Rethinking immigration in the face of innovation
Immigrate for the future, not the past.
Throughout human history, the means of production and economic growth that came from it have depended on and needed more humans. The more humans you had to build things, the more things you could build, and so it happens they also consumed.
Over time, what people did went from generalization and labour, which transitioned to more specification of labour tasks and the specialization of new fields. Industrialization specified labourious tasks while innovation required specialization to develop new fields.
People went from needing ten kids to work their farms to a couple kids who could run a tractor and the family farm would be ok. The same is happening in many industries with innovation. The same should be considered in our immigration policies.
The trend in economic evolution is that the demand for general, unskilled labour is diminishing, and employment is not transferable. We won’t need people moving boxes from one place to another or to serve us coffee at a fast food joint in the future. Robots will do that.
The overall skill and knowledge in our society will need to be greater and we need to be prepared for it within our education system but also within our immigration systems. However, more knowledge will be much more accessible and easier to use.
We are at the point where we should be looking at certain jobs with a lifespan - life cycle lens. It will be important to be proactive in helping people transition and upskill but more importantly not to immigrate people for these jobs and their skill set (or lack off) that are going out.
To put it bluntly, we shouldn’t be bringing in people who are less ‘intelligent’ than the innovation-executable knowledge available or less capable than it. Immigration will be important to position the skills needed to build the future instead of what was built in the past.
Bringing in people to do low-skilled jobs that will most likely be gone in the next ten years will be economically and societally disastrous. Not only do these jobs not cover current social services costs but these people will require even more taxpayer-funded services in the future, which will increase additional net costs to Canada as a whole.
Canada’s current immigration mistakes are already well documented in our economy. The real output per hour worked has collapsed.
Canada’s cost of labour has outgrown its productivity showcasing that we have abandoned economic growth in favour of low productivity sectors, driven by the public sector.
In other words, we have bloated expensive low-productivity sectors while immigrating low-skilled labour promoting wage suppression on the lower end and promoting low-skilled industries instead of focusing on the growth of high-productivity sectors and emerging technologies.
About 20% of Canada’s labour force is employed in industries and roles that are already obsolete to existing technology and innovation. That’s not including the employment in service industries (including public administration) created by reckless spending.
This puts our economy and fiscal situation at great risk as we aren’t in the position of leading sector evolution but reacting to it. Without addressing this first, we can’t turn our economy around and build prosperity. Our natural resources sector help mask this but they are also impacted.
Instead of allowing temporary foreign workers and other immigration to low-skilled jobs, we need to help these businesses implement technology and start refusing these visas. We should want people to do much more meaningful tasks than moving boxes or flipping burgers.
One of the reasons Canada has over 600,000 people working in ride sharing and food delivery is because of low economic opportunity. One of the reasons Canada has hundreds of thousands of people working in fast food as a long-term career is because there is no economic mobility opportunity. This is something the next government will have to fix, and adding more people to this area makes no sense.
Instead of immigrating more truck drivers, we need to create lanes for self-driving trucks (which already exist). Time to implement drone deliveries, robotic fast food restaurants, high tech warehouses and so forth. More importantly, we need Canada to develop industries that disrupt the future.
We used to make machines to amplify human potential, and now the focus is to amplify machines’ potential to amplify humanity’s potential.
This economic and labour reorganization is Canada’s path to retaining talent, wealth and significant tax cuts.