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The Canadian public deserves a trustworthy immigration system that serves the national interest. Until recently, most Canadians were proud to support a generous immigration system; the bipartisan consensus was that a reasonable level of young, high-skill immigration attracts capital, improves productivity, and sustains population levels—benefiting not only the immigrant but also Canadian society. To some extent, this is what Canada’s immigration system achieved, until about 2015. But policy changed.
Canada does not have a single immigration policy, but many; as a whole, it is needlessly complex and challenging to understand. Moreover, the system is sealed off from public scrutiny, difficult to evaluate, and the formation of new policy is opaque and seemingly arbitrary. New categories can be created suddenly, or old ones abolished, outside the political process.
Due to policy changes about a decade ago, the proportion of high-skill immigration has plummeted, while the total number of newcomers has exploded. Canadian immigration is no longer economically beneficial, as it is dominated by low-skill temporary foreign workers and international students. With approximately three million non-permanent residents in Canada—nearly eight percent of Canada’s population—amidst stagnant wages, a shortage of housing, and youth unemployment, the economic case for mass immigration has collapsed.
But the economy, although vital, is not the only consideration. Integration and culture are also key factors, when it comes to immigration policy. And here, too, policy decisions have failed the Canadian public.
Consequently, polling data finds Canadians no longer support the present immigration system. But, given that the root problem is poor policy, the solution is to repair the broken system. This will not only reverse negative public sentiment but also strengthen both the Canadian economy and culture.
Immigration has been a good thing in the past. It should be in the present and future, too.
This study has three main parts: (1) an exposition of the economic and cultural challenges of mass immigration (including a short history of immigration policy in Canada), (2) a comparative analysis of other immigration systems that we can learn from, and (3) a series of policy options for improving the Canadian system.
To repair Canada’s frayed immigration system, this study makes the case for the following recommendations:
1. Lower the annual permanent residency target to a more manageable level (e.g. 200,000).
2. Strengthen the process of deportation for any non-citizen found guilty of violent crime, supporting terrorism, or expressing hatred for Canada.
3. Execute an international campaign to discourage immigration by anyone unwilling or unable to respect our founding cultures and unwilling or unable to integrate.
4. Prioritize international students pursuing courses of study of high importance to our labour market and supply chains.
5. Re-engineer the points system to emphasize language, age, and domestic education.
6. Consolidate all “population” ministries to create the Ministry of Human Resources Canada (MHRC).
7. Make the main mandate of MHRC to ensure that economic immigration serves the national interest.
8. Require MHRC to implement a pro-birth strategy.
9. Lengthen the time requirement for citizenship, except for immigrants from peer English- and French-speaking countries.
10. Phase down and abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program permanently.
11. Establish a uniform standard of credential recognition in self-regulating professions and skilled trades.
We have the right and the obligation to raise the value of Canadian citizenship, and to demand more of our citizens. Above all, however, efforts at integration should proceed not from a dislike of other places, but from a love for Canada.
What is wrong with our immigration system? This is an urgent question in Canada—but not only in Canada. Throughout the West, mass immigration caused a backlash nearly everywhere, beginning in the mid-2010s with Brexit, the two elections of Donald Trump, and the rise of right-wing parties in Europe. Canada, however, had long seemed exceptional. All our political parties shared certain assumptions about immigration, and the result was a consensus in favour of it.1 Received thinking held that new migrants, especially those below the age of 40, contribute more to the economy than they take from it, and bringing in a younger workforce already educated and trained abroad boosts productivity without the need of domestic investment. So went the main economic case for immigration. Other arguments were of a moral or social nature. Openness to newcomers was held to be right in principle. Migrants were believed to bring a greater variety of food, artistic and musical creativity, as well as language and literature—in other words, they were seen to be culturally enriching. Younger migrants, finally, were likely to settle, marry, have children, and thereby raise a falling birth rate.
