The Unholy Trinity : Who Mass Migration Was Really For

Follow the Money and Power till you Find Three Winners. Sorry, You're Not One of Them 

Liam Deboer

 

 

Who Benefits From Mass Migration?

We’re told that dialing back immigration numbers will fix the issues caused by a decade of open-border policies. This is like saying you are undoing a flood by turning off the tap. Except that does nothing to address the water damage already caused.

What I am about to break down is applicable to all Western nations, but I’ll use Canada — my home country — as a case study. For three years, this nation ran the largest population surge in its modern history. Between 2022 and 2024, roughly 3.1 million net “newcomers” arrived — around 8% population growth in three years.

These policies were marketed as compassion and nation-building. We were expected to jump with joy, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya in our new multicultural paradise. To even question whether mass migration was benefiting the nation or the people in it was a form of heresy — punishable by ostracism from so-called “polite” society. Except now the results are in. Nobody on the ground level is better off as a result of these policies, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people, institutions, and industries who did benefit.

In 1959, Canadian women had close to four children each. In 2024, the number was 1.25 — a record low. Every year since 1971, we’ve had children below the replacement rate. This puts us in a category with Japan and South Korea, who are projecting demographic collapse. Without immigration, deaths outnumber births. This poses a major problem for a welfare state.

Pensions, health care, and social programs are funded by a large base of young workers paying for a narrow top of retirees. If the base stops growing while the top expands, the whole pyramid inverts. Rather than confront the much more difficult and daunting question of why we stopped having children, the ruling class reached for the quickest lever it could find: import a new foundation.

Once entire younger generations were priced out of homeownership, communities started fracturing, and crime started rising, the polls began to reflect extreme dissatisfaction among the general populace. This led the politicians and elites to backtrack. Ottawa began cutting immigration rates in late 2024 and has continued since. But reducing the number of new immigrants is not the same as fixing the problems caused by a decade of mass migration. The past arrivals do not evaporate when the targets change. The wage suppression and inflation have already occurred. Canada’s GDP per person fell two percent between 2020 and 2024, the steepest five-year drop since the Great Depression. The average citizen’s share of the collective economic pie is still smaller than it was four years ago.

So if this open-border-esque experiment didn’t benefit “the people,” who did win as a result? The unholy trinity: the State, transnational corporations, and international criminal organizations. Let’s cover each.

The State

Western governments have many incentives for mass migration. Overwhelmingly and increasingly staffed by progressives, the State wishes to expand its authority over social relations and the economy. After all, how are you going to “redistribute wealth” and ensure “equitable representation” in cultural settings without first controlling it?

Many would consider the rising cost of living a failure. To those being crushed by it, this makes sense. However, consider the state’s perspective. A population arriving faster than it can be housed, schooled, or treated puts strain on “the system.” Then the state reacts to this by increasing spending in those areas — exerting economic control. A failure of the state becomes the pretext for expanding it.

This increase in population also creates the opportunity for false marketing. At the height of the immigration surge, headlines were written about Canada’s growing economy. Which isn’t entirely false but eliminates the distinction between GDP and GDP per capita. For instance, if five people lived under one roof, each making $50,000 a year, the annual GDP for that group would be $250,000. If you then added five more people and everyone’s earnings slightly decreased to $45,000 a year, the GDP would be $450,000 a year. Nearly double what it was prior, despite the fact that each individual is actually making less. There are also now 10 people bidding on who gets a room, food from the fridge, or space in the yard, which will inflate the cost of every resource, again, while people make less. This is exactly what happened in our economies. Fewer earnings, higher costs.

Mass migration is a great example of what Rob Henderson would call a “Luxury Belief” — opinions that confer status on the affluent, who are sheltered from the consequences of their belief. A great example of this is Mark Wiseman — co-founder of the Century Initiative. This lobby group — which had partnerships with The Globe and Mail — aimed to have 100 million people in Canada by 2100. That would equate to roughly a million a year, which just so happens to be the rough number from 2022-2024. Once these policies proved disastrous, Wiseman failed upwards. He now has a seat on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s advisory council.

