As of end-September 2024, there were only 29 immigrants who had been approved  under the Skilled Trades category & awaiting the issuance of visa. The govt narrative of tackling the housing shortage via immigration was empty talk.

RESPONSE V/S REACTION

It was a little over one year ago that Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced the first of the decisions that fall under the broad title of ‘beating a hasty retreat’. This particular announcement was about reducing the intake of international students by 35%. Exactly one week prior to this announcement, I had appeared on the podcast of Clyde Do Something to discuss, at length, the multiple types of corruption, exploitation and malfeasance in the international student area that were happening out in the open, but that were being ignored (perhaps studiously) by both the mainstream media and the political class. Our discussion went on for over one and half hours, and surprisingly in the current climate known as ‘attention economy’, garnered over 130,000 views in a couple of days (it stands at over 184,000 views as of today).

The issue of international students had been featuring in public debates (meaning, on social media; MSM is largely redundant in the regard, sadly) for well over a year by that time. My first brush with this goes back almost 4 years, when suicides by international students from India, mostly in the Greater Toronto Area, were going unreported in MSM. Then, in November 2023, I posted on X an image (with permission) of a sign outside a food bank in Brampton saying ‘No international students’. This went viral and many MSM outlets picked up the story – and tried to make it about ‘discrimination’, which it manifestly wasn’t.

HOUSING TROUBLES

Over the months following Minister Miller’s above-referred announcement, the immigration story had moved to focus on the issue of its impact on housing costs, which were soaring to unprecedented heights. The federal government was still in denial, but opposition leader Pierre Poilievre started hammering on this, and his messaging resonated strongly among people across a wide range of demographics.

The Trudeau government’s response consisted largely of co-opting Mr. Poilievre’s ideas (such as tying infrastructure funding to municipalities with more homes being approved by them), albeit with suitable modifications to enable laying a claim (however tenuous) to originality. However, when it came to their (quite frankly, boastful) claim that they would ‘build 4 million homes by 2031’, there was the pesky issue of the physical resources required for this ambitious enterprise. In a podcast episode, I discussed the challenges of raising the amount of additional financial capital required for doubling the number of homes being built (see this YouTube link); the TL;dr version of this podcast is that it is well nigh impossible.

A lot of people pointed out that the labour force required in order for this objective to be met simply wasn’t available. Paradoxically, this caused the debate to veer in the direction of demanding (or justifying) even more immigration – this time, of tradespeople. The argument was that getting a bunch of immigrants in the skilled trades is the answer to the housing shortage, as it would help us to speed up construction of more homes. Let us skip over the obvious defect in this argument, viz., that the newly arrived tradespeople would need to live somewhere – but the homes where they (and hopefully, their families) could live did not exist yet. However, IF we take the argument to be valid at face value, there was an additional problem – one that I don’t think has been addressed (or even mentioned) by many: the number of tradespeople that we get as new immigrants is vanishingly small, and in comparison to the vast armies of these that we would need, is essentially zero. To my knowledge, only the X account (now deactivated by the owner) called Justice Queen dug up the data, which I mentioned on Clyde Do Something’s podcast. That number was a grand total of 251 immigrants in Skilled Trades category over a period of two years.

Recently, another person obtained data via ATIP on this aspect of immigration, which I am reproducing below (with permission); as you can see, as of September 30, 2024, the total number of immigrants in the Skilled Trades category awaiting the issuance of visa was 29. In addition, there were 94 other applications in the pipeline (82 in the ‘pending eligibility decision’ stage and a further 12 in the ‘pending final decision’ stage). Notably, these numbers aren’t materially different from the numbers in 2023.

Before we rush to judgement, however, it is important to emphasize that the number of applicants in the pipeline on a single day is not necessarily a conclusive indication of how many applicants get approved in one year. But a quick look at the numbers in the other categories gives us a good sense of how puny the number in the Skilled Trades category is. For example, the corresponding numberin the Family Class category is 29,378, i.e., over 1,000 times larger than in the Skilled Trades category. The number for refugees (all the categories put together) is 20,908, which is 721 times the number for the Skilled Trades category.

GHALIB’S WISDOM

This situation reminds me of a couplet by the great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib:

manzar ek balandi par aur hum bana sakte

Arsh se idhar hota, kash! ke makaan apna”

I could have constructed a tall visage

If only my house was on this side of the sky”

The debate on immigration has once again moved into other directions. With the helping hand of MSM, the Trudeau government is able to advertise the various and frequent changes it makes to the policy, but the same MSM is disappointingly – but not surprisingly – not too keen to delve into analysis of the issue. This is a disservice, because unless we are able to sort out the immigration mess, we won’t be able to improve the state of affairs on a whole host of fronts, such as housing, cost of living, healthcare, jobs, infrastructure and more. In other words, sorting out immigration policy is the equivalent of bringing Ghalib’s house to this side of the sky.

DIGGING OUT

As many people have been observing rightly for a long time, ‘we aren’t going to build our way out of this hosuing crisis’. Yes, we can take steps to increase the labour force in the Skilled Trades via various means, but (a) it is going to take time, and (b) it is blindingly obvious that the reckless immigration policy of the past few years has created a grave imbalance between the supply of and demand for housing, so in the short term, the only recourse is to reduce the population of temporary residents in Canada. I know that this is (still) a touchy issue for some, but as I have been saying for years, the current situation is a bad bargain even for the temporary residents. In fact, when it comes to temporary foreign workers (which includes international students, by virtue of Motion M-44), the United Nations has officially called it ‘contemporary form of slavery’. Therefore, I contend that it is in the best interest of all concerned that we take a cold, hard look at whose presence in Canada is mutually beneficial and whose is not. The latter cohort will have to leave, if only for their own better future which, from the looks of it, lies somewhere other than in Canada.

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