Whatever the truth of those assumptions now or in the past, the Canadian consensus in favour of immigration is gone.2 It has given way to scepticism and outright opposition. A majority now believes that immigration harms the country by increasing scarcity of resources, especially supply and affordability of housing, healthcare, education, and social services.3 Moreover, multiculturalism itself has fallen under suspicion. Nearly 60 percent of Canadians now claim that newcomers do not share Canadian values and that they fail to integrate themselves within Canadian society.4 Additionally, 51 percent expect government institutions to do more to integrate newcomers and 55 percent believe that immigrants must adopt “broad mainstream values and traditions and leave behind elements of their cultural identity that may be incompatible with that.”5 Such beliefs have surely been reinforced by foreign interference in our domestic politics, as well as by public protests connected with foreign conflicts.6
These are the makings of a crisis. If our immigration system is impoverishing us and eroding social cohesion, it is not fit for purpose. Present attitudes towards immigration and Canadian culture cannot long continue without doing damage to our country. Ratcheting down immigration numbers and tinkering with eligibility, which the Trudeau government began to do, may be a step in the right direction.7 But there remain fundamental questions about the role of immigration in our country, integration, and Canadian identity, and this white paper will examine them.
“The problem of immigration,” began Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s May 1947 immigration speech to Parliament, “must be viewed in the light of the world situation as a whole.”8 This remains good advice, and we may begin to look for the causes of the backlash within global and domestic trends. Solutions may perhaps be found by comparison with immigration policies from different countries around the world.
Human migration to what is now Canada began during the last Ice Age.9 There took root a welter of mutually distinct peoples, who nevertheless more closely resembled one another than they did the later newcomers from Europe. Contact with Europeans led to conflict, but also to cooperation and a search for mutual understanding and accommodation that continues to the present moment.10 Norse explorers, commonly called Vikings, made contact with the peoples of the East Coast of North America around the year 1000 A.D. They were followed nearly 500 years later by English and French explorers. But there was no lasting European settlement in what is now Canada until the early 17th century.
The history of immigration to Canada since then is a story of oscillations between economic and cultural demands.11 The economic rationale came first and was long dominant. And, since the late 19th century, numbers of newcomers have risen and fallen with each wave of globalization.
At the moment of Confederation, Canada was less a “nation of immigrants” than it is now.12 The native-born population stood at 79 percent in 1867, slightly above today’s 77 percent.13 Mass immigration nevertheless was an important part of Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy: a steady influx of newcomers would ensure a supply of cheap labour and economic expansion. Immigration policy was accordingly quite open and flexible, but it was not liberal. Industries fed by immigrant labour, such as the railway, were heavily subsidized and rigorously protected by tariffs. Moreover, the immigrants themselves were seen as little more than units of economic input, beholden to contract-labour schemes and with limited rights.
A pattern of opposition and cooperation emerged among employers, trades unionists, and nationalists which continues to this day. Organized labour has always resisted the demand of big business for foreign workers, and the nationalists have always favoured restrictions. Both English- and French-speaking Canadians wished to select such immigrants as would increase or maintain their respective peoples’ demographic and linguistic weight. But in the councils of government, economic interests always triumphed. From the late 19th century down to 1914, some three million immigrants came to Canada. Industry boomed and small towns became big cities as the Canadian population grew.
This was the era of Sir Clifford Sifton and Frank Oliver—two successive Ministers of the Interior within the government of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier.14 It was they who brought mass immigration to its early peak. In the Sifton years (1896–1905), colonial offices were opened in Europe, so as to recruit newcomers from the moribund empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary. The aim was to open, settle, and farm the “last best West,” and the effort was well organized. Land companies sold homesteads at knock-down prices, agents of shipping lines and railways received bonuses for bringing in immigrants, and immigration officials churned out one publicity campaign after another. There were brochures, advertisements in print media, posters, exhibitions, and speeches at country fairs. And officials helped newcomers with planning their routes, buying tickets, and helping to choose homesteads.
