[This article was originally published on mises.ca]
Ottawa types try to make themselves look busy with “immigration
reform” every now and again, so as to convince the voting public that
they look out for their safety, money and future. In the twelve years
since I landed in Canada I can recall at least three or four such cycles
of alleged attempts to remove application backlog and elevate the
“quality” of immigrants by improving the selection process. Despite the
tugging and rumbling, one thing never changes: the result. Presently we
find ourselves in the midst of one of these non-events. Yet, the fact
that immigration reform never brings authentic change should not deceive
the reader into believing that there is nothing wrong with Canada’s
immigration policy. The present article will attempt to point out but a
few of these shortcomings and offer remedy. In fact, the immigration
system is an immoral regime that only serves to perpetuate the Welfare
State while keeping wages artificially high by barring potentially
useful and cheaper labor to enter. The system provides a series of
negative incentives which turn off the most desirable potential
immigrants, while encouraging bureaucratically inclined, proponents of
Statism.
The Immigration Process in a Nutshell
Non-Canadians are required to obtain residency and working permits
through Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). This is a typical
bureaucratic agency, thus, the immigration process is long, expensive
and intrusive. The CIC regime is absolutely unnecessary, for
“officialism is stupid,” wrote Herbert Spencer. Individuals can judge
whether to immigrate or not based on their successes or failures, since,
[u]nder the natural course of things each
citizen tends towards his fittest function. Those who are competent to
the kind of work they undertake, succeed, and, in the average of cases,
are advanced in proportion to their efficiency; while the incompetent,
society soon finds out, ceases to employ, forces to try something
easier, and eventually turns to use. (The Man Versus The State, p.138)
The nature of the process vis-à-vis the agency gives advantage to
bureaucratically inclined, rather than people of initiative. In normal
cases it takes two to three, and often up to five years from the filing
of an application with Citizenship and Immigration Canada to the
approval of a Permanent Resident Visa, at which point candidates are
allowed to land in Canada, having bestowed upon them the right to work,
access to public education and healthcare, and every other social
program. The application process is conducted over mail correspondence
and through immigration lawyers based in Canada, which the applicants
engage with from their home countries.
Most contemporary immigrants come from the less developed regions of
Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, i.e. poor countries. As a result of
Canada’s tough visa regimes with countries where immigrants come from,
very few get an opportunity to visit Canada before making their decision
to apply for immigrant visas. Persons visiting Canada on visitor visas
are positively discouraged from indefinitely extending their stay if
they find a career opportunity. Rather, they are forced to exit Canada
and commence an application process from their home country. Thus, a
large percentage of those who choose to immigrate do it
either with only anecdotal knowledge of Canada or are the sort of
persons who make rash decisions. Applicants are submitted to a series of
health and language proficiency examinations, and asked very personal
questions relating to income, wealth and family ties. In addition, and
unbeknownst to them, applicants even get “checked out” by Embassy
personnel hired by the Canadian government. Actually, this is standard
procedure in any type of visa request.
The Canadian public is assured, however, that the army of bureaucrats
employed in the CIC supplies them only with the best and most urgently
needed “new Canadians.” In an earnest embodiment of bureaucratic hubris,
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney often expresses
his belief in his Ministry’s employees’ “ability to focus on new
applicants with skills and talents that our economy needs today.” One is
left befuddled as to how it is that bureaucrats far removed from the
actual labor marketplace get to learn of its ever-changing needs so as
to anticipate these needs through a process that lasts at least 24
months.
The CIC’s website boasts several different categories under which
applicants can enter themselves. One of these categories—The Federal
Skilled Worker Program—is at the center of the current “reform.” A
brief description explains that
skilled workers are selected as permanent
residents based on their education, work experience, knowledge of
English and/or French, and other criteria that have been shown to help
them become economically established in Canada.
However, no indication is given as to how the CIC has come to reach
its conclusions on which criteria produce the best immigrants, versus
which qualities are undesirable. It is beyond doubt, however, that the
skills and talents needed by our economy today are different than those
which were needed yesterday, and very probably different than those that
will be in need tomorrow. Any notion that bureaucrats can anticipate
these needs years in advance is nothing more than a myth. If CIC
personnel could indeed make the sort of forecasting that Minister Kenney
claims that they do, these folks would not be staffing a government
agency, instead they would be the most capable of entrepreneurs on the
market.
