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Then have the Minister of Immigration appear moderate and wise by announcing an increase in immigration by only 15.4 per cent, from 260,000 to 300,000, rather than the 73 per cent to 450,000 recommended by the council.

How does mass immigration serve the interests of political parties? It brings financial and electoral support from employers who profit from being able to employ low-skilled and high-skilled labour at wages that are lower than what they would have to pay for Canadian workers. Electoral support also comes from the owners of real estate, developers and brokers, construction workers and mortgage brokers who gain much from the increased business immigrants bring.

Parties also gain support from immigrant communities who expect to gain political and economic clout, enjoy having family members join them, and benefit from larger markets for ethnic products and media. Support also comes from the large “immigration industry” of social workers, lawyers and language teachers who are paid by the government.

These groups benefiting from mass immigration lobby the government effectively, while the general public is unorganized and does not. To the contrary, the public is lobbied by the government, which issues a constant flow of propaganda about the alleged economic and social benefits from mass immigration and suppresses the distribution of fact-based accounts of the negative effects.

The government also issues highly misleading information about the 172,500 “economic migrants” who will be selected in 2017 for their likely economic success. In fact, assuming an average family size of four, only 43,125 of them will be truly economic immigrants, the rest will be their spouses and children. Many will later be joined by their parents and grandparents, who will number 20,000 in 2017 and contribute very little to the economy.