Category Immigration
100 million is a really big number: a review of Doug Saunders’ Maximum Canada
The following is a guest post by Mikal Skuterud, professor of economics at University of Waterloo Despite my interest in Canadian immigration policy, I’ve been hesitant to read Doug Saunders’ latest book Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million. The idea that the solution to Canada’s economic challenges is more people, and a lot […]
About that EKOS poll
A recent EKOS poll found "the incidence of [Canadians] thinking there are too many visible minorities is up significantly and no longer trails opposition to general immigration (as it has historically)." Here is a picture that shows the question EKOS asked, and the long-term trend in Canadians' responses to this question (click on the picture […]
Do Chinese Canadians struggle in the labour market?
Update: A revised version of the paper discussed in this blog, with results close to those obtained using the PUMF, is available here. Thanks to Feng Hou for taking my concerns seriously and responding to them promptly.
A very simple model of too much city
100 identical individuals choose to live in one of two identical locations. The only thing they care about is how many people live in the same location. Let W individuals choose to live in the West, so 100-W choose to live in the East. The Utility of living in the West is U(W), and the […]
“Trickle Down”, “Magic Dirt”, memes and deep parameters
"Trickle Down Theory" is a meme used (mostly by non-economists) to ridicule certain economic policies and the theories on which those policies are supposedly based. My first year students sometimes ask me to explain it to them, not understanding that it's a meme and not a theory. "Magic Dirt Theory" is a similar meme, of […]
Migration, Wages, and Corner Solutions
I'm trying to get my head straight on something. Macro farmboy lost in Urban Economics again. Read at your own risk. If immigration always increases real wages (or well-being), do we end up in a "corner solution", where everyone bunches together in one location leaving other locations empty? If so, that's a reductio ad absurdam, […]
Thinking about Costs and Benefits of Immigration
I find this a useful way to organise my thoughts about the costs and benefits of immigration. It may work for you too. I start out with a neutral benchmark, where immigration has neither costs nor benefits for the original population. Then I think of different ways in which that neutral benchmark could be wrong. […]
Upward-sloping Demand curves for Labour and Housing
I have a simple thought-experiment ("model") that helps me think about the relationship between: migration; planning restrictions; wages; and house prices (or rents). Assume all workers are identical, all houses are identical, and it's strictly one worker lives in one house. The government of a small city/state controls both immigration and the number of houses […]
Where did all the immigrants go? A fascinating puzzle with a mundane solution.
There are two ways of finding out how many immigrants there are in Canada. One is through administrative data, that is, by using landing records (the forms filled in when new immigrants arrive in Canada) to track immigrants. Another through survey data: to carry out a survey of a selected sample of the Canadian population, […]
Internal migration flows in Canada
Discussions about demographics are typically focused on trends in fertility/morbidity and immigration/emigration, and these are what matter at the national level. But at the local level, trends on internal migration are also important. Statistics Canada has been publishing data on inter-provincial migration for years, but there's only so much you can get out of them. […]
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