Culture: Attractiveness to Migrants

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Somehow, I missed a Gallup poll released back in April on international immigration patterns. I don't recall attention to it in the Canadian media either, which is rather remarkable considering the fact that it reveals trends favorable to Canada as compared with its rival for attracting quality immigrants, the United States.

The United States and Canada are clearly the most attractive nations in the world to immigrants, if the Gallup poll is to be believed. 165 million people would like to move to the United States, while 45 million people would like to move to Canada (which, I would point out, is more people than live here presently). The fact that more people would like to move to the United States is not the most interesting part of the poll. Only the younger and less educated potential immigrants prefer the US--the older (25 and up) and more educated (high school and higher) prefer Canada.

At some level, this seems somewhat counter-intuitive. When North Americans think about the differences between the two countries, they consider Canada to be the more socialist country, the one with more social programs and safety nets. The older and more educated immigrants generally don't need these social programs nearly as much as the younger and less educated. One might think that the more educated would be attracted to the lower taxes of the United States, and the less educated to the programs that help the less privileged in Canada. Yet, that's not the case. In the most extreme demographic polled by Gallup, college graduates from Southeast Asia, Canada was preferred to the United States by a more than 3:1 margin!

What are people seeing? The poll doesn't directly address that, but I suspect a lot of the difference comes down to cultural reputations. For the past decade, the United States is increasingly known as an intolerant place where immigrants are not welcome, at least if they are in any way identifiable as a immigrant. In contrast, Canada's reputation for being multi-cultural is spreading. The educated around the world understand that in Canada they will be allowed to be bi-cultural--both Canadian and whatever they were before they migrated (this blog has addressed this idea before).

The poll mentions what likely is also a major factor--Canadian immigration policy clearly favors well-educated, skilled immigrants, whereas the mess that can barely be called a system in the United States mostly offers no such preference. If somebody knows they are desired, they tend to find that place more attractive.

Whatever the reason, this isn't good for the United States. If the best and brightest are starting to prefer Canada instead of the United States, the increasingly globalized economy will inevitably start to move to Canada's favor as the Canadian work force becomes more qualified relative to that in the United States.

The United States has many reasons to reform its immigration policies. The Gallup Poll is just yet another reason.

Culture: Future Immigration will look Canadian

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Assuming the United States ever gets its health care situation sorted out in a meaningful way, another major issue that it needs to take on is immigration. Pretty much everyone agrees that the immigration situation in the United States--legal and illegal--is a mess, but there is not much more agreement about what to do about it than there is in health care. Interestingly, there does seem to be consensus that somehow acculturation needs to be at the core of any reform, that immigrants need to better integrate into US culture. Some take this theme to borderline racist extremes, such as a recent Robert Harrison column in the Christian Science Monitor that claimed Hispanic immigration should be curtailed in part because the verb structure of the Spanish language doesn't emphasize personal responsibility. (As a side note, I have studied enough Spanish to understand exactly what he was getting at and still think the argument is absurd, and that shame should assign itself to him.)

The problem with this emphasis on acculturation is that it is no longer realistic to expect the same kind of near-complete acculturation that took place as late as the middle part of the last century. No longer does a person move to a new place and only partake in the local culture and media. Technology has completely changed how people can maintain ties to their former culture. Not only does the decreasing cost of air transportation make it more affordable to visit a previous country, but the Internet has made it possible to take in the media of a former country, almost as if one were living in it. It is possible now to be truly bi-cultural, interacting with both one's local culture and one's former culture.

A new model for handling immigration will take precedence because of these changes, and Canada has a big head start on most of the world. For the past generation or so, Canada has encouraged immigrants to bring their cultures with them and build ties to others from their former country in Canada as well as with other Canadians. The city of Toronto, with its string of ethnic festivals all summer long, may represent the epitome of this style immigration, but it is present in any city in Canada with a significant immigrant population. People are allowed to be whatever they used to be--and Canadian. The two perspectives are not seen to be conflict.

One of the things that has amazed me in talking to Canadians that I interact with is how strongly they maintain ties to former cultures. I knew immigrants to the US that went back to their former countries on occasion, but here it is almost expected that people fly across oceans a couple times a year to visit relatives. Many move back and forth for extended periods when that is legal. Communities congregate around institutions, whether they be formal cultural centers or just a store with goods from a given country. A non-Canadian cultural identity is a daily presence in many people's lives.

The situation has existed long enough that quite a number of bi-cultural marriages have resulted. A co-worker once casually stated that interracial relationships were "unremarkable." The first family of Canada, Governor General Michaëlle Jean and her husband Jean-Daniel Lafond are an interracial couple that serve as a role model. The result is lot of Canadians with very nuanced identities, a concept explored by the CBC Radio program Mashup. The difference with multiracial folks in the US? There seems to be a much greater desire to hang on to the various individual identities here, rather than just being "Canadian" and nothing else. These Canadians do not just have two identities, but three or more. The lack of complete acculturation is lasting more than one generation.

For those that don't like this perspective, I suspect it's going to be hard to fight. It's not possible to legislate that one partake only in the media of a new country and not in the media from a previous country. It might be possible to legislate minimal travel and some communication restrictions, but that would only encourage the best and brightest to immigrate somewhere else where travel and communication restrictions did not exist. Like it or not, immigrants are going to be increasingly bi-cultural. Countries will need to figure out how to make this work--as Canada seems to be trying to do--or they will face constant tensions and immigration problems.