The problems with sub-national immigration policies

Earlier this month, the Burgh Diaspora reflected on the history of immigration to the United States, the variant forms of immigration sought by different states, the tensions between different American states over differing attitudes towards immigration and immigrants, and made a proposal: why not let subnational entities control their own immigration policies?

I think we should embrace the anti-federalist mood swing. Allow states such as Pennsylvania to embrace talent immigration as each sees fit. Better yet, let cities decide. H-1B visas effectively tie foreign born labor to the employer through sponsorship. Municipalities could act in the same capacity, making the visa contingent on urban residence and site of work. Various schemes could be concocted to enhance geographic mobility. Green cards would issued after a few years, well before the end of the federal queue.

This does make a certain amount of sense. In the realm of actually existing subnational immigration policies, I'm most familiar with that of Québec, where--as I wrote in June of last year--concerns over the growth of English led to the adoption of a policy explicitly favouring Francophone and French-leaning immigrants over others (French and Senegalese and Congolese versus Britons and Indians and Guyanese, say). This shift has arguably made immigration more popular in Québec, removing the fears of language shift from French, and has the potential to provide Québec with the workers--including skilled workers--that it will need as the provincial population ages. The rest of Canada obviously doesn't share the priorities of Québec and wouldn't be as responsive to local concerns. So, inasmuch as the subnational jurisdiction of Québec's control over immigration policies go, it seems a relative success.

The problems with sub-national immigration policies? Immigrants don't necessarily fit the slots allotted to them. As I noted above, the gap between immigrant and native-born wages in Québec is even worse than in the rest of Canada, a product of many things including the non-recognition of skilled workers and difficulties with social integration. In many cases, it's not especially clear that local control over immigration would be an improvement.

The second problem is that of mobility. For municipalities to have control over immigration, as the above blog goes on to sugget, strikes me as a very bad policy move. Immigrants have to be mobile, geographically as well as socially, and a municipality doesn't necessarily offer sufficient scope. In Québec the overwhelming majority of immigrants may be concentrated in Montréal, but this isn't because they're forced to live there. Rather, immigrants are concentrated in Montréal because that's where immigrant communities have formed neighbourhoods, dense social networks, and the like. Restrictions on mobility are especially problematic if--as some propose--immigrants are assigned residences in hinterlands in an effort to try to boost stagnant or declining populations. The waste of potential in those cases is arguably as much a moral problem as an economic one.

Finally, there's the question of whether immigrants will stay in their localities once probationary periods are up. My native Prince Edward Island has an immigrant retention rate of 25%; for cited reasons of wages (the poorest province in Canada) and social integration, most immigrants do not stay. Many sub-national jurisdictions may not keep as many immigrants as planned--in Canada, the differences between the have and have-not provinces on this metric is notable.

In conclusion? Sub-national immigration may be a useful idea, but it's one that definitely has its serious issues. It may produce short-term gains, but those gains can quickly be dissipated with bad planning and bad underlying conditions. Beware.

Some demography links

This afternoon--this afternoon in Toronto, at least--I thought I'd share with you five interesting demographics-related blog posts.

At Behind the Numbers, Mark Mather reports on the news that men in the United States are catching up to women in terms of life expectancy.

Dealing with my earlier post about biased sex ratios in the South Caucasus, fellow Livejournaler demographer has written--translated post here, original post here--on the subject, suggesting that the apparent deficit is a consequence of the underregistration of female births.

Geocurrents' Martin Lewis writes about the barrier along the Pakistani border built by the Iranians, dividing the historical region of Baluchistan. While built in an effort to control insurgents, the wall has a secondary use of limiting Pakistani migration into Iran.

The Global Sociology Blog links to an extended BBC series describing the effects of the male-biased sex ratio in India, describing things as varied as the grief of women forced to abort their daughters, the migration of women from more sex-balanced areas in southern India to the male-biased north, the shocking deterioration in the sex ratio in Kashmir, and Indian government efforts to encourage the birth of female children.

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen summarizes a new book by Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd and the subtitle is A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World. This book makes the point, made here several times, that Muslim societies around the world are also going through the demographic transition, albeit each in their own distinctive ways.

Canada will soon be as united as the European Union ...

... at least in one respect. It's a little-known fact that Canada is still in the process of creating an integrated national labour market.