This period of rising mass immigration coincides with the First Wave of Globalization (roughly 1870-1914): an epoch, not unlike our own, that saw rising prosperity, falling transport costs, and unprecedented exchange of commodities, people, money, and ideas between and within continents—a golden age cut short by the First World War (WWI).15
The same trends, albeit on a smaller scale, were known in Canada also, and WWI marks their end. But a “de-globalization” movement in the form of opposition to mass immigration had been growing before that. Objection to immigration from trades unionists and nationalists had always been vociferous, but they grew louder in the early 20th century. Police and church authorities added new concerns. Admission of persons who, as it was believed, did not share Canadian values produced waves of crime, they argued, and created overcrowded urban slums and ethnic ghettoes.
The Canadian government reacted with a new Immigration Act in 1906 and subsequent amendments to it in successive years. The force of these was to give the Minister of the Interior considerable power to exclude any groups of immigrants if doing so was deemed to be in the national interest. This authority was often delegated to departmental officials, and the results included: the now-notorious head tax, a drastic reduction in the numerical allowance of Indian and Japanese immigrants, the exclusion of black Americans, and the prohibition of all immigrants who did not arrive by a “continuous journey” from their country of origin. Nevertheless, annual admissions reached their peak during this period: more than 400,000 immigrants arrived in 1913, nearly 6 percent of the population, which was then about 7.6 million.
Immigration fell amidst the de-globalization and economic uncertainty of the inter-war years down to the end of the Second World War (WWII). During this time cultural concerns coincided with or trumped economic needs. Even amidst the economic recovery of the 1920s, admissions were less than half what they were before WWI. About 9,000 Canadians of “enemy-alien” origin had been incarcerated during WWI, and this was a significant deterrent. Immigration from Asia was all but halted in the 1920s; and in the 1930s, it slowed to a trickle from everywhere else amidst the Great Depression.
Mass deportations began at this time also. The targets were indigent immigrants with fewer than five years’ residence and real or suspected communists, labour activists, and other radicals. There was at first some public support for R. B. Bennett’s Conservative government’s pursuit of deportations; but the policy backfired, and Mackenzie King’s Liberals came to power in part on a promise to stop it. Unfortunately, they presided over the absolute nadir of immigration policy. The Liberals relaxed the struggle against communism and had no qualms about relocating the entire population of Japanese descent, confiscating their property, and attempting to deport them all to Japan. Nor did the government shrink from excluding Jews fleeing persecution and mass murder abroad.
Policy began to change again after WWII during the Second Wave of Globalization (1945–1980): another period of economic integration, falling shipping costs, and a general shift away from nationalism within the Free World. With liberal trade policy came a liberal immigration regime, albeit slowly. Some restrictions fell away as refugees fleeing the aftermath of the war in Europe and Asia found welcome in Canada; even the preference for British migrants faded. The post-war boom seemed to favour rising numbers of immigrants, selected entirely on economic criteria. Accordingly, the famous “points system,” introduced in 1967, weighted various human-capital criteria, and the old emphases on nationality and race vanished.16 And the department of Citizenship and Immigration was merged with that of Labour, and the result was the Department of Manpower and Immigration—an obvious emphasis on the needs of the labour market.
A new Immigration Act of 1976 introduced two innovations. First, it specified the goals of immigration policy: promotion of Canada’s demographic, economic, social, and cultural well-being, family reunion, diversity, and non-discrimination. Second, it divided immigrants into four categories—independents, family, assisted relatives, and humanitarian (refugees)—and gave them due-process protections against arbitrary deportations. The Act also obliged the Canadian government to take in refugees in conformity with international agreements, and this sowed the seeds of future controversy. A significant rise in refugee claims threatened to overwhelm Canada’s borders and administrative machinery. Though the government managed this problem successfully throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, this was the beginning of a political debate about humanitarian immigration that arguably peaked when the refugee crisis of the 2010s, and how to react to it, were live issues in our 2015 election campaign.