Immoral Institution
As immigration barriers maintain a jurisdiction underpopulated, they
serve the purpose of artificially keeping wages up. This is the reason
why the labor unions were instrumental in the cessation of open
immigration policies in North America in the peak of the Progressive
Era. North America’s “working class” united in the ultimate act of
hypocrisy in preventing their workers of the world brethren to join them
in success. Those “on the inside” lack a moral right to prevent others
from getting the same opportunity previously given them. If people seek
to relocate into a different country, they only aim to pursue the best
opportunities for their given set of skills. If a new person arrives in a
country, he is not owed anything he will not earn with his labor or
purchase for money previously earned.
Furthermore, as professor Ludwig von Mises concluded in Omnipotent Government, by preventing newcomers to enter our market, we only hamper the potential improvement of our own standard of living.
The free mobility of labor tends toward
an equalization of the productivity of labor and thereby of wage rates
all over the world. If the workers of the comparatively underpopulated
countries seek to preserve their higher standard of living by
immigration barriers, they cannot avoid hurting the interests of the
workers of the comparatively overpopulated areas. (In the long run,
moreover, they hurt their own interests also.) (p.284)
As Canadian companies are forced to pay higher wages due to
underpopulation, they become less competitive on the market. In turn
this leads to the lowering of Canadians’ standard of living.
The immorality of this system is further exposed in the manner the
immigration process dehumanizes the applicants by treating them like
inert objects whose entire beings can be put down on a few pages of
standardized forms. Even animals in this country are seen as deserving
of “human rights,” and of having personality characteristics; yet,
actual human beings who were unfortunate enough to be born outside its
borders are treated as having fewer human traits than do house pets.
Furthermore, Adam Smith ascertained
that “[t]he property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the
original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and
inviolable.” Thus, to prevent people from exploiting their own labor
for the purpose of improving their own condition by means of imposing
rules requiring work permits is surely as immoral as depriving them of
their liberty—which in and of itself is equal to depriving a person of
their life.
No person should have the sort of decision making power over the fate
of another as that given to immigration officers the world over. The
principles of liberty and equality in rights forbid such constructs. The
absurdity of the immigration regime is all the greater when one
realizes that the bureaucrat decides on the matter of who gets to enjoy
that which he had no part in creating: the abundance of the market,
which operates despite of him, not because of him! “[T]he
socialist is no different from the millions of bureaucrats who now
infest the social order; the bureaucrat is, like the socialist, a ruler
by natural selection,” wrote Frank Chodorov.
He went into detail, exposing the true nature of the opponent of the
free market, the socialist in the official role of a bureaucrat, thereby
explaining why bureaucratic processes are as they are:
I have never met a dedicated socialist
who did not consider himself a leader—if not at the top of the
revolution, then at least as commissar of toothpicks in the ninth ward.
He is not a replaceable part of the thing called society but was
destined, at birth, to be a regulator of this thing. This desire for
power is quite common, even among nonsocialists, but while others seem
willing to win their spurs according to the rules of the market place,
the socialist claims the scepter because he has a mission. He is of the
anointed.
Perpetuation of the Welfare State
The immigration system perpetuates the Welfare State in two
elementary ways. One is the employment of vast armies of immigrations
officers who are not needed by the market. In fact, they hamper the
market threefold: (1) by consuming taxes; (2) by barring potentially
necessary laborers to enter the country, thereby prohibiting the natural
progression of the division of labor; and (3) by discouraging
self-deportation, which leads to more consumption of taxes.
Government expenditures are a coerced
transfer of resources from private producers to the uses preferred by
government officials. It is customary to classify government spending
into two categories: resource-using, and transfer.
Resource-using expenditures frankly shift resources from private persons
in society to the use of government: this may take the form of hiring
bureaucrats to work for government—which shifts labor resources
directly—or of buying products from business firms. … After all, when a
bureaucrat receives his government salary, this payment is in the same
sense a “transfer payment” from the taxpayers, and the bureaucrat is
also free to decide how further to allocate the income at his command.
In both cases, money and resources are shifted from producers to
nonproducers, who consume or otherwise use them. (Man, Economy and The State p. 938-939)
The consumption of tax dollars by this system is formidable as the
CIC alone employs approximately 5,000 personnel, who in addition to pay,
need to be placed in offices, supplied with computers, internet and
telephone connections, stationary etc. In addition, there is the never
ending waste that goes into its paperwork, as well as the wasteful pomp
of swearing-in ceremonies.
