I think the issue with this conversation is that you have been talking about temporary immigrants all along, but I did not realise that originally so I have been talking about permanent immigrants all along. Hopefully both of our comments make a lot more sense in that light.

Your first post used the word "immigrants" and talked about the home building rates and the health care sector. Most people don't expect temporary immigrants to have a large impact on health care costs. So I think my initial misunderstanding of you is sensible. I would guess most people mean permanent immigrants when using the word "immigrants" - however I don't know your background...

We also obviously need to be careful when using annualised numbers. For example plenty of the students that come to New Zealand come to learn English over say two months (as I have just been learning since I'm looking at renting a room out to a student or worker).

6 student visas for two months consecutively has the same yearly impact on resources as 1 permanent immigrant. Adding tourist visa numbers to immigrant numbers would be similarly misleading for the same reason. Perhaps we need numbers for a snapshot of all visitors? The information is available to our immigration departments - they know how many people are currently in the country at any point in time.

If the 550k number is a sample at a point of time during the student year then it can be compared as an annualised number - but I can't know the context of your number without knowing your source. If it is a number of VISAs then the number needs to be annualised to work out impact on resources.

I completely agree that temporary immigration has an impact on resources and residents.

I believe that temporary immigration is nowhere near the impact that permanent immigration has on resources - especially in the long term where retired immigrants DO massively affect the health system costs. Temporary immigrants are mostly healthy and sick ones should be covered by travel insurance?

The podcast mentions one long term impact for Canada: that temporary immigrants can have a baby and Canada gives the baby citizenship.

In New Zealand we have massive numbers of tourists over our summer which has a heavy impact on our resources (including housing due to AirBnB). But tourists do pay their way and don't have a long tail of costs (retirement etcetera).

If we wanted to compare temporary residents, then I can include tourists during the tourism season, and suddenly you will find that the numbers for New Zealand are ridiculously high! However I have no idea what it's like for Canada. Our tourism season has a heavy impact - but mostly on tourist locations - less so on our metro areas (although I see personally see the impact of cruise ships on the suburb of Lyttelton in Christchurch).

I recall the podcast seemed to say that your problem with temporary immigrants was a sudden change and that the numbers likely would revert to something more sensible.

I'm sure we can agree that all 3 countries have economic issues with immigration.

New Zealand has been making new houses especially in Auckland and Christchurch. I believe Canada has been falling behind there. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38430062

And most developed countries are fucked for demographics in the future: permanent immigration is a short term solution but I reckon we are just punting the problem to the future. As a middle aged guy I can see the problem slowly building and I have been doing what I can to prepare!

Since immigration can be a sensitive topic, I want to be clear that I like immigrants and I have close friends and family by marriage that were not born in New Zealand.

All the best. I am hoping to visit Canada in the next 5 years to go skiing. Thank you for the conversation - I comment on HN to learn and I have learnt a few things! Cheers