Discussing the 2023 Immigration Levels and Plan Announcement on CBC Daybreak November 2, 2023

I was interviewed on CBC Daybreak by Chris Walker on November 2, 2023 and asked about the immigration levels and plans announced by Minister Miller. A transcript follows the audio.

Chris Walker: 13 minutes after six o’clock Pacific Time Immigration Minister Mark Miller has unveiled the federal government’s updated immigration plan. It aims to attract more immigrants to smaller communities and rural areas, and we’ll have more on that by the way, a bit later this morning on our program. This plan is also meant to ease labor shortages, with. The focus on sectors like construction and healthcare. The government says about 465,000 immigrants are expected this year, followed by half a million for each of the following two years. Raj Sharma is an immigration lawyer and former immigration officer, and is on the line from Calgary this morning. Raj Sharma, good morning.

 
Raj Sharma: Good morning, Chris.

 
Chris Walker: What do you think of this plan so far as we know the details?

 
Raj Sharma: I think you hit it on the head there. It is a plan and there’s not a lot of details. Generally speaking, the numbers are about what we sort of expected. There’s no major significant departure from that sort of average, 465, 485, and then 500, and then expectation to plateau at that $500,000 mark. So important to know, out of that 500,000, we expect 58 to 60% to be economic class. We’re selecting immigrants based on their human capital age, education, language proficiency work experience. So 60% are going to be individuals that will contribute or we feel that will contribute to economy. Forty percent are going to be non-economic. So the overall numbers appear to be, let’s call it stabilized, but quite high. These numbers are quite high if you look at it historically. You’d have to go back maybe a hundred years to see numbers like this.

 
Chris Walker: We spoke a couple of days ago with an economist with the BC Business Council, David Williams, who said, it’s all well and good to have these kinds of high numbers, but you need the infrastructure that comes along with that, schools, hospitals, roads, et cetera. First of all, do you agree with that and do you see any evidence of that in this plan?

 
Raj Sharma: No, they’re quite divorced or bifurcated, and that’s probably just the nature of our federal system. The provinces have authority over various aspects of our economy. The federal government has authority over various aspects of our economy, but that’s exactly correct. You simply cannot have intake without regard to integration.

 
Chris Walker: And so what do you think the federal government could improve in that regard?

 
Raj Sharma: There’s a number of troubling aspects here. There’s two recent polls that indicate a drop in public support for immigration. Historically, we’ve had very high support for immigration because Canada tends to, or we have that impression that Canada picks that we choose our immigrants, and so what we have right now is with the inflation and the rise in cost of living, you have pockets of perhaps concern, and again, Canada is a large country. The population’s spread out. You have very serious concerns regarding housing and inflation.

 
Those hotspots being probably the GTA, the greater Toronto area and the lower mainland, probably. You have hundreds of thousands of temporary residents. So I think, by the way, that is probably going to be the bigger story next year, that it looks like there’s going to be a cap on international students coming in. It looks like they’re going to try to get a handle on the hundreds of thousands of temporary residents that are now in Canada, because we might just have this permanent underclass of workers and Uber drivers and food counter attendance with no ready pathway to permanent residence. As you can see, the math doesn’t add up. You have a million plus temporary residents. We’re taking 500,000, 60% are economic class. Someone’s going to be left out. These students are going to be coming to Canada, and there may not be a ready pathway to permanent residence for them.

 
Chris Walker: One of the things that we understand that this plan includes is trying to convince more immigrants to settle in smaller Canadian communities, smaller towns away from those two areas, the GTA and the lower mainland. What do you think could be done to encourage that?

 
Raj Sharma: Well, I grew up in Elkford, BC, a town of about 3,000 in the east Kootenays.

 
Chris Walker: We’re broadcasting there right now as a matter of fact.

 
Raj Sharma: Yeah, my old hometown. So look, I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve seen various iterations of this rural immigrant program come and go, and it’s never quite worked, and no one’s really gotten a handle on it. One should expect them to push this hard and perhaps encourage all these students that if you want to become permanent residents, maybe now’s the time to explore the beauty of interior BC, for example.

 
Chris Walker: I’ve spoken to a number of people here in Kelowna who have told me that there are a number of people in, especially the Indian diaspora, who are going back to India because for various reasons, housing and inflation though are two of those drivers. First of all, have you heard much of that and what do we know about the reasons behind that?

 
Raj Sharma: Yes, this is a concept that is now being studied called onward migration, and you have this sort of uptick that over the course of five years, you see perhaps 20% dropping out of Canadian economy and presumably going onward or back. So that phenomenon is there, and bear in mind, if we’re selecting people based on their human capital, well, they have options. And so you might have an Indian national who’s lived in Dubai for 10 plus years, who’s highly skilled, and he’s got domestic help. He doesn’t have to wait in line, let’s say for healthcare or what have you, and cost of living as opposed to income. He may not have permanent status in Dubai, but it is a very good lifestyle. So you will see individuals with options tend to perhaps go back. Housing is prohibitively expensive. It’s difficult to see in a contrast, when my father came to Canada 50 years ago to Toronto, and a contrast now when you have a detached house in the GTA or Toronto approaching $2 million.

 
Chris Walker: Yeah, Raj, really interesting to talk to you about it this morning. Thanks very much for joining us today.

 
Raj Sharma: My pleasure. Thank you, Chris.

 
Chris Walker: And by the way, if you’re listening to us in Elkford and Sparwood 105.7 FM. Thanks again, Raj.