yellowcanoe wrote:My perspective is Canada where we managed to grow our population by almost 3% last year -- a tremendous rate of increase for a post-industrial society. One justification is that we have an aging population but the government appears to have relaxed limits on family reunification and of course a lot of immigrants want to sponsor their elderly parents to come to Canada. That pretty much negates any benefit in dealing with our demographic problems. Filling a labour shortage is also trumpeted but the immigrants themselves create additional demands for services that they themselves are not filling. That we continue to have a labour shortage while we've had a high immigration rate for quite a few years shows that immigration itself is contributing to our labour shortage. Economic growth is also supposedly a benefit of immigration but more commentators are noticing that it isn't useful economic growth -- per capita gdp isn't increasing and the country continues to have a productivity problem. Immigration is also seen as a way to deal with our deficit problems but this fails to account for the fact that immigrants themselves need services so the cost of government increases. We are heading for big social problems because our housing stock is not growing quickly enough to accommodate everyone and our medical system already had insufficient capacity to support those of us already here. Of course none of this seems to matter to our Federal government as they just want to keep growing the amount of immigration every year.
IMHO its totally illogical for countries like Canada or the USA or the EU to pretend they are trying to reduce their CO2 emissions and then take in millions of immigrants from third world countries and then elevate them to first world living standards because the carbon footprint of every person in a first world country is unsustainable. For instance, supposedly Canada is concerned about global warming, but adding 3% new people to Canada in just one year is inevitably going to tend to drive Canada's CO2 emissions higher......and at 15.43 metric tons PERSON Canada already has some of the largest CO2 emissions per capita of any country on earth.....even higher then the USA which comes in at 14.67 metric tons per person.
Any effort to reduce CO2 emissions from western countries should include limits on immigration. This was the fundamental position of the Zero Population Growth (ZPG) movement here in the USA but unfortunately ZPG got zero support from the mainstream D political party here in the US precisely because it opposed mass immigration into the USA.
Cheers!
