Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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The Challenges of Immigration	3 min 32 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
The Significance of Fertility	3 min 48 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Demographic Objectives	4 min 29 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
On Refugee Immigration	3 min 33 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Migration Policies	3 min 21 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Future immigration trends	5 min 11 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime

The Challenges of Immigration

My name is Luc Legoux. I’m an assistant demography professor at Université Paris 1, so I’m a demographer. I teach demography like any other teacher and, since I’m a research professor, my research focuses mainly on all aspects of refugee immigration, asylum seekers and asylum policies, and a bit on overall migration in France and within the European framework, since France is part of the European framework.

The challenges.... There are lots, but at the same time there aren’t so many because there’s always the impression when you talk about immigration, especially in Europe, that immigration numbers are huge. You have the latest report from the Global Commission on International Migration talking about 200 million international migrants in the world as if that were a huge number. In that report, it’s saying: Take note of this! It’s an awful lot! It’s the equivalent of the population of Brazil, the fifth most populous country in the world, and so on. So it’s perceived as a very big number, but you can take the complete opposite view, which is to say that 200 million is very small. It represents barely 3 percent of the world’s population, and the margin of uncertainty for global population numbers is in fact 3 percent.

So you could say that it’s a lot or that, no, it’s not a lot. It’s more how you look at it. If you see it as something big, that’s also because most migration (60 percent of international migrants) flows into developed countries. Therefore, it has a more visible presence in developed countries, which account for only 25 percent of the world’s population. But developed countries have 87 percent of the entire world’s gross national product (GNP) in purchasing power parity. So developed countries are not being “invaded” by migrants. That’s not a challenge at all. In fact, immigration does not really pose a problem for the developed world, in any case not for the authorities.

If immigration poses a problem, it’s more the fact that developed countries, for example the United States or France, voluntarily accept 'tolerated' illegal immigration. It’s the fact that they tolerate illegal immigration that poses a problem for society because tolerating illegal immigration has a significant impact on wages. Therefore, it’s not so much immigration that poses the problem as tolerated illegal immigration.

The Significance of Fertility

The important thing about the changes in population structures or population numbers is fertility. There’s mortality, of course, but you’re not going to increase mortality to have, for example, fewer senior citizens. You’re not going to be able to play with the mortality variable very much because there’s a lot of value placed on curbing mortality as much as possible. So, the number one variable that’s going to influence population numbers is fertility.

And if we look at the Canadian context, fertility is currently very low there. It’s 1.5 children per woman, which is not a lot. That doesn’t ensure population replacement because to ensure replacement there would have to be slightly more than two children per woman. Obviously, at the moment, Canada is not formulating any policy on fertility that would affect people’s standard of living, how society is organized, the child’s place in society, and so on. They’re not meddling with that. You don’t want to tinker with how society is organized as such; it’s preferable to try to compensate for this future deficit -- because at the moment there is not yet a deficit due to the age structure, where currently there are many working-age people and very few senior citizens. Which means that even though fertility is low with many people of child-bearing age, there are still a lot of births. And since there are not a lot of seniors, there are not many deaths. But in the long run, the people who are currently of child-bearing age are going to get older, and then there will be a lot of deaths. At the moment, there are more births than deaths, but 20 years from now it will be the reverse. And we don’t want to hear about it. We prefer to tell ourselves that we’ll draw on immigration.

It’s true that immigration can be used in Canada’s case, but that’s not true everywhere. In Canada’s case, with approximately 200,000 immigrants per year -- the current number -- population numbers can be maintained. Canada’s population can even be increased slightly, even with 1.5 children per woman. It’s just that it makes for a much older population, with a dearth of young people. This means that if we resort to immigration to make up for the shortage of births, it frees us from having to ask why our society, our organization of society, doesn’t enable the resident population to reproduce. Now that -- that is really a serious issue, saying there’s a population that’s not reproducing because the social conditions created for that population do not allow it to, because children are not welcome, not all the structures exist for them, work is what it is, etc. And finally, resorting to immigration means that the social organization does not have to be called into question. And that’s very serious.

