[transcriptase]

Makes far more sense than the “population must increase forever” pyramid scheme the rest of the West is running. Check out Canada for a look at what happens when you try to juice GDP via population growth at the expense of literally everything else.

[Stevvo]

The data/facts disagree with you. In a low birth rate society a constant influx of new tax payers is required. Without it you end up with decades of stagnation like Japan.

[transcriptase]

Why shouldn’t the need for tax revenue go down as the population it’s intended to serve declines?

[aprilthird2021]

2 main reasons

1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own

2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it

[amunozo]

One word: ageing. Population declines but also age, so working population declines much more than total population.

[s1artibartfast]

This sounds like a strong argument for having a stable cap. It's not a total immigration ban and would freeze population at a steady state. This makes all of the boom and bust problems easier, not worse

[gambiting]

Population of most European countries is actually decreasing year on year:

https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe...

But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.

[bombcar]

Pensions are a bit harder to get out of, but healthcare is easy. You never deny, just delay.

[throwaway85825]

Or in Canada, MAID.

[ryandrake]

What happens, specifically? Not that I'm a fan of "population increase forever" but what's wrong with Canada?

[maxglute]

Pop increase faster than housing / good jobs. The usual. Tried to juice economy post covid with MASS Indian immigration, for reference peak "Chinese" immigration was post HK handover was 60k, settled at 40k per year, lots of Chinese wealth transfer to Canada. Indian immigration went from 60k per year to over 140k, outrageous amount. Bluntly, most of west including Canada gets second tier immigrants, all the good opportunities in US, Canada doesn't get to retain tier1 talent, and Indian immigrants are in aggregate less wealthy. The entire point of brain drain is to get best brains, or in lieu get wealth. Canada got neither. This not knock on Indian immigrants, who work just as hard as every other, just acknowledging value proposition is not the same.

The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.

Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.

[panick21_]

Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.

Yeah immigrants are really the problem.

[maxglute]

Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.

[panick21_]

The overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it and long term they all are because they have more kids. Every immigrant who comes grown up with minimal education is a huge benefit.

Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.

> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat

Mostly because of far right misinformation.

> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.

Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.

The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.

So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.

[maxglute]

>overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it

Unlikely with Canadian exploding diploma mill immigration patterns post covid i.e. the 100k increase in Indians. That's not some, i.e. a few 1000 refugee/asylum charity to make feel good headlines. That's structurally unsustainable. Hence new cap reduction and strict field of study rules. Reality is Canada was importing fuckload of low skill hoping to juice economy short term with international tuition injections, but having students fill service and gig jobs driving up rent / suppressing wages / straining infra / services is bad short term politics and bad long term ROI. These generally aren't turnkey high skilled immigrants that boost economy long term. These aren't even wealthy economic immigrants dump $$$ into economy, these are bluntly marginal immigrants from poor households that goes into debt/leverage and have to take low end jobs with high remittance culture to payback - the give/take ratio is not great. They are no where nearly as "worth it" as a rich PRC international students dropping $$$ into economy and trying to capital flight $$$ into Canadian economy. And removing them is easy... a few signatures to cap study permits, change crs and pgwp requirements, already down ~70% from peak, much easier to building. Of course building is great for everybody, but Canada ain't building.

The right solution is move back to sustainable high-value immigration patterns. 60k to 160k Indians is unprecedented. Like 2nd/3rd largest cohort is PRC and PH at ~40k. 160k per year from any country is stupid policy, only justifiable if the plan is basically to steal their tuition and kick them out of the country after making PR/citizenship harder, i.e. Canada bait-switch (scammed) a bunch of Indian villagers pooling their limited resources together, and it's looking likely that's how this saga will end. Again, it's not Indian immigrants fault, but they don't vote so they're the one's whose going to get screwed because bad policy screwed Canadians who vote.

[alephnerd]

A lot of people on the internet blame Canada's malaise on their historically lax immigration stance.

While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.

Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and

1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)

2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)

3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)

6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)

7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech

all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.

At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.

THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.

Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.

Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.

[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/484/export-complexit...

[kens]

Serious question: what is ONG? I assume it's like LNG (liquefied natural gas), but after multiple searches, all I can come up with is Oklahoma Natural Gas, NGO in French, and On God.

[alephnerd]

It's the abbreviation for Oil and Natural Gas sector.

[metalman]

Here in Nova Scotia, Canada, mass imigration is driving the most intense building of everything boom, ever. And it just went up a notch. Plenty of Swiss imigrants as well.

[PowerElectronix]

No country is running a "population must increase forever". You only hear that when the public pensions are discussed because they are unsustainable. The argument is not " population must increase", it's more "human labor is the most critical resource and we must get as much as we can".

You can fear the results of runaway immigration in the short term, like cultural clashes, organized crime and brown people in your neighborhood. But you can't deny the results on the long term when you allow talent to go to your country and end up with more nobel laureates of New Zealand origin than New Zealand.