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 HeindlDec 26, 2022
@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.
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 Horowitz
@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.
Dec 26, 2022 at 6:50pmWeb