Demographic Objectives

Perhaps 40 or 50 years ago, demographers tried to think about the notion of demographic objectives and optimum populations. If there were an objective, we would be saying that if the population numbered “x,” then that would be best; it’s the concept of an optimum. They quickly realized that it was absolutely impossible to define because there are as many optimum populations as there are social objectives. A demographic objective means adapting the population so you can achieve a social or political objective. A social objective might be having the most military power, the most economic power, refraining from destroying the planet or enabling people to have a maximum amount of free time. These objectives are a bit contradictory, especially in demography, because to have the maximum amount of power, you would have to have maximum population numbers. On the other hand, in order not to destroy the planet, you can’t have megacities with 10 million residents in the same place.

So you’re asking the wrong question if you’re thinking in terms of demographic objectives. The first question should be: What is the social objective? Then you can determine what the population objective is. Currently, Canada more or less implicitly has a growth objective -- to be the biggest -- because Canada is a member of the G8 and it’s the smallest of the G8 countries. It’s two times smaller than France, England or even Italy -- Italy has less economic power, but Canada is much smaller. It’s true that if Canada had the same population as France, it would have much more clout in the G8. So this may be one objective, an objective that might stroke the ego of Canadian leaders, but one that would not necessarily be good for Canada, for Canada’s population.

Measuring the population’s well-being is extremely difficult, but the UN has a human development index, in which statisticians take an average of the results of three main criteria: a health criterion measured by life expectancy; education criteria measured by a few education indexes, including the school enrolment rate; and standard of living criteria measured by the GDP. They take an average of all that and rank the countries. The top country in the rankings is Norway. Canada lands in fifth place -- ahead of the United States and ahead of France. When you look at the rankings for all those countries, you notice that it’s absolutely not related to population size. If there had been a connection, it would be the reverse, but even in reverse there’s no connection. The countries in which the human development index is the best are the small countries. And they’ve added another series of indicators, one of which is interesting: the incidence of poverty. Sweden comes out on top, followed by Norway, but after that, of the three countries I’ve mentioned, France comes out in 8th place, Canada in 12th and the United States in 17th. Once again, it’s not related to size. The population’s well-being is not necessarily related to the country’s power.

On Refugee Immigration

In theory, refugee immigration is dependent upon the international texts and commitments that nations have signed. By definition, a refugee is someone who is fleeing persecution. Nations have signed international commitments on refugees -- essentially the Geneva Convention of 1951 -- and, still in theory, someone who is fleeing persecution should be able to request asylum in a country and, from the moment that person is persecuted, the nation must welcome that person. That’s the theory, but in reality, refugee migration represents a bit of a departure from that general right. For example, in France, economic immigration is at a virtual standstill; they’re currently thinking about accepting a little more skilled immigration, but there is very little economic immigration. That’s our legitimate right. However, any asylum seeker who is truly persecuted should be accepted. It turns out that person is not accepted because, still in a formal legal context, the request is going to be analyzed and it will be said that the person is not afraid, even if that person obviously is afraid. That, then, is a situation that is more specific.

Even a country like Canada, which is an immigration country, which has immigration targets (that it sometimes does not even achieve), does not want to accept all the refugees that ask for asylum. The refugee policy is actually a little more restrictive because the policy of developed countries, even those that accept immigration, is an immigration selection policy. There are criteria defining “good immigrants,” ones who have intellectual qualifications, financial qualifications and so on and who will help enrich the country. But this is not necessarily the case with people who are fleeing. Which means that some refugees are going to be refused even though in other respects we want migrants -- but they aren’t the same thing. Migrant selection exists, and in a way it’s the main social problem because we don’t necessarily see the positive aspect of immigration. We see the utilitarian aspect of immigration; that’s to say, we’re going to use immigration for our own enrichment, either directly because the immigrants selected are going to work in the country, or indirectly because of the social, economic and cultural relations it helps establish between the receiving country and the countries of origin.

Migration Policies

Trade liberalization is occurring for all goods, services and financial flows. All those things have near-total freedom of movement, but not human beings. The problem of freedom of movement of workers is perhaps the greatest challenge. Currently workers’ freedom of movement is being restricted to protect the workers of receiving countries. But on the flip side, this protection is quite flawed because the response to such protection is offshoring. If I can’t take a worker from a poor country and bring him or her to work in my country, at the poor country’s wage, at that point I’m going to go offshore. I’m going to manufacture elsewhere, I’m going to move my factory to a poor country where labour is very cheap and I’ll bring the goods back afterwards. So, the response to non-freedom of movement is offshoring. That’s the first level of response.

