Comment Re:Skilled workers (Score 3, Insightful) 88
Of course we don't want them going back, because if they go back it's a sign the system is screwed up in the first place.
Most should never have been permitted to come at all, especially their families. A slight labor shortage is a good thing, as it forces companies to raise wages and train to attract and maintain talent.
As Harvard and Statistics Canada found, there is an inverse correlation between immigration-induced labour shifts. In other words, when the labor pool gets bigger, wages get smaller (and the GDP gets smaller). Merit-based immigration (like Canada) reduces income inequality by suppressing wages of higher earning (professional) workers, which hurts the tax base (as the poor pay very little, relatively speaking in tax base).
So, if they don't have essential skills, we don't want them (as they decrease wages for the poor), and if they have professional-level skills, we especially don't want them. There is value in truly exceptional and talented people, but we're talking H-1Bs here.
The nationalist approach is not deportation, it's denying them a visa in the first place.