Think-tank calls for immigration reform
Fraser Institute says newcomers creating high ‘fiscal burden’
The Conservative government has taken steps to deal with the “fiscal burden” imposed by Canada’s immigrants and refugees, but the reforms will only make a minor dent in the estimated $20-billion-ayear cost on society imposed by newcomers, according to a provocative report to be published Thursday.
The government should take more “radical” steps, says Herb Grubel, an economist at the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, a conservative think-tank. He suggests phasing out the sponsorship of parents and grandparents, and bringing in an employerdriven system to attract economic immigrants.
Grubel was a caucus colleague of Prime Minister Stephen Harper after they were elected as Reform MPs in the 1993 election.
“The current government recognized the existence of this fiscal problem and initiated a series of new policies to reduce it,” Grubel noted in his report, which assesses immigration reforms since 2008.
Grubel has always provoked controversy with his studies calculating the negative economic impact of Canada’s immigration policy.
In his new report, Grubel has looked at the average incomes of immigrants and refugees who arrived in Canada between 1986 and 2004 (as reported by Statistics Canada), and compared those figures with other Canadians.
“The economic performance of recent immigrants is substantially below that of other Canadians,” he argues in the report, saying their average total income is 70 per cent of other Canadians. And immigrants are paying just over half — 54 per cent — the taxes paid by other Canadians, according to the data.
He then weighed average incomes against benefits received by immigrants, from education, health and welfare to language training, as well as their share of “public goods” spending in areas like defence and research.
Grubel said there’s no consensus on the reason for immigrants’ poor performance, though he noted that both refugees and parents-grandparents clearly didn’t need to pass the government’s test for economic migrants that require certain levels of education, training and language proficiency.
In 2011, Simon Fraser University economists Mohsen Javdani and Krishna Pendakur released a study arguing Grubel and some of his Fraser Institute colleagues have wildly exaggerated the negative affect of immigration on the economy.
They said the net transfer to immigrants who arrived between 1970 and 2004 amounted to about $450 a person in 2005 — or about $2 billion a year — compared with Grubel’s estimate of $6,051 each and about $20 billion annually.
In his latest report, Grubel praised some of the new federal policies on economic and family-class immigration, and especially Ottawa’s tougher approach to asylum-seekers.
He said it will have some success in reducing the socalled burden caused by immigrants who cost more in social services and general government expenses than they contribute in taxes.
But Grubel said Canadians should be allowed to debate the broader question of just how many new Canadians are needed in coming years.
A broad public policy debate involving politicians, academics and interest groups, whether it results in lower or higher immigrants, would at least ensure there is a “better informed and more rational Canadian immigration policy,” he concluded.
Grubel argued that “largescale” immigration intake since the late 1980s has raised “serious concerns” over effects on “Canadian culture, religious tolerance and national security.”
Former immigration minister Jason Kenney, recently replaced by Chris Alexander in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet shuffle, has introduced numerous reforms to try to improve the quality of skilled migrants brought into Canada, while combating fraud, improving processing efficiency, and reducing the number of bogus refugee claims.
Grubel praised Kenney’s move to require new Canadians sponsoring their parents and grandparents to commit to covering their financial costs for at least 20 years. But he questioned whether the federal government will be able to enforce that requirement, and said a better solution is to simply end the right to sponsor older relatives.