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Canada is nowhere near as diverse as the US.

Canada is 1.x% hispanic, 2.x% black, 78% white.

The US is 20% hispanic, 13% black, 60% white.

Canada is a homogeneous nation.

Latin America's population is ~650 million. Canada intentionally designed its immigration system to be exclusionary to immigration by poorer people. Which is why, during the time in which the US massively boomed with Latin American immigration (1970s forward), Canada did not.

How can there be 650 million people in Latin American, nearly 70 million hispanics in the US, and only ~450,000 hispanics in Canada? A skill & education restricted immigration system that doesn't allow in typically poorer, lower skill, lower education hispanics coming from Latin America. It's extremely anti-diversity.

People of Chinese, East Indian, First Nations, Ukrainian, Dutch, Polish & Filipino ancestry all make up a bigger proportion of Canada's population than hispanic or black people. Your own numbers only add up to 81% for Canada but 93% for the USA. That's people from as propontionally large a group as African-Americans in the USA that you've skipped over.

Possibly there's two layers of miscommunication about "diverse". One, people could consider Scots, Irish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Welsh, Norweigan people to be non-diverse if they fit some social category of whiteness. Even if one of the groups still speaks it's own language and has a seperatist movement.

Second, having big chunks of certain demographics could be considered less diversity than having lots of little chunks from different places.

Facts are facts. Canada's immigration system is absurdly anti-diversity, which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's nearly 80% white.

Within about 20 years, the US won't even be a majority white nation. Pretending Canada is more diverse than that, is ridiculous. That Canada is somehow a super diverse nation, is a pretend claim that is unsupported by the actual demographic facts.

Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like Detroit, Chicago or New York? Surely their lives would be considerably improved given Canada's superior safety net, healthcare system, etc. - and Canada has good wages and a healthy unemployment rate. It's simple, they're not allowed to. Canada's immigration system excludes the possibility that most people with lower skill & education backgrounds can ever get in.

If Canada were actually pro-diversity, they'd liberalize their immigration policies and let in a large amount of immigration from Latin America (after all, the vast majority of the Americas is hispanic), such that Canada's hispanic percentage closes the gap with the US over the next 20-30 years. They're never going to allow it.

BenchRouter 3122 days ago

> which is why Canada has so few hispanic and black people, and why it's nearly 80% white.

Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico and doesn't have nearly the extensive history with African slavery that the US does?

> Why don't more poor black people immigrate into Canada from cities like Detroit, Chicago or New York?

I'm not trying to argue one way or another for Canada's immigration system (I know very little about it), but this is a very simplistic argument.

Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Picking up and relocating your life is way, way more involved than you're making it sound.

> It's simple, they're not allowed to.

This is also the case in the US, hence the widespread fears about illegal immigrants.

If life was significantly better in Canada, one would expect far more illegal immigration.

> but this is a very simplistic argument.

It's not a simplistic argument. It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far that is actually using facts.

> Er, or it's not bordered by Mexico

Canada also isn't bordered by Asia. It allows in plenty of skilled Asian immigrants. What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the country?

The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Borders don't mean much if you're not allowed to immigrate regardless.

The US is also not bordered by Colombia, Hondurus, Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Brazil, etc.

> Why don't all the ex-coal miners in WV simply move to where the jobs are?

Well that's exactly how the US has worked in fact. People - over time - migrate toward opportunity state to state. That's why West Virginia's population hasn't grown in 80 years (!).

See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

BenchRouter 3122 days ago

> It's a facts based argument and I'm the only one in this discussion so far that is actually using facts.

Your facts-based argument is that people in Detroit would move to Canada if the immigration policy was relaxed? I see no facts at all around that assertion, which is the one I was calling simplistic.

> What does bordering have to do with Canada's regressive immigration policies that prevent low skilled, low education persons from immigrating into the country?

You said (paraphrasing):

>> Why are there no hispanic people in Canada, relative to the US

I said:

>> Because it's not bordered by Mexico

(And, by the way, Mexico is the #1 source of immigrants for the US).

> The US isn't bordered by Pakistan, India, Vietnam, China, Philippines, or El Salvador. Six of the top 10 immigration countries for the US.

