Canada has been pulling back in immigration, specifically student visas by a third because things got modestly out of hand and it ended up with about the same number of international students as the US, uh, not adjusted for population. This is after a decades long pro-immigration cross-party consensus so I should highlight how irregular this is as now 2/3 major national level parties have supported curtailing immigration.

“Schools” would open up in strip malls and most of the students wouldn’t show up which existed simply to justify visas.

Some enterprising types would go out and take out mortgages and buy a house and have a dozen plus people living in it.

Public services like the healthcare systems and food banks saw overflowing demand. People were allowed to come to Canada to study with proof of just 10k of credit, which you will obviously blow through long before you complete a 4 year program, and that’s not actually enough to live in Canada.

Housing prices absolutely exploded in no small part to all of this, and in case you’re thinking maybe the immigrants will build more houses, Canada has about 9% of its population working construction compared to 2% of immigrants, because for some reason the immigration ministry was unconcerned with taking in immigrants who can build homes during a housing shortage.

GDP per capita has actually been backsliding, and while this is largely demographics and an aging workforce and low productivity, national bank of Canada economists pointed to there simply being more people and this spreading our economic output thinner. I do notice how immigration numbers are multiples of the number of new jobs in the statscan data. The jobs are also going down in pay over time.

Of course you are correct about these economies being uncompetitive but framing them as resource extraction economies is reductive and mostly wrong. These are service based economies for the most part. If anything, the main economic driver in recent times has been building and selling houses and products and services to people who want to live in the beautiful lands and breathe in the clean air of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to new money bringing fistfuls of cash. You aren’t wrong about these counties being kept afloat by immigration, but this sort of thing is taking the air out of the rest of the economy though because it’s inflating cost of living and gutting the cost competitiveness of other businesses. Also we took in a whack of students who were fuck poor and went to school at a fake strip mall school they did not attend which does not seem like a wise strategy if we want this educated economic juggernaut of a population.

Framing these countries as uneducated is somehow even more wrong, Canada has repeatedly topped the entire world in numbers of those with a post secondary education despite grads constantly bleeding south. In no small part because Canada both has a shitton of student immigrants as I just mentioned and all these students subsidize the education for the rest of the students. It seems like education is not actually the key to economic success and in practice actually results in people getting bachelor degrees to do menial work so they can get hired over somebody with a mere diploma, while the most economically productive graduates fuck off to America.