Furthermore, Canada’s welfare system is world famous. Easy access to
government doles makes immigration to Canada an attractive proposition
to many in the underdeveloped world who lack work ethic, yet are well
trained in subsiding on the State. This provides the other prong of the
Welfare State perpetuation fork. I landed in Canada as an asylum seeker,
and as such did not have all the privileges of residency available to
me. However, I found it shocking that I became eligible for welfare
payments, access to healthcare and education many months before I became
eligible for work. Those who land in Canada with immigrant visas have
access to every bit of the Welfare State from the minute they step on
Canadian soil. In addition, there are in place settlement assistance agencies, funded by CIC, which list the following services:
- Interpretation and translation of documents, or help to arrange these services
- Help filling out forms and applications
- English as a Second Language (ESL) classes
- Help finding a job or training
- Information about other community services, schools and health care
Since the CIC boasts that it selects candidates who meet “criteria
that have been shown to help them become economically established in
Canada” “based on their education, work experience, knowledge of English
and/or French, and other criteria,” the existence of settlement
assistance agencies which perform the listed services seem to suggest
that either the CIC’s selections actually do not meet the criteria it
claims that they do, or the settlement assistance agencies themselves
are unnecessary.
In any case the process itself is misleading to the applicants. The
CIC, by making the claim that it selects candidates “with skills and
talents that our economy needs today” gives them the impression that
little or no initiative is required from them once selected. Moreover,
the “new Canadians” are led to believe that in Canada the economy works
in something of an automatic fashion, whereby all that is necessary is
the correct filling out of an application. Others still are incorrectly
led to believe that their post secondary credentials earned overseas
will be valued on par by Canadian employers, when in reality this is
seldom the case. Likewise many experienced doctors find themselves
disappointed to learn that the government granted monopoly to the
provincial colleges of doctors bar them from practicing medicine.
Finally those misled newcomers who were led to believe that they would
quickly find employment because their skills are in demand, having come
to realize that they were deceived by CIC turn to government subsidized
re-education programs, and other forms of welfare.
Solutions
The Fraser Institute recently produced a study which concluded that
in the fiscal year 2005/06 the immigrants
on average received an excess of $6,051 in benefits over taxes paid.
Depending on assumptions about the number of recent immigrants in
Canada, the fiscal burden in that year is estimated to be between $23.6
billion and $16.3 billion. These estimates are not changed by the
consideration of other alleged benefits brought by immigrants.
Therefore, the institute proposed that the selection process of candidates be improved.
To curtail this growing fiscal burden
from immigration, the study proposes that temporary work visas be
granted to applicants who have a valid offer for employment from
employers, in occupations and at pay levels specified by the federal
government and determined in cooperation with private-sector employers.
Immediate dependents may accompany successful applicants.
The temporary visas are renewable and lead to landed immigrant status if certain specified employment criteria are met.
What the Fraser Institute proposes is more government intervention in
an area where government intervention has already proven to be the root
of the problem. There cannot be a “better selection process,” for,
immigrants are people, and each person is a unique being. No truth
concerning how a person will fare in future events can be extrapolated
through a bureaucratic process, regardless of how much the selection
process allegedly gets improved. For that matter no definite truth
regarding how a person will act in an environment different from the one
he has heretofore acted in, can be distilled out of applications,
letters or even interviews. Since individuals interact with their
surroundings, their accomplishments are to a degree—a degree which
cannot be determined—a result of that interaction with their
environment. Would, say, Bill Gates have created Microsoft had he been
living in Turkmenistan? We can never know.
No bureaucratic system can be developed which will be able to
forecast how a person will behave in an environment different than the
one he hails from, no matter what their past credentials. Just as a
scoop of vanilla ice-cream to be enjoyed at one’s home is not a
homogenous good with an identical scoop of vanilla ice-cream in an
ice-cream parlor down the street: so too a person in one environment
cannot be considered homogenous to the same person in another
environment. Any notion of a supposedly improved selection process is
only bound to be more misleading to potential immigrants in reinforcing
the false perception of automation of Canadian society. No scientific
equation which will deduce how a person would turn out in an uncertain
future, in an environment of nothing but variables can be produced. “In
physics, an experimentally determined law may be assumed to be constant
for other identical situations;” wrote Murray Rothbard in Man, Economy and The State (p.863)
“in human action, historical situations are never the same, and
therefore there are no quantitative constants! Conditions and valuations
could change at any time, and the ‘stable’ relationship altered.” To
believe otherwise is to believe in soothsaying. Yet fortunetelling is
widely ridiculed as gobbledygook, except within governmental
forecasting!