The 1990s nearly saw the breakdown of our immigration system. In theory, the economic consensus still held, but the efficacy of the entire immigration system seemed doubtful. Immigrants were not faring as well as they had done in former generations. Selection criteria no longer seemed to attract those whom the country most needed, nor those most in need of protection. The architects and perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) who easily settled in Canada immediately afterwards symbolize the problem vividly.17 Critics were especially appalled by the appearance on the West Coast of four ships carrying 600 Chinese illegal migrants.18 Most were deported. Otherwise, immigrants arrived with inadequate knowledge of Canada’s languages, processing times grew, immigration officers were overworked, assessment criteria were vague, and decision-making was inconsistent.
Then came Al-Qaida’s attacks on the United States. Security concerns, which had already loomed large, rose to prominence following the attacks of September 11, 2001. A re-engineering of immigration policy was called for, and the result was the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) of 2002. The Act made all forms of immigration more difficult and criteria more rigorous, and it gave considerable power to the Minister of Immigration and departmental officials through regulation.
The philosophy of the IRPA was similar in principle to that of the Immigration Act of 1976. But it was otherwise reminiscent of the immigration regime of the early 20th century, albeit without any racial or national basis. Economic needs emphasized education and skills, but considerable discretion was left to officials in determining an immigrant’s potential to adapt to life in Canada. The Act broadened the definition of “family” while restricting those who could be admitted as dependents. The refugee regime was tightened, and provisions for deportation were broadened with the result that the executive had more power to exclude and remove certain persons. Due process was somewhat restricted also. An ominous feature of the IRPA was its openness to temporary labour. This was, and remains, a boon to business but a bane to everyone else.
Between 1995 and 2008, immigration levels averaged about 240,000 a year. They rose somewhat higher, to about 250,000 a year, up until 2015, and began to rise sharply thereafter. This period (roughly the late 1990s to 2022) is known as the Third Wave of Globalization. Its interconnections, free movement of capital and labour, and rapid delivery of goods strongly recall similar trends of the early 20th century. Moreover, the number of admissions equalled and then surpassed the early-20th-century high-water mark, averaging about 450,000 annually by 2023.19 Immigration policy, ministerial power, and economic demands thus came full circle. And so has the recent backlash.
The old Immigration Act of 1976 divided all newcomers as follows: independents, family, assisted relatives, and humanitarian (refugees). The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) ostensibly preserves this fourfold distinction, but in practice our immigration categories look more like this:
1. Economic Immigration Streams: these are governed by an application-management system known as Express Entry, and they include:
2. Family Class Immigration: This stream allows Canadian citizens and permanent residents to sponsor family members including spouses, partners, children, parents, and grandparents to come to Canada.
3. Refugee and Humanitarian:
4. Temporary Immigration:
5. Other Programs:
That exposition should make clear that Canada does not have a single, unitary immigration policy, but rather many. The various Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) are all different, for instance, and an entire category dedicated exclusively to live-in caregivers has little in common with the asylum process or the start-up visa program. And Quebec, for all intents and purposes, maintains its own immigration system.
Furthermore, the formation of immigration policy is opaque and seemingly arbitrary. New categories can be created suddenly, or old ones abolished, outside the political process. Points are now awarded out of a total of 1,200. Human-capital factors account for 500 points; there are 100 for skill transferability; and 600 for additional factors, such as PNP nomination, a job offer, proficiency in a second language, and so forth. Nevertheless, Cabinet and the Minister of Immigration have considerable freedom to adjust eligibility criteria and numbers of immigrants. The points system itself has been notably adjusted several times, most recently in 2017.20 In the past, immigration officials were able to bypass the points system altogether, or award additional points, where they would otherwise be lacking, if a particular immigrant is judged to be a good fit on subjective criteria.
At present, the situation is arguably little better. The combination of the points system and Express Entry produces confusion and ambiguity.21 The main problem is that the points required to qualify are not absolute but relative: they vary from moment to moment within the Express Entry system, depending on the scores of the people involved. In other words, persons are not selected based on an external standard but only in comparison with others. The Minister furthermore has the right to establish “category-based Express Entry draws” whereby the importance of certain qualifications may suddenly increase.22 At the very least, the system is sealed off from public scrutiny, and it is difficult to evaluate.
