan probably doesn’t work in places that are struggling to handle existing growth. But at least remember the people here are human beings. I’ve even been told the people everywhere else are human beings, they might even think using the same flawed brain processes as me. I just don’t want my brain to start thinking the cruelty is the point.