The Immigrant Investor Program (shortened as IIP) allowed foreigners with assets of at least $1.6 million CAD to gain residency, or even citizenship, by providing an interest-free loan of $800,000 CAD over five years. More than 130,000 people have migrated in Canada through the scheme since it was launched in 1986. Ian Young, Vancouver correspondent of the South China Morning Post, says the IIP was “the most popular scheme in the world for millionaire migrants” from China to protect their wealth against fears of social and political upheaval at home.
Numerous sources subliminally hint that the upheaval of the housing market was one of the determinant factors to why the IIP was cancelled . However, there is no single source that explicitly states this phenomenon, and there is stirred debate as to whether we can put the entire blame on the “millionaire migrants”. With this, I would like to look into the relationship between immigration and the housing market, and assess whether if the end of the IIP is an effective measure to neutralise the housing prices in Vancouver.