DUAL CITIZENSHIP: HOW MUCH IS IT COSTING CANADA?
By Bruce Cheadle
Hamilton Spectator, Canada
The Canadian Press
Nov 13 2006
Country looks good in retirement
For the record, Don DeVoretz doesn’t criticize immigrants who come
to Canada, stay long enough to become citizens, then leave to sow
greener pastures in the world’s economic hothouses.
"Nobody’s breaking any law here," the economist and immigration
researcher said from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, where
he’s co-director of Research for Immigration and Integration in the
Metropolis or RIIM.
"If we set up the policy to encourage people to come here, get
citizenship and leave without paying taxes, I would do it. You would.
It’s not evil."
But DeVoretz does take issue with some of Canada’s current immigration
and citizenship policy.
In an increasingly mobile world, Canada’s generous social programs,
platinum passport and low threshold for naturalization make this
country an attractive way station.
Whether that is a good or bad thing for the country depends on who
you talk to.
Kenny Zhang, a senior research analyst at the Asia Pacific Foundation
of Canada, writes eloquently of the benefits naturalized Canadians
abroad bring to their adopted homeland.
The foundation has estimated there are 2.7 million Canadian citizens —
9 per cent of the total population at home — living outside Canada’s
borders.
That puts Canada ahead of the United States, China, India and Australia
for the proportion of nationals living abroad.
Zhang and his colleagues believe economic considerations are going
to keep increasing that number.
China and India are furiously recruiting their educated expatriates in
western countries as their economies modernize and grow exponentially.
Canadian nationals of Chinese and Indian descent help foster valuable
trade and cultural ties when they return to jobs in their mother
countries, Zhang argues.
But there’s a downside to the equation.
DeVoretz is working on a book that involved a series of interviews
with Canadian returnees to Hong Kong, where he estimates close to
250,000 Canadian nationals live and work.
The academic says there’s a uniform response in the interviews:
"They would like to come back (to Canada) in their retirement years."
For a country that provides generous medicare benefits as well as
social security and old-age pensions, the cost of servicing these
retirees, "could be a very big issue," says DeVoretz.
Lest it appear he’s picking on Hong Kong Canadians, DeVoretz makes the
point that policy-makers seldom talk about the estimated 1.2 million
Canadians — including power earners such as Wayne Gretzky and Celine
Dion — who live and work in the United States but are equally part
of the problem.
"There isn’t criticism aimed at that diaspora, but it is at the
foreign-born one. And that’s where the racism comes in, clearly."
Canada’s relatively relaxed entry standards for business-class
migrants, generous family reunification policy and short, three-year
residency requirement for citizenship were all put in place to help
us compete for skilled immigrants with the attractive American market
in the 1990s, said DeVoretz.
Now that those migrants are flowing back out, Canada needs to address
some issues.
The range of options is staggering, from Israel and Switzerland’s
compulsory military service for citizens to the U.S. requirement
that worldwide income — after the first $100,000 — be subject to
American taxation.
Germany recently decided to revoke dual citizenship after age 18,
forcing adults to decide on their nationality. The Netherlands has
changed its citizenship policy three times in the last decade.
"Each country has addressed what it feels is the most vulnerable part
of its overseas diaspora," said DeVoretz.
"I would like to have a Canada-first policy, like every other
country has."
He proposes a couple of rather benign fixes.
First, make all citizens abroad file an income report annually in
Canada, "just so we know where you are."
He’d also like to see evidence of political participation, through
Internet voting abroad or some other option.
Zhang, in a paper this year, noted countries such as Israel and
Armenia view their diasporas as "strategically vital political
assets." Other countries, such as Mexico, India and the Philippines,
see the economic power of their diasporas reflected in remittances
sent home by expatriates working abroad.
Canada, up until this summer’s Lebanon evacuation, seems not to have
given its diaspora much thought.
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Monte Solberg now says his
department is reviewing dual citizenship.
"From my point of view, that’s the wrong medicine for the issue,"
Zhang said.
The majority of Canadians abroad probably hold only Canadian
citizenship, since neither China nor the U.S. formally recognizes
duals.
If the Canadian government has a problem with citizens living abroad
for the balance of their working lives and returning in retirement
for medical care and other services, the solution has little to do
with dual citizenship.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
