Whether those levels of immigration can be sustained without causing social problems is not yet known. Certainly housing is extremely unaffordable and taxes are very high.
Canada's TFR in 2020 was 1.4. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/960-fewer-babies-born-c...
And the last time TFR was above replacement was in 1970. Meaning Canada has been at below-replacement fertility for more than 50 years.
Canada's population, however, has doubled since 1970. That represents an extreme amount of immigration.
Canadian immigration quotas are simply out of control, about 10x per capita what the US allows.
And it's just the beginning, apparently the current ruling party is planning to give amnesty and permanent residency to half a million illegal migrants in the coming year. [0]
It creates an interesting dynamic in tech.
Anecdotally, it seems there's a lot of Canadians expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Canadians could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and its Universities were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. Yet it seems the opposite happened. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for Canadian nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US. Canada maintains a net brain drain to the US [1]
Canada sure had a lot of "talent" immigrate in the meantime, but from my observations it's mostly people who can't -and likely won't ever be able to- secure a US visa, mostly due to skills (there's a reason they immigrated to Canada, it's way easier). Some companies leverage this and have floors of international devs they park in Canada for a fraction of their US counterpart through a subsidiary. The city of Vancouver even bragged about its devs being worth 50K less than their American counterparts! [2]
I witnessed it first hand. Back when we opened a satellite location in Toronto. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/immigration-ministry...
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
[2] https://globalnews.ca/news/4178326/amazon-vancouver-tech-wor...
I was born in Canada, and I would have preferred to stay. The country is a great opportunity for immigrants, but it’s an opportunity cost for me.
