Canada: Migration Policy Institute

Migration Policy Institute: Sound like a resum of woes afflicting Canadas immigration policy? Actually, its a partial slice of New Zealands experience with Chinese migrants during the past two decades, topped with a gloss of public reaction to those trends. As a 2012 report from the U.S.-based Migration Policy Institute outlines, Chinese migrants to New Zealand are presenting researchers with a striking new phenomenon to study: migrant families that move and relocate according to the specific needs of their members at various stages of their life cycle. Families from Hong Kong, Taiwan and now mainland China are coming and going from the country as dictated by the needs of career, childcare, education, elder care and retirement. In so doing, they are provoking outraged charges of disloyalty from longer-established Kiwis, according to The Star. It may be that some migrants to Canada, though their subsequent international movements, end up drawing on social benefits and protections that seem disproportionate to their commitment and contributions and The disloyalty is shocking. Waves of migrants arrive at a countrys shores seeking economic opportunity, a higher quality of life for themselves and their children, or refuge from political uncertainty only to return to their home countries or move on to other ones while retaining open-ended rights of return and access to social benefits. As followers of citizenship matters in Canada well know, those migration patterns, and the alarm they can cause, are much the same here. Like New Zealand and Australia, we have the luxury of not having to face the crises of human trafficking and criminal smuggling that European countries are grappling with, particularly in the wake of recent high-casualty migrant shipwrecks on the Italian coast. For that reason, migration angst in our three countries comes almost entirely from people we let enter and then accuse of opportunism and disloyalty based on their subsequent actions. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.