Who is blaming immigrants? Seriously, I haven't seen that take.

You could put part of the blame on immigration targets/the system though. It's not "RaCiSt" to know that if you don't have enough housing as it is, that adding more people who needs homes won't help the issue (unless they are all here to build homes?).

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I need to explain to adults how addition and subtraction works.

Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it's impossible they're NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you're in a deficit. It's Grade 1 math.

But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can't just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can't expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can't do nothing.

Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that's the way it goes.

In recent years Canada has experienced absurdly rapid growth in total population by any standard. It doesn't matter that much of it is from immigration, that's beside the point. Even without any immigrants the population would've been growing still. It's already grown to levels that stretch our natural resources per capita much thinner than they used to be. I remember even in my youth, in the 1980s, my father pointing at the vast new suburbs surrounding his hometown and lamenting how much of the best farmland had already been paved over. Growth like this cannot continue, it's got to stop at some point. Slowing it down a little would be nice, if we have that power. It wouldn't magically fix all our problems with housing and everything else, but it sure wouldn't hurt. It would at least buy us time to learn how to do development in less environmentally destructive ways.

On the other hand, borders suck and I'd prefer to live in a world without any. It's a dilemma keenly felt and little understood even in Canada where it's endlessly discussed.

Let me ask a question.

Did the Natives ever agree to immigration? I'm going to take a guess and say they did not. More immigration means less native land and that's not ok, it's just a slowly continuing genocide that never ended

It's not necessarily a "garbage" argument. When 100% of your population growth is immigrants, it does not feel right. My point is that when your local population does not feel like they can create families in their community, replacing that with immigrants is probably not a good way to patch the problem. I mean, our environment is so shit that less and less people feel comfortable creating families.

Another question I never had a response to is the difference between a population that its growth is majority immigrants versus locals. How different the city will evolve in either case ? Immigrants are usually coming from an economic, capitalist need. What does this say on our communities ? Our places are so crappy that you can't even have your own children ? What's the point of a community ?