GLOBAL FORUM
Immigration touted
As populist movements in western countries seek greater protectionism and resist immigration, an Oxford University professor argues immigrant workers are needed more than ever to fill gaps from declining birthrates and aging populations.
Ian Goldin, a former World Bank vice-president who now teaches about globalization, said during a business conference here that western nations could accommodate much higher levels of immigration but that they need to deal with negative perceptions.
Goldin later told reporters cities with high concentrations of foreigners, including Vancouver and Toronto, have strong economies with contented residents, citing top scores on happiness index surveys.
“There is no evidence that towns with higher shares of immigrants do worse off,” he said at the Global Business Forum, a conference featuring talks from executives, academics and government leaders on emerging trends. “In fact they are better off and I think we’re not good at communicating that.”
Protectionism on immigration and trade has been a central plank of Donald Trump’s election campaign for the White House. In Britain, politicians are wrangling over the path to leave the European Union after a referendum in which protectionism played a major role.
Restrictions on immigration are expected to be a central theme in the Brexit negotiations.
At the same time, fewer babies and aging workers are expecting to put major strains on labour markets around the world. The workforce in OECD countries is expected to decline from 800 million to about 630 million over the next 34 years, which Gold in said under scores the demand for more immigrant workers.
Perrin Beatty, president and chief executive of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said immigration remains an important component of efforts to fill labour gaps, along with retraining, education and integrating more indigenous people into the workforce.
“Immigration is one of those tools that allow us to deal with the demographic time bomb that we’re sitting on today, with an aging population and growing needs within the workforce,” Beatty said in an interview.
Goldin said Canada has been a standard-bearer for progressive policies welcoming both immigrants and refugees, “but this needs to be sustained.”
On the refugee front, Canada has taken in more than 30,000 Syrians since November 2015.
But the influx of refugees into Europe triggered considerable public resistance, helping to shift governments to the right and looming large in the Brexit vote, said Alexander Betts, director of the refugees studies centre at the University of Oxford.
“We’ve really had a year where Europe was engaged in a massive u-turn from Angela Merkel’s ... ‘We will cope’ speech a year ago where she said, ‘We can take 800,000 refugees into Germany in a year, and we will manage,” Betts said in an interview after his talk at the business forum.
“Europe has come full circle and it has slightly rejected that position and it’s moved to create a deal with Turkey to close the Aegean Sea, shut the Balkan route into Europe and effectively warehouse millions of Syrians in Turkey so they don’t come across the border.”
Betts praised Canada’s resettlement program for Syrians, noting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected on a pro-refugee platform “which at the moment is almost unprecedented.” Still, there have been cracks. A survey conducted in February found barely half of those polled supported Trudeau’s resettlement plan, with 44 per cent opposed. A Calgary school was spray-painted with the threatening words “Syrians go home and die.”
“There’s no society in which there would be no opposition to reaching out and allowing people to make a new home,” Beatty said.