Immigration Politics in Canada are a Cynical — and Dangerous — Affair

Rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and policy, put people at risk. We can do better.

Source: Miko Guziuk on Unsplash.

As we close the year, I’m reflecting on the challenges we face Canada. There are many. Of them all, immigration seems particularly notable. I use the word “challenge” here because managing immigration is, in one sense, plainly a challenge, a difficult thing we must sort out. But it’s something more than that, given that we aren’t dealing with an abstract phenomenon or some mere numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere, but with human beings and a state and market that is all too ready to treat them as economic units, as tools, as a means to an end, rather than as humans.

While immigration is a policy challenge, it’s also an issue of moral concern relating to what we owe one another and to conceptions of justice and fairness. When viewed through those latter lenses, we have some serious decisions to consider in Canada — and, perhaps, reconsidering.

Take, for instance, the fact that the threat of violence against immigrants in the West is real and growing. In August, a far-right mob near Rotherham in the United Kingdom attacked a hotel that was housing asylum seekers after online disinformation spread, claiming that a knife attack that killed three children and injured ten others was carried out by an immigrant. The riots and protests spread throughout the country, in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, and Belfast.

In September, in another round of baseless online information spread, US Republican presidential contender Donald Trump and his choice for vice president JD Vance repeated the dehumanizing lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets. The false allegations led to threats of violence against the Haitian community. Two elementary schools needed to be evacuated in the face of credible threats. Hospitals locked down. Government buildings shuttered. Vance is now the vice president of the United States. Trump is the president.

Canada is not immune to the problem. The country has enjoyed a pro-immigrant consensus for decades, but in recent years, that consensus has frayed. Most recently, a growing backlash has put it, and newcomers, at risk as politicians, commentators, and anti-immigration activists blame immigration for domestic woes including housing and healthcare crises. Hate crimes in Canada are up, more than double between 2019 and 2023, and nearly half of them last year were specifically linked to racial or ethnic prejudice.

Immigration minister Marc Miller has accepted the premise that immigrants are contributing to economic strain in Canada. The government has recently lowered the cap on international students permitted into the country, limited work hours for international students, and curbed the temporary foreign worker program. The government is now also reducing immigration targets after raising them as recently as a year ago.

As things stand, the combination of real economic struggle, inadequate social programs, far-right anti-immigrant movements, and the cynical politicization of migration has created significant risk of hostility towards migrants, or worse, throughout much of the West, including Canada, the UK, and the US. It’s a cynical situation, particularly since these countries have long relied on immigrants as means to economic ends, filling jobs and boosting populations whose rate of growth is below the rate of replacement. It’s also dangerous, as the UK riots and recent threats in Ohio remind us.

The challenge for governments – which have so far proven not to be up to the task – is to address the crises that drive very real anger, frustration, and resentment without demonizing migrants and enabling xenophobes to use the occasion to attack those they hate.

Housing and healthcare in Canada, the UK, and the US are an utter mess, and it’s far easier for politicians to blame immigrants than it is to build more houses or fill more hospitals or primary care clinics with staff. It's true that at some point immigration rates can indeed be too high in the short run compared to the rate of growth of housing stock or healthcare system capacity or good jobs – immigrants themselves in Canada report trouble navigating these challenges.

It’s just as true that cynical politicians will blame immigrants for failures that are entirely their own. And newcomers are part of the solution to building a stronger country, of building capacity, as Miller admitted in August of 2023 when he argued the country can’t build more houses without immigrants and their skills.

Governments, commentators, civic leaders, and activists ought to be pressing the point that immigration is a boon to the country, focusing on the need to welcome newcomers and to ensure they can swiftly find work, a home, and access to the resources they need to start their lives in Canada – and, then, contribute to doing the common work we all ought to be doing in building a better country for everyone.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Yvonne Su, Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, argues Canada acts towards immigrants like a “narcissistic partner,” luring them to the country “by promises of opportunities and the potential for permanent residency” only to later change the rules on the fly or turn their backs on them all together.

Su recommends that Canada bring migrants into policy consultations, listening to them and taking their needs seriously and treating them as more than mere “economic units,” but as “individuals who bring rich diversity and potential to our communities.” She is correct.

The line that connects newcomers to those who live in Canada now is solidarity in the struggle to make a life for oneself, a life that is secure and marked by dignity and respect, by a wage or salary on which one can live and care for a family, and by access to robust social welfare programs that ensure nobody is left behind. These are goods we establish and maintain together – not in competition with one another, but in cooperation.

Politicians can do the hard work of facilitating this cooperation or they can pit the population against immigrants and pretend migration is a zero-sum game in a bid for short-term political gain. History warns us they’ll pursue the latter strategy, but that shouldn’t stop us from insisting they adopt the former.