Clichés die hard in immigration. They come as much from distrust of strangers as from ostentatious virtue.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
“The more immigrants there are, the more it puts downward pressure on wages,” claimed François Legault in mid-May at the Blue Room.
“There is no proof of that,” reacts Gilles Grenier, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa who specializes in immigration and the labor market.
Should we therefore welcome up to 70,000 immigrants per year to Quebec, as the Liberals are proposing, to meet our labor needs?
“The effect would be very weak, even nil,” replies Mr. Grenier. He had already supported it in a report commissioned by the Department of Immigration in 20141. This is the conclusion also reached by his colleague Pierre Fortin in a brand new study.2.
There is an old saying that immigrants “steal jobs”. It’s wrong. When they come here, they consume and fuel demand, which creates other jobs. But we must follow this logic to the end. This therefore also means that they are not solving the labor shortage.
The effect on population aging or per capita income is also small.
Intolerance is rightly denounced. But in this fight, some go a bit too far. They make immigration a moral issue and they attribute miraculous virtues to it.
I remind you here that the debate is not about asylum seekers and family reunifications. These categories are managed by the federal government. They are a matter of international law and humanitarian duty. For current immigration selected by Quebec, however, we should listen more to economists.
A young country with a vast territory, Canada is among the most welcoming in the world. He wants to receive more than 400,000 immigrants a year. Its goal: to have 100 million citizens in 2100. During this time, the federal bureaucracy is unable to process current files within human waiting times.
To maintain its demographic weight, Quebec should double its immigration. However, this would pose integration challenges. For example, these newcomers should be housed and more schools and daycares built. And there is the particular issue of francization.
Even if Quebec seems less generous than Canada, it should not be ashamed. Greater Montreal welcomes proportionally more immigrants than cosmopolitan metropolises such as Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
What is the reception capacity? There is no objective answer. The calculation is more political than scientific.
The caquistes created Francisation Québec, a one-stop shop, in addition to reducing tuition fees for immigrants in the regions and expanding the temporary worker program. But at the same time, Mr. Legault is fueling collective insecurity by claiming that immigrants are driving down wages.
If we follow his reasoning, we should expel the guardian angels who care for our seniors in CHSLDs, on the pretext that this would harm economic statistics.
Jean Boulet, Minister of Labor and Immigration, indicated that Quebec could accommodate 58,000 immigrants. This studious minister is the government’s specialist. Yet he had to retract and revert to Mr. Legault’s position, a hard cap of 50,000. Because that’s the most popular option, according to a party poll…
MM. Fortin and Grenier advocate maintaining the current level, that is to say a little over 50,000 new arrivals per year. Sylvain Giguère, senior economist at the Montreal Metropolitan Community, agrees. According to him, this would compensate for the drop in the activity rate (the percentage of citizens who are working or looking for a job).
But Mr. Giguère insists: we must also act elsewhere.
Many in-demand jobs are poorly paid. No wonder the staff is lacking… All the stakeholders I spoke to recommend first increasing productivity, for example by automating tasks.
At home, the labor shortage is recent. It destabilizes. But we will have to get used to it, as other countries have learned to do. In particular by deploying more efforts to attract and retain employees, and also to automate work. However, despite its catch-up, Quebec remains less productive than the rest of the country.
The employers’ lobby does not dare to tell its members that they must reinvent themselves. He prefers to say that raising the thresholds is the solution.
Of course, new Quebecers can make a valuable cultural, human and economic contribution. Young immigrants are twice as qualified as natives. If we fight discrimination and recognize their skills, society will be more prosperous, recalls Mr. Giguère, who produced a study on this subject for the OECD.3.
But we must also focus on the underutilized labor pool, such as those aged 60 and over. Punitive taxation and rigid working conditions are still an obstacle. And in general, the lack of training is a glaring problem.
For our politicians, however, these measures have a disadvantage: they are flat. But maybe our debate on immigration needs to become a little less exciting.