Overall numbers, as determined annually by Cabinet, are furthermore misleading since they do not include non-permanent residents such as foreign students and temporary foreign workers. Even a seemingly straightforward distinction between economic and non-economic immigration fails, when we realize that immigration policy does not include temporary foreign workers and foreign students within economic immigration, though they both account for a large proportion of workers recruited by businesses. And the operations and decision-making processes of the Immigration and Refugee Board—the administrative tribunal handling immigration and refugee determinations and appeals—are almost totally obscure to most Canadians.
That state of affairs makes our immigration system difficult to understand and to explain to begin with. It has made the present backlash worse than it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, complexity did not cause the backlash.
To put it as simply as possible, current immigration policy no longer benefits the economy or the culture of Canada. In order to understand this, we must take stock of both global and national trends in recent years.
We now live in a new era of de-globalization, associated with five main phenomena:
1. Retirement of the Baby Boomers. The Boomers are the West’s largest generation and the largest generation of all time. The youngest of them are in their early 60s, and all are past their peak earning years and most have now left the work force. At their peak, the Boomers had a high appetite for risk and accordingly invested their earnings across industries and throughout the world. Those days are over, and, as interest rates rise again, capital will be more expensive and less plentiful.
2. Falling global fertility. Rates of fertility have been falling almost everywhere over the past century.23 By 2100, 97 percent of countries will be shrinking, and only Western and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa will be above replacement levels. The industrialized West has already been below replacement for many decades. This suggests that the era of younger, more internationally-mobile populations seeking opportunity abroad is drawing to an end.
3. Supply chain weakness. Covid-19 exposed the many risks and dangers of out-sourcing, far-flung supply chains, just-in-time delivery, and frictionless international travel. Governments found themselves unprepared and unable to produce PPE, medicines, and other medical equipment. This has changed, and Canada has notably revived much of its capacity for manufacturing medical supplies.24 Renewed emphasis on “friend-shoring,” “near-shoring,” and revived domestic industry will continue.
4. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war began on February 22, 2022. One month later, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink declared that the conflict “has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.”25 The full effect of the war may not be known for some time, but it has proven highly disruptive to food and energy supply chains, and is likely to result in a greater international emphasis on geopolitical risk than on integration and cooperation.26
5. Decoupling from China. Diversification of low-end manufacturing and supply chains away from China is a consequence both of Covid-19 and American trade policies which predated it. Rising wages, a shrinking population, political risk, and unfair trade policies have made China an increasingly undesirable and unreliable business partner. Pivoting away from China commands bipartisan consensus in America, as evidenced by tariffs imposed or reinforced by the Trump and Biden Administrations and the CHIPS and Science Act, which repatriated the American semiconductor industry. The second Trump Administration claims even greater determination to repatriate industry and to increase pressure on China, though many of its efforts so far entail reciprocal harm to America and its allies.
Meanwhile, Canada’s economic position has been steadily declining despite the second and third waves of globalization. Canada faces five main challenges:
1. Declining productivity. In 1970 Canada was the 6th most productive economy in the OECD, but it stood at 18th place in 2022. Since the turn of the millennium, the economy of Australia has grown at about 50 percent per person faster than the Canadian economy, and Australians are 10 percent more productive. Canadian productivity has fallen 30 percent behind that of America within that same time, and our closest comparators are low-income states like Mississippi. The annual “productivity gap” between America and Canada amounts to an average of about $20,000 per person.27
2. Underinvestment in the economy. Canadian businesses have invested a substantially smaller share of GDP in manufacturing than their American counterparts—though our domestic companies maintain a stockpile of cash worth about a third of our GDP. And manufacturing in Canada is now half the size it was in the year 2000.
3. Over-regulation. Our economy is riven with interprovincial trade barriers, complex regulation, red tape, infrastructure chokepoints, and other government-generated inefficiency; this in large measure explains why businesses fail to invest.
