Immigration's False Bigotry

It Isn't Racist To Support Cutting Immigration

If there were suddenly a million less people in Canada tomorrow, do you seriously think the housing market wouldn’t change?

There’s an argument going around these days, that’s likely to intensify in the aftermath of the Liberals finally cutting student visa numbers, that immigration isn’t responsible for the housing crisis. Of course, responsible for is a particularly obtuse way of framing it, because 12000 things are “responsible for” our current malaise, but of course immigration levels being so elevated exacerbates the crisis.

The test as to whether immigration is causing issues is of the same variety I used in these pages to attack the anti-condo nutbars. Then, the question was whether Toronto’s housing market would be cheaper if 100000 condo units were suddenly available throughout the city. Now, it’s whether the departure of a million people would cool the market.

In both cases the answer is yes, despite it being an intentionally extreme distortion of the policy levers. 100000 condo units can’t appear tomorrow; we’re not going to deport a million people tomorrow. But the second it’s framed in such a way, the idea that reducing immigration or building more supply wouldn’t impact the market is shown to be farcical.

We have to build more fucking housing. I have been screaming at the Liberals to do so. I supported an Ontario Liberal Leadership candidate who put out a housing policy first above all else and that supported a significant re-entry of the government to non-market housing. I am becoming more and more radicalized by urbanist Twitter on a seemingly daily basis. We also need to temporarily reduce the level of immigration to let the various pro-building housing reforms catch up. These two things are not in conflict.

The housing crisis is an all hands on deck policy crisis, a disaster that requires every solution to work in unity. But what do we have, when people make the self-evident point that our increasing immigration burden is incongruent with our housing capacity? To invoke racism and to label the CBC white nationalist for platforming this self-evidently true point. And I’ve got a message for anyone who tries this argument;

If the pro-immigration consensus in Canada dies, you’ll have been the ones who fucking killed it because you’re too stupid to realize that your heads were up your asses.

…

When Poland and the rest of the 2004 EU Ascension states joined the EU, the UK were the only major economy not to apply transitional controls on the free movement of people. As EU citizens, the citizens of 8 countries now had full right to move anywhere in the UK, as a matter of right. The Blair government predicted 13000/year net immigration levels from the so-called EU8. By 2016, there were more than 1.3M additional UK residents from the EU8.

The implicit promise that has been sold to the west is that immigration is a solely good process. Instead of making an argument for immigration as a net positive, it has become gospel that any acknowledgement of any potential harms of immigration is racist blasphemy. Obviously, like literally anything else, the truth is less absolute. As someone who does vociferously support immigration, lying to the population and pretending there’s no potential harms does nobody any good.

The problem that the UK ran into was that they allowed all of this immigration without building up the support system or the infrastructure to support it. The consequence? Brexit. You can draw a straight line from the betrayal of Blair’s promise to the rise of UKIP to the referendum to Brexit, because voters felt like they were sold a bill of goods by an out of touch elite. That the Brexit campaign was led by another out of touch elite didn’t stop the British people going for it. (The Boris-Skippy parallels work frighteningly well.)

The same thing is very obviously happening here, where the political consensus sold a vision of ever-higher immigration as a unambiguous good. Many, including myself, swallowed it hook line and sinker. The idea that there would be tradeoffs was never part of the pitch, and the conception of those opposed to the increased immigration levels as racist loons helped to stop me, and presumably others, from thinking through it. Now, the costs are apparent.

The costs can be mitigated, obviously, and I am still pro-immigration, but there’s no point having a conversation about immigration divorced from reality. Higher class sizes, wait times for appointments with doctors, and yes housing costs all stem in part from the combination of high immigration and insufficient spending to ameliorate those negative externalities. Does a lot of the blame for not ameliorating those negative externalities lie with Doug Ford? Sure. But that doesn’t matter for right now.

You can’t build a new school in Brampton overnight. You can’t build 100000 condo units in a summer. The supply constraints are going to last for at least a little while because you literally cannot solve them overnight no matter how much political will there is for it. It takes time to build. So, if you want to do anything for lower prices in the next 2 years, you pretty much have to lower demand. Had the Liberals gotten on the supply-boosting train in 2019 and not 2023 then there might have been time to boost supply before crisis levels hit without reducing demand, but here we are.

What those opposed to this discourse want is to return to the fanciful lies that we used to tell ourselves that there was no cost to higher and higher immigration. There is one. It is a price worth paying, in my view, but there’s a price and we’ve acted like it’s a free roll for decades. Now that the consequences are here, we have a choice. Either we can manage this process carefully, reduce immigration levels temporarily in a way that allows us to catch up on supply, and then continue along, or we can let the country turn against the concept of immigration, as opposed to just the reality of these specific levels of it.

Let’s be plain here; if the Liberals don’t cut immigration, Pierre Poilievre will win the next election. Whatever chance you think the Liberals have right now, their chance is non-existent if they don’t bring down immigration levels. A majority of the country wants the level brought down, including a lot of the voters who won them government in 2015, 2019, and 2021. So what those more willing to yell about racism are advocating for is a Poilievre government, where there’s no guarantee that their immigration cuts will be temporary.

Harm reduction is the favoured buzzword of the left, except when it comes to electoral politics. The case for safe supply is that expecting someone to go from using unsafe drugs to none at all is unreasonable; yet the same people want to pretend that a temporary cut to one part of the immigration portfolio is a racist act that can’t be countenanced. If you cannot see this is childish nonsense then your views should be discarded.

It is not racist to want an immigration system to sustain itself. It is not racist to be worried about public backlash to unfettered access. If the Liberals don’t reduce levels now, the entire pro-immigration consensus will collapse at the hands of an incredibly dangerous Poilievre supermajority.

And if you don’t get that and would rather call those of us sounding the alarm a racist, don’t be shocked when Prime Minister Poilievre goes farther and destroys a lot of the meaningful achievements of the last decade at the same time.