[LINK] "Closing Toronto to newcomers would lead to economic collapse"

[rfmcdonald]

Mayoral candidate Rob Ford--the front-runner, in case you're wondering--has come out against the current immigration trends to Toronto, saying that the immigrants divert resources and curiously mangling figures (the actual number of immigrants coming to Toronto is only a quarter of the hundred thousand he claims, oddly enough). In the Globe and Mail, John Allemang explores the ways in which this would wreck the city.

One-third of the voting public takes Rob Ford very seriously, according to the pollsters. Which leaves the remaining two-thirds in a state of intellectual despair: What kind of rational response can you give to a man who says he wants to keep newcomers out of Toronto?

[. . .]

But closing the gates, tossing away the welcome mat, and junking the Diversity Our Strength civic motto? “We can’t even deal with the 2.5-million people in this city,” Mr. Ford said in the TV debate that first popularized his anti-outsider views. “I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.”

As part of the campaign platform for a fiscally frugal candidate, this reluctance to grow sounds persuasive. Our roads are clogged enough already. More people can only make them worse. Or, we don’t have enough tax dollars to deal with public housing as it is. So where will we find the money to build more towers when all those impoverished foreigners get off the boat?

But Mr. Ford’s followers should be very careful what they wish for: However unworkable the city seems to them now, a city without newcomers will face a much more desperate future. We’re not talking slow-moving commutes, rude TTC employees and the occasional garbage strike – this Tea Party resistance movement is a recipe for urban extinction, and not just because there’ll be nobody around to serve the tea.

“If you think growth is bad,” says Joe Berridge, a partner at Urban Strategies Inc., “just try the alternative.” The economic activity generated by young, energetic newcomers to Toronto actually makes our lives richer, literally as well as figuratively. “There’s absolutely no evidence that any of the city’s social or physical problems are due to the strains of immigration,” Mr. Berridge says. “Our transport system is appalling, but that’s because it’s just too old, and we’ve refused to spend money on it.”

[. . .]

Let’s look more closely at his newcomer-free city. The first thing we see are the obvious disappearances, the missing applicants for those highly visible jobs traditionally taken on new arrivals: Children and seniors and the infirm would lose their caregivers, fast-food restaurants would become slower and fewer, cabs would disappear from the streets as fewer overeducated immigrants arrived with a willingness to work hard for a lower wage but a better future for their overachieving offspring.

But that’s just the starting point of the Ford revolution, and it misses out on the subtler but more widespread damage done by his Little Toronto musings. “This would have a huge effect on the labour market,” says Alan Broadbent of the Maytree Foundation. “Once the economy comes back, the worker shortage is going to be a serious, serious problem. The birth rate in Toronto is well below replacement, which has a huge effect on the labour market.” Either we need a constant flow of newcomers, or less effective forms of birth control – a subject to which Mr. Ford has not yet turned his thoughts.

Mr. Ford made his controversial comments shortly after a shipload of Tamil refugees reached Canada, leaving the implication that newcomers were rule-breaking have-nots who would take more than give. But any analysis of modern Toronto dispels his simplistic response – immigrants generally are better educated than their homegrown Toronto equivalents, and they raise children who are academic and economic overachievers.

Immigrants aren’t a burden to the taxpayers and a drain on the economy. In fact, to a large extent they are the economy. An analysis of the Toronto job market prepared by Karen King of the Martin Prosperity Institute estimates that there are more than 125,000 immigrants working in business and finance occupations alone, or almost half of the city’s total. In health and science occupations, more than half the work force is foreign-born. Newcomers are the rule, not the exception. Perhaps not enough of them are in management, but that doesn't seem to be Mr. Ford's main complaint.

[. . .]

“Toronto’s rise onto the world stage has been driven by immigration,” says Prof. Siemiatycki. “The issue of population capacity is a legitimate issue to consider, and the stagnation of infrastructure can become an impediment to Toronto’s quality of life. But the answer isn’t to shut down growth. In an increasingly knowledge-based, globalized economy, you don’t want to turn away smart and well-connected people.”