The International Scam

There were no "misunderstandings", nor are people needy refugees.

Canada (read: its idiot government that relies on restive votes) lets anyone and everyone in promises freebies for all.

To wit:

Some food banks have also blamed misconceptions about how they operate for part of the rise in use by international students. A food bank in London recently told the CBC that the number of clients “began to mushroom” at the start of the school year, with many of the new users being students from nearby Fanshawe College.

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“Our staff said they’re coming in such huge numbers and that we’re going to have to do something about it,” the food bank’s co-executive director Glen Pearson told the broadcaster. “It caused some concern as to whether or not we would have enough supply.” The college subsequently sent an email to students explaining that food banks are for those in need, and not just a free-food depot.

A food bank in Brampton, on the outskirts of Toronto, made an even more draconian move recently, posting a sign telling international students that they could not apply for relief there.

“We’re at a point where we need some intervention here on the food banks not being inundated and overwhelmed with people coming to the doors and interfering with the service for those that need help,” the organization’s board president, Catherine Rivera, told the National Post. “We’re entering our busiest season, Christmas, when our numbers practically double, just because the pressures on some families become greater this time of year.”

The new report notes that individual food bank visits rose by almost one million from 2022. In that year, total visits numbered more than 1.5 million for the first time in the history of the survey. In 2023, it broke 2.5 million visits. Annual visits had remained largely flat from 2010 to 2020 at a little less than a million, but are now trending significantly higher each year.

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Canada’s population has become increasingly difficult to count, and the balance of evidence points toward an undercount of one million temporary residents in the country’s main employment survey. This has eroded the reliability of a host of market-relevant variables involving population counts, from employment figures to housing construction to productivity.

After raising five-year immigration targets in the aftermath of the sharp drop in immigration in 2020 and 2021, the federal government last week announced immigration targets would be held at the current planned levels through 2026. Over the next three years, Canada will aim to bring in roughly 500,000 permanent residents per year (around 1.3 per cent of the 2022 population). This compares to a pre-COVID-19 target of 310,000, and 250,000 a decade ago. ...

Although there are some reasons to think the IRCC data come with a slight upward bias (such as double counting individuals with both study and work permits), there is no question at all that the LFS numbers are heavily biased downward. This owes partly to ambiguous questions in the survey, and partly to a sampling methodology that simply underweights temporary residents due to low response rates (according to recent research from the C.D. Howe Institute).

A similar issue arises between the Canadian census and the quarterly demographic estimates. According to the latest census, there were 925,000 non-permanent residents in 2021. However, the quarterly population data show that number to be 1.38 million, based on a new methodological update that corrects for those who stay in Canada after their permit expires.

It is part of the unfortunate nature of mismeasurement and unreconciled data that we cannot precisely assess the errors in the related statistics, but we can at least attempt to match the best available measurements — with appropriate adjustments — to the analysis at hand. With this in mind, we highlight three areas where we can get a sense of the directionality of potential errors.

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Over two dozen Republicans formed a northern border security caucus earlier this year, which intends to identify and quantify the problem at the U.S.-Canadian border. In recent years, the surge in refugee claimants from the U.S. into Canada, via Roxham Road (closed in September) in rural Quebec, has been the biggest bilateral immigration issue and led to a new asylum pact with the U.S.

“What’s gotten less attention is the exponential surge in migration going the other way,” wrote Alexander Panetta, the CBC’s Washington correspondent. The northern border caucus is calling for more border agents and monitoring equipment, all of which will slow border crossings for those headed to the United States from Canada.

Remote areas are most affected. “We are being assaulted because we don’t have a border,” said Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana. “This is a national security problem and the northern tier has their own set of challenges.”

Americans have also complained about visa requirements for Mexicans who wish to enter Canada. Mexicans can fly and enter Canada if they obtain an eTA, or an online visa waiver, which entitles them to stay for up to six months. An unknown number are smuggled into the United States by vehicle.

Fox News reported in February that, “There has been a sharp increase in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encounters of migrants at the northern border, jumping from 32,376 in FY 2020 to 109,535 in FY 2022. There have also been more recent increases in drug seizures, all while staffing levels have remained roughly static for years. The border, which is 5,525 miles, only has 115 ports of entry.”

According to Rep. Mike Kelly, “Migrants and smugglers are seeking alternative routes into the United States, and the northern border is increasingly their first stop.”

The CBC reported that, “Statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show exponential growth in migration from Canada, with more than 55,000 encounters in the first four months of this fiscal year — almost eight times the 2021 rate.

“These encounters can include anything from an arrest to an asylum claim, and they’ve disproportionately involved citizens of India, Mexico and Canada.”

That’s a small amount compared to the flood of illegals getting across America’s southern border, but as controls along the Mexican border increase, migrants and drug smugglers will increasingly turn to Canada to bypass U.S. immigration controls.