4. Scarcity of housing. From the turn of the millennium to the present, Canada has failed to build an adequate amount of housing. A recent report by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) suggests that, beyond existing targets, 3.5-million additional units would be needed before 2030 in order to restore affordability and meet foreseeable needs.28
5. An ageing population and falling fertility. The retirement and ageing of Canada’s Boomers promise to strain provincial health systems and the Canada Pension Plan, perhaps to the breaking point. Meanwhile, Canada’s fertility rate peaked in 1959 at 3.94 children per woman and reached an historic low of 1.33 in 2022.29 This is part of a Western trend, but our demographic position is significantly worse than that of peer countries like the United States, France, and Britain.
Given those global and domestic factors, it would be easy to make a case for a moderate level of young, high-skill immigration and other measures to attract capital, ratchet up productivity, and increase the population. To some extent, this is what Canada did until about 2015. Until that date, about 250,000 new Canadians were granted permanent residency every year, and about 67 percent of them were high-skilled immigrants. But after 2015, policy changed. The number of newcomers to Canada began to rise overall and the proportion of high-skilled immigrants fell rapidly. Now, immigration is generally at too low a skill level to be economically beneficial, and numbers are so high as to disrupt social cohesion.
The overall number of immigrants began to rise steadily from 2015 onwards, peaking at 465,000 in 2023; meanwhile the proportion of skilled immigrants shrank to about 50 percent of that total.30 So many newcomers, the government claimed, were needed to remedy labour-shortages caused by the pandemic; and yet only half could ostensibly have done so. The primary symptom of this problem is the huge rise in non-permanent immigration in the form of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and the International Mobility Program.31
Throughout the 2000s, international demand for Canadian commodities rose, and so did our need for heavy, low-skilled labour. This was an invitation for successive expansions of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP).
The TFWP was designed to fill gaps in the labour market until Canadians could be found or trained to do the jobs. Those gaps were assessed through an analysis of the local labour market, now called a Labour-Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Before 2002, about 50 percent of TFWP workers were high-skilled. But in that year, the low-wage part of the TFWP was expanded, opening the lower end of the Canadian labour market to practically anyone, even in the absence of a demonstrable labour shortage. Further expansion came in 2006,32 and recruitment of foreigners was fast-tracked in the resource-rich areas of Alberta and British Columbia—just in time for accelerating demand for Canadian commodities from the developing world. Unsurprisingly, the program more than doubled in size between 2003 and 2013, to almost 340,000 workers; and, from 2006 to 2014, it grew to about 500,000 workers, above and beyond the number of new permanent residents.
This was the germ of the contemporary immigration backlash. Two scandals caused it in 2013. First, HD Mining International, a Chinese-owned mining company based in Vancouver, refused to hire some 200 Canadians for a new project, and instead sought to bring in an entire workforce of Chinese labourers.33 Second, the Royal Bank of Canada replaced 45 Canadian IT professionals with workers from India, and the outgoing employees were required to train their replacements.34 In both cases, Canadians were indeed available to do the jobs, but those companies refused to hire them because it would be cheaper to employ foreigners. The TFWP was suddenly making daily headlines, and outrage grew.
These scandals occasioned reforms, which I helped to design and implement, in 2014. The government’s solution was to phase the TFWP down over three years, eventually capping low-skill TFWP workers at 10 percent of a firm’s employees, and making foreign recruitment more expensive and more difficult.35 The program was banned altogether in areas of high unemployment, enforcement measures were strengthened, and a public blacklist was established for naming and shaming delinquent employers. This worked, and the number of foreign workers immediately began to fall. But after 2015, the Trudeau government began to undo those measures, and numbers began to rise again.
