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  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
    1·
    4 days ago

    Look, we can talk and argue about the rate of increase and it won’t be controversial, with two caveats: a) that people already here should be grandfathered in (none of the PEQ fiasco). b) the rights of immigrant workers should always be equal to those of established ones.

    I have explained above why I don’t think the housing and unemployment crises are caused by immigration.

    But I agree that if all else stays the same, a big increase in precarious immigrants exacerbates things. The point is that I don’t think that we should accept everything else remaining the same and then play the game of blaming the immigrants. Front and centre should be a program to address the structural problems of our economic system, and immigration only secondary. Think about it: the Liberals just aggressively cut immigration rates, while keeping other things the same. The results are only small dips in the housing market, nothing that actually makes housing genuinely affordable: we’re still in crisis but now we’ve run out of immigrants to blame.

    Any politics that puts immigration at the forefront is just ceding the initiative to the (far) Right.

    • maplesaga@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 days ago

      Its not blaming immigrants, that is a common tactic used by lobbyists and politicians to shut down discussion. Its simply what the BoC and our institutions say.

      https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/corporate/reports-statistics/research/immigration-housing-prices-municipalities-canada.html#s6

      The results show that, over the study period, the rise in the influx of new immigrants, who arrived in Canada within the past five years, on average, accounted for 11% of the rise in median house values and in median rents across municipalities with a population of at least 1,000. This association was notably more pronounced in larger municipalities. In the 53 municipalities with a population exceeding 100,000, which together attracted over 80% of new immigrants, the rise in new immigrants accounted for 21% of the overall increase in median house values and 13% of the increase in median rents. In these large municipalities, the effect on house values tended to be larger than on rents, possibly due to rent control policies in many provinces that can cap rent increases for certain properties (Gorski, 2023).

      https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/12/staff-analytical-note-2023-17/

      The wage one is harder to quantify due to inflation, wages would have gone up far faster like in the US, but overall wages still rose. Wages just bought far less and people who dont own inflation hedged assets are far poorer on a per capita basis.

      • acargitz@lemmy.ca
        1·
        4 days ago

        Our institutions are not talking about financialization of housing though! So it defaults to the “if all else remains the same, the factor to blame is immigrants”. If we don’t end financialization of housing, then even without immigration you’re still going to have the exact same problem of housing scarcity because the system requires housing to be scarce so it’s an asset that always appreciates.