There is a second level of response for those things that can’t be offshored -- such as building construction -- and that’s tolerated illegal immigration. The minute people are illegal, they have to accept very low wages -- nearly at the level of wages in their country of origin -- and they are not protected in the least by labour laws, they can be fired at will, and so on. It’s in their interest to be illegal, but in order for them to be able to work for a long time without too many problems, they have to be tolerated. We therefore have, as a second level of response, tolerated illegal immigration. Obviously, that poses a very big problem and it involves the whole issue of freedom of movement. Complete freedom of movement would certainly be an extremely complicated issue to bring up, but we can argue that protection of the national worker of the country of origin, which is assured by the ban on freedom of movement, is in the end not very well assured at all because offshoring exists. Perhaps by developing international labour laws we could come up with protection for local workers that is at least equally good within the framework of a much wider freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is not necessarily so very far-fetched, but it cannot be done suddenly or overnight.

Future Immigration Trends

Another thing to mention is how the UN uses its calculations on replacement immigration. There have been major, well-known works on replacement immigration that have concluded that, because of the very marked drop in fertility in Europe, extremely high levels of immigration would be required to maintain the ratio of people 15-65 years old to those 65 years and older. For example, for the 25-nation European Union, with its 460 million inhabitants, to maintain the ratios as they were at the time of the projections (which were based on data from 1995), we would have to take in 700 million immigrants by the year 2050. Compared with the 460 million we have right now, these are unrealistic figures. In fact, they’re based on an unrealistic scenario because there’s absolutely no need to maintain the potential support ratio (15-65 years/65 years and older). In 1995, the ratio was extremely unbalanced in all the countries for which the calculations were done, with France leading the way. For historical reasons, including the baby boom, there were very, very few senior citizens and many working-age people. Therefore, it was not a balanced situation and, if we were to maintain it, it would mean a demographic explosion. To maintain it, without considering immigration, there would have to be 2.8 children per woman in France and 2.9 in Canada. That would mean a demographic explosion. In two centuries France would have 470 million residents. That’s absolutely unthinkable! So this scenario is totally unrealistic. Once I studied that as a demographer, I asked myself: Why such an unrealistic scenario? It is, in fact, because the objective of this replacement immigration projection game is not to talk about immigration. They talk about migration only to gain acceptance, without debate, of the idea that it is vital to maintain the potential support ratio. It’s very true that the working-age population is shrinking while the population 65 years and older is increasing. Aging is inescapable. What they neglect to do, and so in a way it’s dishonest, is they neglect to project the productivity of the labour force. Since record-keeping began, labour productivity has been rising much more quickly than the ratio has been declining.

Therefore, the problem is not a demographic problem. If we want to be convinced, we just have to look at per capita GNP which, despite the aging trend, is not dropping -- it continues to rise. And no one is expecting a drop in per capita GNP. So, if there’s no drop in per capita GNP, that means that per capita wealth in the country is not decreasing, and if per capita wealth is not decreasing despite the aging trend, the problem of pension payments is no longer a demographic problem, it’s a distribution problem. And that’s a purely political problem. So the real question -- for example in Canada, which has a pay-as-you-go pension system -- of who will pay the pensions when there are a lot of senior citizens and fewer people in the labour force, is not a demographic problem because wealth will not have decreased. It’s a political problem.

 
And to go back to the UN’s projections about the reasons for such an unrealistic scenario, you just have to reread the findings of the UN report, which are very clear. The conclusion is that if, in Europe for example, the thought of 700 million immigrants scares you, then the solution is very simple. To keep the potential support ratios constant, you simply have to push back the working age to 75. In other words, if you don’t want immigrants, work until you’re 75! With what I told you previously -- that per capita wealth is not decreasing, that productivity is increasing -- the real issue of this debate is knowing who will benefit from the gains in productivity. Will it be the population as a whole, through a drop in the hours worked and consequently more leisure time? Will it be only those who are in a position to benefit from the results of the growth? It’s a totally political use of demography.

Last Updated:2006-09-08

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