Furthermore, the Fraser Institute’s proposals have the preservation
of the Welfare State in mind, for they do not address the essential
cause; rather they aim to aggrandize it. Immigrants are only a “fiscal
burden” due to the existence of extensive social security programs. To
that point, the question is how much of a fiscal burden “the average
Canadian”?
Restricted movement of population is not a trait of a free society,
while the lack of freedom stifles economic and intellectual development.
Similarly calls to prohibit parents of immigrants from entering Canada
are shortsighted, as many newcomers, in a display of division of labor,
use their parents as caretakers for their children and homes. In such a
way newcomers enable themselves to spend more hours in income producing
work. Thus, newcomers are not the problem, the Welfare State is.
Therefore, the solution to Canada’s immigration problem is twofold: (1)
abolition of the Welfare State; and (2) abolition of immigration
barriers. For as Herbert Spencer recognized that there are
general truths which the citizen, and
still more the legislator, ought to contemplate until they become
wrought into his intellectual fabric, are disclosed when we ask how
social activities are produced; and when we recognize the obvious answer
that they are the aggregate results of the desires of individuals who
are severally seeking satisfactions, and ordinarily pursuing the ways
which, with their preexisting habits and thoughts, seem the
easiest-following the lines of least resistance: the truths of political
economy being so many sequences. … And that the right interpretation of
social phenomena is to be found in the co-operation of these factors
from generation to generation, follows inevitably. Such an
interpretation soon brings us to the inference that among men’s desires
seeking gratifications, those which have prompted their private
activities and their spontaneous co-operations, have done much more
towards social development than those which have worked through
governmental agencies. That abundant crops now grow where once only wild
berries could be gathered, is due to the pursuit of individual
satisfactions through many centuries. (p.102, The Man Versus The State; The Sins of Legislators)
Having an immigrations system in place only works toward producing a
stationary society. Potential new laborers, entrepreneurs and investors
are either held back for a given time or barred permanently from moving
into Canada’s market based on decisions made by bureaucrats. The
decision makers in this process have only paperwork to go by when
passing judgment on real people, who have unique personalities and
traits that cannot be expressed in an application. Furthermore, each
country is unique, and different regions and cities within any given
country give rise to all sorts of variables in upbringing, customs, work
ethic etc. The bureaucrat passes judgment on whether a person they have
never met would fit in well within any one Canada’s ten Provinces,
hundreds of Regional Municipalities and thousands of towns, among over
30 million other people. Surely the folly of this system now becomes
obvious.
People seeking to immigrate to Canada are only hampered or misled by
the actions of government bureaucrats. And when they are indeed misled,
and Canada does not present them with the opportunity they envisioned,
having spent the two, three or five years of their lives, and thousands
of dollars in fees in obtaining the permanent residency and work permit,
they find it too expensive and impractical to reverse the course. In
the absence of the restrictionist and expensive immigration regime, they
would have the flexibility to move to Canada years sooner, when perhaps
whatever opportunity that attracted them to Canada is still available.
Likewise, rather than become “burdens on the system,” leaving Canada,
for “greener pastures” in an act of self-deportation, would be all the
more attractive were they not to suffer the psychic loss related to the
obtaining of the immigrant visa.
To be sure one cannot be a “burden on the system” if there is no
system to burden. Thus, the removal of the “safety net” provided by the
Welfare State would serve to ensure that only the most work ready
immigrate; while the abolition of the CIC would ensure that the needs of
the market are satisfied timely. A practice of open immigration would
be sure to match the most compatible persons with the work they are most
inclined to. The assumption that government can produce a successful
policy through intervention fails to understand the essential difference
between human action which is hampered by intervention and that which
is the result of the decisions of free persons acting reasonably.
Rothbard understood that
There is only one thing the Canadian government can do to improve the
immigrant selection process: it can get out of the business of
immigration and let the natural processes of the free market make their
choices.
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