Premiers put the finishing touches today on amendments to a 15-year interprovincial trade agreement they say will guarantee full labour mobility across the country – but experts warn Canadians to be skeptical of what the changes accomplish.

For decades, Canadian trades and professions have found it difficult to switch provinces because of protectionist rules in each jurisdiction that frustrate the easy portability of their skills. Premiers say their solution – first reached last July, and finalized Friday – will end those problems.

“On April 1, 1009 … a nurse will be a nurse, a plumber will be a plumber and credentials will be recognized by each [province] across the country and we will have true labour mobility,” Manitoba Premier Gary Doer said.

But trade experts say there is a significant gap in the revised deal that would still allow provinces to bar out-of-province workers.

“There are gargantuan loop-holes … allowing any province to opt out for something called legitimate provincial objectives,” Lawrence Herman said. “What does that mean? I guess it means whatever any provincial government says it means when it decides to prevent workers from another province coming to work in its territory.”

Mr. Herman, a lawyer with Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP whose specialties include trade, said the only way to guarantee that trades and professionals can work unfettered throughout Canada would be for Ottawa to pass legislation.

The federal government could use its trade and commerce powers to lay down one unambiguous law, he said – but it appears unwilling to do so.

Mr. Herman said the amended provincial agreement is “better than nothing” but falls short of what Ottawa could enact.

“If the federal government had the backbone to use the trade and commerce power that would make it unconstitutional for any provincial law to prevent labour mobility throughout the country.”

But the premiers maintain their new deal is solid. They say the revised labour mobility chapter of the Agreement on Internal Trade will provide that “any worker certified for an occupation by a regulatory authority of one province or territory is to be recognized as qualified for that occupation by all other provinces and territories.”

Provinces that break the rules could be fined up to $5-million under the agreement.

However, provinces will still be able to bar out-of-province workers from a particular profession or trade if it's “justified as necessary to meet a legitimate objective, such as the protection of public health or safety,” premiers said.

Canada's labour market was, until recently, roughly as fragmented as that of the contemporary European Union, perhaps even more so, despite the large volume of interprovincial migration within a unified country. As the authors of the informative June 2007 report "Moving in the Right Direction? Labour Mobility, Labour Shortage and Canada's Human Potential" noted, the reasons for this discrepancy can be found in the visscitudes of Canada's unification.

At Confederation, the British North America Act set out mutually exclusive areas of legislative authority for both the federal government and the provinces. Since then, the prevailing view has been that the provinces, rather than the federal government, have the exclusive authority to regulate occupational qualifications. As a result, each province regulates its own occupational groups often independently of
other provinces, resulting in a “patchwork” of regulations across the country.

Wherever regulations with respect to a particular profession differ in two provinces, those differences constitute barriers that inhibit the ability of professionals in that field from moving between the provinces and working in their professional field. A surprising result is that, at times, it can be easier forCanadians to have their professional credentials recognized abroad than to have them recognized in another province within Canada.

The British North America Act was, of course, drafted for a different age. At Confederation, the Canadian economy operated under quite different conditions from today. Interprovincial barriers may have seemed sensible, given the reality of the time. In the post-War period, however, as global economies emerged, there were various attempts to make it easier for regulated professions to have their credentials recognized in other provinces.

Some have argued that the federal government could assert jurisdiction over interprovincial labour mobility through its constitutional power to regulate “trade and commerce.” Thus far, however, successive federal governments have preferred to act in a more iterative and cooperative manner.

The first federal standards came with the Red Seal program of 1952, which established national standards for some trades, while the later adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its Section 6(2) granting all permanent residents of Canada "the right (a) to move to and take up residence in any province; and (b) to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province" subject to provincial laws, reflected the trend towards interprovincial mobility of professional and skileld labour. more progress was made in the 1990s, culminating in the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement signed between Alberta and British Columbia in 2006 and this year's recent developments. Not only native-born Canadian citizens but immigrants will benefit as well, since a professionally trained immigrant in Québec wouldn't necessarily have his skills recognized in Ontario.

As "Moving in the Right Direction?" acknowledges, in a tightening labour market like Canada's, with below-replacement cohort fertility rates and unpredictable immigration trends, Canada--provinces, territories, and federal government alike--will need to boost labour participation rates and try to make it easier for the Canadian workforce to be more mobile. The same can easily be said of other countries (and continents) with tightening labour markets. Old barriers just have to be dropped.