Lastly, if you want the state to direct social and economic life, you need to ensure that there are no revolts when said central planning inevitably fails. By fracturing the nation into an endless number of different group factions, while also telling those groups to celebrate their diversity (differences), each group becomes more prideful and less able to cooperate across cultural lines. Some would call this divide and conquer.

The state’s interest was never a thriving citizenry — only a growing one.

Transnational Corporations

Mass migration suppresses wages and, in turn, increases the bottom line of transnational corporations who don’t view nations as sacred, but as economic zones.

Flood a labor market and the price of labor falls. Basic supply and demand. Also, when many visas are linked to employment, this gives the corporation added leverage over the immigrant. They are far more likely to stick it out in poor working conditions or a hostile environment, compared to someone who doesn’t have to worry about deportation for losing their job. Employers benefitted from stalled wages, and asset owners — such as Brookfield Asset Management, formerly chaired by now Prime Minister Mark Carney — watched rents and home prices climb as millions bid for a stagnating or dwindling supply of housing. In essence, why go through all of the trouble of creating new products when you can just artificially inflate the pricing of your existing products through money printing and increased demand via immigration?

Even the Bank of Canada and mainstream economists admit that expanding the labor market, especially at the degree Canada did, led businesses to stop investing in equipment, training, and technology. Canadian productivity fell as a direct result.

Not to mention, an entire industry has been created around immigration. Lawyers and NGOs turn immigrants into customers. It’s not rare to see immigrants in chat rooms talking about how much money they spent to get approved and move here, some even taking on debt, only to find themselves competing for a minimum-wage job with fellow immigrants.

You could argue that both the immigrant and the Canadian citizen are losers in this deal, while the elites are the true winners, but I don’t think that holds up. For the sake of argument, consider Canada a 10/10 country, and the country a immigrant is coming from a 3/10. If mass migration degrades the standards of Canada to 6/10, the immigrant still finds themselves in a better situation, while the Canadian has to live through declining conditions.

Organized Crime

One of the greatest and unacknowledged beneficiaries of mass migration has been organized crime.

Chaos and deteriorating social conditions are a green light for criminal organizations. In 2011, the RCMP estimated that 800 different organized crime groups operated within Canada. Today, that number is over 4,000. It’s not hard to understand how this occurred, when you have an increasing number of people flowing into a nation, facing less scrutiny on the way. In fact, Canada recently rolled out an asylum intake model called “One Touch,” where claimants are expected to enter their own information — the border officers’ own union warned it lets the people most motivated to hide slip through unscreened.

With an increase in criminal activity comes an increase in criminal profits, which then need to be washed. Canadian intelligence estimates that between $45 billion and $113 billion is laundered through the country every year. It’s become so prominent that the practice earned its own nickname, “snow washing.” This comes as a consequence of a spotless reputation and toothless enforcement. In 2022, British Columbia’s Cullen Commission documented how transnational criminal networks pushed illicit cash through government-operated casinos and real estate — further locking young Canadians out of owning homes. FINTRAC, the federal body meant to catch this, was found ineffective and unreliable. Even worse, back in 2013, the federal government shut down a dozen specialized RCMP crime units.

Whether by design or incompetence, when a country overwhelms its immigration systems and law enforcement, it creates the conditions for laundering, trafficing, and smuggling. Canada’s own “exotic dancer” visa is an excellent example. For years it allowed strip-club and escort operators to bring in foreign women, and a 2010 RCMP report found organized crime exploited it to expand the underground sex trade.

Things have gotten so bad that a senior RCMP intelligence official, Cameron Ortis, was convicted of leaking secrets to targets tied to an international money-laundering network. There are still questions to be answered about why former cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault’s medical-supply company shared a rented mailbox with a woman later detained in a Dominican cocaine bust.

It’s not hard to see the intersection between political, criminal, and business interests in allowing this chaos to continue.