Out of those 6 countries, one would qualify as contributing to the Hispanic or Black population in the US (the groups we were discussing).

Out of the top 10, none are from countries in Africa or the Caribbean (which we might also consider to be a "black" population).

So we can agree then, that the US's diversity w.r.t. black people has nothing to do with immigration?

> See: population growth over time in Nevada, Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, etc. Silicon Valley exists precisely because the US works that way.

Those are also states that have heavy immigrant populations because they're attractive for skilled workers or close to natural entry points. You'll have to cite a source stating that the growth in those populations is from internal movement.

The US as a whole is fairly close to replacement rate births, so we would actually expect populations to remain stable.

freeone3000 3122 days ago

"Diversity" in your example seems to include black people and hispanic people, but disregards the diversity in "white" culture (there's a huge split between English and French), and the entire Asian continent.

Denying people of low skill and educational backgrounds isn't inherently racist - an African-American software developer gets the same NAFTA rubber-stamp as a Polish-American developer. French-speaking workers have it even easier, as French-speakers get preferential treatment. (Areas of Africa natively speak French, if you're insistent that Africa is the source of all "diversity".)

I don't see how letting low-skill, uneducated people immigrate to a country helps it. Immigration isn't a charity.

Yes, facts are indeed facts, let's agree on that at least.

The USA has always been partly hispanic, from before there was a USA. That might have something to do with their presence in the country today.

Similarly, I don't think the African-American presence in the USA can be put down to a pro-diversity immigration system, unless we're really twisting those words meanings. Indeed America has a long history of having openly and literally racist immigration laws.

Either way, we seem to be retreating from "this can't happen in the USA because it's diverse" to "there's poor people in America", which seems like a different argument entirely.

> That might have something to do with their presence in the country today.

The US was 3% hispanic in 1960 and 84% white. Your premise is wrong. In 57 years, the US hispanic population has skyrocketed from around 6.x million, to ten times that today. The reason for that, is immigration policies that allowed for vast immigration from Latin America. For reference, from 1980 to 2000, the US absorbed about 8% of Mexico's entire population; that's just immigration from one country.

I never said the presence of black people in the US was due to pro-diversity reasons. You're inventing that. I specifically said the lack of black people in Canada is due to anti-diversity immigration policies. That the US is ~13.4% black, does in fact make it more diverse than it would be if the US were 2% black as with Canada.

pessimizer 3122 days ago

> The US was 3% hispanic in 1960 and 84% white.

You're going to need a good reference for that one, just because categories have changed, plenty of hispanics have identified as white when they thought it would help and when they could pass, and because plenty of non-citizens don't respond to these types of surveys unless specifically targeted, although I'm sure that there would be methodologies that could attempt to account for them if the investigator intended to.

tl;dr methodology is important when trying to estimate the population of hispanics in the US, especially in 1960. Specific references would be helpful.

> The US was 3% hispanic in 1960 and 84% white.

Maybe the hispanic people were younger, and had more children (I believe the facts back me up here)? Maybe their religion encouraged this? Maybe hispanic immigrants wanted to go to a nation that already had 3% hispanic population and that was geographically closer to their home nation? Maybe they could trace their family roots over the border?

You appeared to making a relative claim about US and Canadian immigration policy? I thought you were implying that if Canada had an immigration policy like the USA then it would also have 12% black population and that because it doesn't then it's somehow bad and/or cheating?

You'd have to estimate what percentage of African immigrants would have made it into the USA (in the years it wasn't illegal of course) and then substract some kind of modifier similar to the Hispanic immigration, where African immigrants may wish to move somewhere where there already were people who looked like them. And then compare those numbers to see whether Canada was really being exclusionary towards Africans relative to the USA.

gruez 3122 days ago

>The reason for that, is immigration policies that allowed for vast immigration from Latin America

how much of that was legal?

It's worth noting that half of American Hispanics identify as "white" to the census, since it asks for race and ethnicity seperately (i.e. you can be black and hispanic too) The census actually counts 90% of Hispanics as white, because their answers (mostly "other race") don't fit better in any other category.

Taking that into account, the USA is either 70% or 78% white. (And presumably that bumps Canada up to 78.7% or so too.)