Excessive, wealth-based immigration is a root cause of the housing crisis. Explored in this dystopian novel following two families on opposite sides.
This is not an anti-immigration book. Historically, immigration has been important to countries with low natural birth rates (including Canada). Benefits include a predictable growth in the working population, cultural diversity, and infusion of new ideas into arts and science. Immigration is an important part of who we are as Canadians.
But too much of a good thing can be harmful. Canada has aggressively increased its annual immigration targets, and this is accelerating. Current projections will take us from 310,000 in 2018 to 340,000 by 2020. The Advisory Council on Economic Growth has recommended another colossal jump, to 450,000 per year by 2021. Unless this influx is matched by an accelerating growth in housing stocks, upward pressure results on housing prices. Compounding this, if the immigrants we admit are preferentially wealthy, it is as if we allowed foreign buyers unfettered access to our real estate. Official foreign buyer numbers remain low, even while vast amounts of foreign capital are used to outbid local-earning would-be buyers, yet this capital is not counted or taxed as foreign, due largely to politics.
Indeed, the connection between immigration and real estate prices is such a political hot potato that no one in the mainstream media-let alone any politician-will discuss it at all. It is however the topic of this book, albeit, in a fictional, near-future setting, in which the Canadians are the migrants with the much stronger currency, buying up the real estate in the relatively poor nation of Ghana under invitation from the Ghana Immigrant Investor Program (GIIP). And just as published statistics have shown that the vast majority of multi-millionaire migrants entering Canada today through the Quebec Immigrant Investor Program end up thousands of miles from Quebec (their top destination is Vancouver, BC), those entering Ghana via the GIIP nearly all land in the coastal city of Zoya. Under both policies (the real and the fictional), the governments' preference for attracting the wealthiest foreign migrants it can is so blatant as to be built into the names of these policies.
The Vancouver Model: Landed Money is Foreign Money begins in one author's vision of a 2029 dystopian Vancouver, BC, in which in which extreme overpopulation resulting from excessive, wealth-based immigration has combined with hyperinflation brought on by decades of cheap money and foreign capital, to trigger an exodus of Canadians seeking better lives elsewhere. Their preferred destination? Zoya, a picturesque harbor city of four million people in the developing African nation of Ghana. The Ghanaian government welcomes wealthy Canadian migrants as they believe this may accelerate Ghana towards first-world status. But just as we see in present-day Canada, not all Ghanaians benefit from this policy. The harbor city of Zoya is particularly affected, as its temperate climate and picturesque beauty have made it the top choice for immigrating Canadians, many even dubbing it the "new Vancouver."
This book follows two families-one Canadian and one Ghanaian-as they navigate differing paths through a period of unprecedented global migration between Vancouver, BC, Canada, and Zoya, Ghana.
The author, Eric C. Sayre, PhD, is a statistician and researcher currently living in Vancouver, BC. Besides being an author, he is a well-published scientist, with over 250 publications between 1997 and 2018, including a mixture of first-authorships and coauthorships on articles published in peer-reviewed medical journals, abstracts presented at scientific meetings, research reports and invited talks. For a BIGGER SAMPLE plus links to other books and software, please visit www.ericsayre.com.
