35,000, 50,000, 70,000, 80,000, 1 million who says better? The volume of immigration that one should receive is like an auction. Everyone goes with their number, their volume, and we, as spectators, have to decide on who seems to have the most common sense.
But we don’t know. Worse, they know nothing about it. We are told about the reception and integration capacity, without ever telling us how it is calculated, this capacity. We go there at random, in the mood of the day, on the corner of a table. But deep down, we know absolutely nothing about it.
Immigration is not the solution to everything and is certainly not a necessary evil. It has advantages and disadvantages, but represents a means rather than an end in itself. It is potentially a lever for economic, social and even cultural development. It is still necessary to determine upstream the volume and the profile in an objective and realistic way.
In the same way that we calculate and project labor needs, governments, whether federal or provincial, must demonstrate to us in a rational manner the parameters taken into account to determine our capacity to reception and integration and thus, the volume of immigration that we should receive.
Fluctuation in the birth rate, job market, political weight of Quebec in the Commons, available housing, capacity of the education and health systems, capacity to francize and demolinguistic trends are all parameters that should be part of the mathematical equation leading to the determination of our capacity. These parameters must be put together, weighted according to our priorities so that we really determine the place that immigration must take in our development.
It is therefore not a question of being for or against immigration. This is a false debate. It is a question of depoliticizing this one so that we stop serving it to us in all sauces among those who think that it is the answer to everything and that we stop brandishing it as a scarecrow by those who see it a constant threat to who we are.