Jonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022

I'm looking at differences in the US and Canadian immigration system and how people get employment under them right now.

The Canadian immigration system has some serious execution problems, but compared to the absolutely crazy and inhumane system the US practices it looks awfully good.

Show threadBrett Heindl
@jonathanhorowi1 agreed. I’m curious: do you have thoughts about why the two federal systems have diverged so sharply? American legislators’ ideological allergy to “big government” disappears when it means a vast expansion of detention and expedited removal.
Dec 26, 2022 at 3:40pmWeb
Show threadBrett HeindlDec 26, 2022
@jonathanhorowi1 the obvious answer would be racism, but Canada was no stranger to that.
Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022

@58mph There are a bunch of theories for why this happened but at least some of it has to do with the economic success of the United States and the massive population boom in the US as a result.

Up until the mid-1960s, the approaches in both countries ran parallel to each other. Northern and Western Europeans were favored, they would grudgingly take Southern and Eastern Europeans if absolutely needed, and Asian immigrants were excluded.

Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022
@58mph But by the mid-1960s the countries were in very different places. For about a hundred years, people had immigrated to Canada only to migrate southward to take advantage of the booming US economy, and in-migration to the US was also far greater than to Canada. So Canada was facing a very different situation than the US in the mid 1960s.
Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022

@58mph Both countries undertook a major reform to prioritize family reunification and skilled in-migration, but they did it differently. And I'm still fuzzy on the exact differences.

But the US system created a huge number of categories for entry and quotas and caps and the Canadian system, if it did these things, only a few of them exist now. And I think the reason for this is because Canada just had a lot fewer people and they realized this was a problem.

Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022
@58mph All that said, there is one other major historical difference, which is that Canada has always been able to pick and choose its immigrants. People didn't migrate from the to Canada in large quantities from anywhere (much less the US), and the United States is in the way between Latin America and Canada. So Canada might very well have created a brutal penal system of deportation on the scale that we see in the US, but they didn't have to.
Show threadBrett HeindlDec 26, 2022
@jonathanhorowi1 That’s interesting. I’ve also read that US immig policy has been friendlier to family reunification while the Canadian point system has prioritized economic and employment migration. Fam reunif has had some similar econ effects in the US but in a very unfocused way. One could argue that partly animated the punitive reforms of the 90s, which greatly expanded grounds for detention and expedited removal and aside from undoc mig, was most acutely felt by fam reunif visa holders.
Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022
@58mph This is absolutely what everyone says. But family reunification is also a pretty big part of the Canadian system too; it's just that the sheer number of people coming in through the economic stream is dramatically higher on a proportional basis compared to family reunification vs the US.
Show threadJonathan HorowitzDec 26, 2022
@58mph And furthermore, it's worth noting that because family reunification is primarily done via people who came in via the economic stream (which is highly selected on human capital characteristics) then we also see the family stream *also* see high human capital amongst the family migrants because human capital is correlated within families.
Show threadBrett HeindlDec 26, 2022
@jonathanhorowi1 O Canada, indeed :)
Show threadBrett HeindlDec 26, 2022
@jonathanhorowi1 Anyway, I don’t mean to monopolize your time. Your initial observation squared with something similar I’ve been working on (integration policy), an area where Canada and Europe are light years ahead of the US. As usual, the US federal govt takes a laissez-faire approach and makes communities and state and local governments the de facto agents of integration.