Population Pressure and Immigration Policy


Population Pressure and Immigration Policy

Today is November 24th. It’s the day that something like 27 people drowned trying to emigrate from France to the United Kingdom in a large open inflatable dinghy. This comes days after Belarus created an international incident by routing migrants to the border and urging them to cut fences and cross into Poland. Italy, France and Greece are all bitterly complaining about the volume of illegal immigration and asylum seekers. Here in the Americas we’re all too familiar with Donald Trump’s “Build a Wall” policy, although we’re probably less familiar with the “caravan of immigrants” from Central American countries making their way north through Mexico to challenge the US-Mexican border. It’s easy to be scornful of the despicable Donald’s attitude about immigration, but don’t kid yourself. He’s not alone. Every nation on the face of the Earth is struggling to control immigration, and they are all contemplating new and greater barriers to the movements of people.

The UN Report on International Migration says “Growth in the number of international migrants has been robust over the last two decades, reaching 281 million people living outside their country of origin in 2020, up from 173 million in 2000 and 221 million in 2010. Currently, international migrants represent about 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.” Based on those data, five to six million people are relocating away from country of origin every year. That little piece of data doesn’t differentiate between legal and illegal immigration, but it doesn’t much matter. Migration is clearly a major issue on a world-wide basis. How do we deal with it?

At first one is tempted to write some of these migration streams off as responses to local chaos. Syrians avoiding their oppressive government. Afghans fleeing the Taliban. Haitians getting away from their earthquake shattered home. The problem with thinking in those terms is that you can believe that these are temporary problems and the immigration issue will calm down and go away if we ignore it long enough.

The truth is, that isn’t going to happen and we shouldn’t delude ourselves.

Remember where we started on this series of essays. The world’s population has tripled in the last 70 years after quadrupling in the 250 years before that. So, it’s not unreasonable to think that the world is just slowly and naturally re-distributing all of those new bodies. The pressure to find space to breathe, to find food and shelter, just to survive – that pressure doesn’t understand or respect borders, and nations trying to control migration are, in my opinion, fighting a losing battle.

And on top of the need to find suitable places for all those people we’ve already generated, come two new pressures. First, global population is projected to grow by another 3 billion people or so in the next 80 years. I have to believe that this increase will cause further competition for space. And second, the world’s “comfort zone” is shifting rapidly as climate change affects lower latitude places.
So, we’re trying to put more people into the places where they currently live, but at the same time many of those places are becoming less hospitable for human occupation.

Our World in Data predicts that most of the population growth in the remainder of this century will occur in Africa. They suggest that by 2200, about 80% of the world population will be in Africa and Asia. The most startling projection, to my mind, is that the population of Africa will triple over these next 80 years. In fact, the vast majority of the 3 billion persons increase in population is projected to be born in, and remain in, Africa. Canada is expected to grow from 38 million to about 57 million, an increase of 50%. The US grows by 30% in that period. Europe’s growth projection is negative, by 15%, while Asia peaks in mid-century at 5.2 Billion, but declines to approximately its current level by the end of the century. South America, like Asia shows a slight increase and then a decline to about its current level in these predicted population figures.

The World in Data attributes the unprecedented population spike of the last 100 years to a dramatic decrease in post-natal mortality and a significant increase in lifespan. The reversal of the disastrous population explosion is attributed mostly to decreasing fertility. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean that the kids have defective swimmers, it’s just that people (women) are choosing to have fewer babies. And THAT trend, deliberate declining fertility, is statistically associated with advanced development of nations and education of people.

So why is Africa going to see a continuation of the population boom? Because education and development are slow in coming to Africa, so their fertility rate isn’t declining yet, but medical advances have improved child survival and life-span.

I understand broadly what the experts are predicting. But I fear that they may be wrong. We are seeing people fleeing Africa today in ever growing numbers as food shortages persist and authoritarian governments impose more and more hardships on their people. I just have no faith that Africa will be able to accommodate a tripling of its population.

Canada and the US have about 4.7% of the world’s population, living on slightly more than 12% of the world’s land area. As people in the rest of the world begin to starve, what do we expect? Will they stay where they are and die? Or will they come knocking on our doors?

I think that if we don’t find a way to open our doors and accommodate a larger fraction of the world’s peoples, those doors are going to be blown open anyway. Pressures will continue to build, and Canadians (and Americans) are going to have to ask whether it’s morally acceptable to try to hang on to all of the resources we’ve got. Forget morally acceptable – is it even achievable?

My prescription is that we should establish a very open immigration policy and accept people peacefully now, under our own terms, before they simply break the doors down. Current immigration policies seek skilled workers and affluent peoples who can add to our riches. But, in my opinion, we should also be welcoming those who have nothing but the willingness and ability to do physical work, because we can have work for them to do.

Stats Can informs us that “In 2017, there were about 550,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada, accounting for 2.9% of total employment…… TFWs accounted for 41.6% of the agricultural workers in Ontario, and over 30% of the agricultural workers in Quebec, British Columbia and Nova Scotia during the year.” The market garden business here in Port Elgin brings in a number of workers from Mexico each year. We see them working in sometimes miserable conditions doing hard work, and I have no problem with them being here. But if we cannot run our agricultural businesses without them, why don’t we invite them to become permanent citizens? And especially, if the future is that our country is going to have to grow by a quarter of million people every year for the foreseeable future, why not keep them here and tax the hell out of them like anyone else who does work here?

We should aim to become the breadbasket of the world. Our greatest asset is our millions of hectares of arable land. We can let the world invade and turn that land into cities, or we can begin dramatically increasing our agricultural output and sell it for whatever we can get – give some of it away if we have to. Governments should support infrastructure improvements (rail and shipping) that allow us to get food to the rest of the world. We should fund sciences, research and development projects that improve crop yields. We should seek trade alliances that provide us with raw materials so that we can produce food, or that promote exchange of food for consumer goods. If we want to keep our pre-eminent place in the world, we’re going to need to show the world that we’re willing to share and share abundantly. And that message applies even more significantly to our American neighbours.

Canada needs plans, policies, actions that deal with immigration not as a nuisance portfolio, but as a big-picture attempt to manage world population growth and redistribution. We need to accommodate the people that will be streaming our way and we need a plan for what those people will do. And we need to stop complaining about immigrants of any colour or language, who are all just trying to survive and provide for their families. In similar circumstances we’d do the same thing. So, stop whining about immigration and immigrants. It’s the shape of our future. Live with it.


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