Comment on Which countries combine high quality of life and strong equality?

• FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Canada was going to have the inequality anyway. The immigration is a scapegoat for the declining quality of life but many policy decisions outside of immigration were already impacting quality of life. The housing bubble and oligarchy/monopoly of major sectors (grocceries, telecommunications etc) are the main issues driving inequality in Canada.

  Canada could support its ambitious immigration goals if it were willing to invest in the country to support them, such as extensive public transit overhauls and nationalizing essential services like rail, communications, and energy.

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  • Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be clear, I am extremely pro-immigration, but many of the immigration policies as written are tools used to suppress wages. This is the reason we see so many immigrants, often with degrees and training we refuse to recognize in Canada, in low paying, minimum wage jobs. I personally had the pleasure of working with a wonderful woman from the middle east who was a qualified teacher, stuck working 30 hours a week in a grocery store deli because we refused to recognize her degree or decade of experience. She spoke perfect English and was incredibly pleasant, and visibly intelligent and well-mannered, but she’s a brown immigrant, so fuck it, minimum wage for her.

    We can take immigrants at the rate we have been while not using them to further wealth inequalities. But as a friend of mine says, the purpose of a system is what it does, and the current iteration is not about creating a multi-cultural nation.

    For additional clarity, this isn’t to say that you’re wrong and immigration isn’t being used as a scapegoat. I’d just argue that the problem is more substantial than simply calling the issue a scapegoat suggests. There is a real problem, but it’s not in that we’re accepting immigrants at all; it’s the conditions we’ve agreed to accept them under.

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