[LINK] "Refugees pay more income tax than millionaire investor immigrants"

[rfmcdonald]

This older CBC report says much, I think, about immigration policies across Canada and ways in which they should be rethought.

Refugees who have come to Canada over the past 30 years have paid more income tax in this country than immigrant investors admitted under the now defunct immigrant investor program, critics say.

Ian Young, a South China Morning Post journalist based in Vancouver, crunched the numbers with data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

Only a small proportion of the immigrant investors who have come to Canada under the program since 1980 end up staying here, Young said, again relying on numbers from the federal government.

"After five years, only 39 per cent of investor immigrants declared any income. Not only that, those who did, their average incomes were very low," he said in an interview with CBC Radio's The Current on Friday.

They may have been millionaires, but they were earning very little money here in Canada. Immigrant investors declared about $18,000 to $25,000 of income annually, he said.