The number of temporary foreign workers more than doubled between 2018 and 2023, from about 109,000 to 240,000. In 2022, the 10 percent TFWP worker cap in certain industries was raised to 30 percent, and the amount of time that the workers were allowed to remain in Canada was increased.36 The Ministry of Employment and Social Development, which oversees the LMIA process, furthermore instructed its workers to skip fraud-prevention steps when vetting applications for foreign workers in order to hasten the process.37
But most of the growth of non-permanent immigration occurred in the International Mobility Program (IMP) created in 2014. This program includes such streams as international students, students with post-graduate work permits, youth exchanges, and intra-company transfers. The common element is that, unlike the TFWP, these streams do not require LMIAs. They do not, in other words, take into account local unemployment rates or the availability of Canadians, nor are the immigrants necessarily bound to only one employer. The huge influx of international students in recent years accounts for most of the growth of the IMP. We know that the number is large and that it has grown, but we do not know exactly what it is. There were probably about 123,000 international students in Canada in 2000 and more than a million in 2023; but we do not know for certain because international students are not reflected in public data on the IMP.38
As of the time of writing, there are about three million non-permanent residents in Canada—nearly 8 percent of the population.39 These huge numbers of immigrants are, in theory, meant to serve the economy and thereby raise the general level of prosperity. But this happens only in an extremely lopsided sense. The reason is that employers use temporary immigration as a business model.
The TFWP is not normally the last resort that it was intended to be. It is a business model. Companies can recruit eager foreign workers, pay them the minimum wage, and keep their prices low and profits high. This is especially true of the hospitality industry where low-cost labour comes at a high cost to everyone but the businesses in question.40 Young Canadian workers, for instance, are priced out, as foreign workers are effectively paid below minimum wage: hours are unreasonably long, breaks are forbidden, and workers are forced to live in accommodation owned by their employers while rent is deducted from pay. This is tantamount to indentured servitude, and a recent report by the United Nations included the TFWP among modern examples of slavery.41
Recruiting international students is also subject to abuse. International students’ fees are higher and, therefore, attracting them in large numbers is very profitable for post-secondary institutions. Many of these are well-respected universities and career colleges eager to attract high-paying top talent from abroad to train for the benefit of Canadian industry. But other institutions offer certificates that are altogether fake or of low value. Their courses are bogus or perfunctory. Their primary function is to collect high foreign fees while requiring students to work for minimum wage. Perhaps the worst part about this is that international students are permitted to work 24 hours a week without a work permit, and so they are easily exploited.42 As of the time of writing, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were not studying at any Canadian university or college, but rather working and attempting to settle in Canada.43 Most are migrants from India, and some have been trying to cross the border illegally into the United States also. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement officials in investigating alleged links between dozens of colleges in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage south of the border.
The huge influx of mostly low-skilled, low-wage immigrants has kept wages and prices artificially low, and priced young Canadians out of the market.44 If there are nearly three million additional non-permanent residents, and the housing stock has hardly changed, infrastructure has not been enlarged, and healthcare funding remains the same, then we have an obvious explanation for the perception of resource scarcity. And so the economic argument for mass immigration must seem especially dubious.
Meanwhile, an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire in 2025.45 This number is notably higher than the three million temporary residents mentioned above. The reason for this is that the higher number includes visas held by persons expected to arrive in 2025, as well as multiple visas held by one and the same person.
Some of those visas may be renewed, and some may be parlayed into post-graduate work permits. But the majority will be expected to leave of their own accord. Problems have already arisen. Many international students are now lodging asylum claims. Though few of these are likely to succeed, the persons involved will be entitled to due process. And as for those who refuse to leave, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) will be responsible for tracking them down and removing them. In either case, there may be heavy demand on administrative resources and personnel alike. As of the end of 2024, there are 457,646 set for deportation—an already high number. And the CBSA has claimed to have lost track of 29,731 of them, and this does not augur well.46
Following previous legal judgements staying deportations, an activist legal community may be motivated to frustrate the CBSA’s efforts. High-profile cases in the past have included: Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad, a convicted terrorist set to be deported in 1988, but who managed to remain until 2013 through a series of appeals;47 Arshad Muhammad, another terrorist to be deported in 1999, who disappeared until his arrest in 2011, avoided deportation in 2013, was discharged from prison, and may now be at large;48 and Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, a member of Al-Qaida who improperly received refugee status in Canada in 1996, was ordered removed in 2004, and who has been fighting deportation ever since.49 Similar high-profile cases may be covered in the media in 2025, and may enflame and divide public opinion.
The sheer number of newcomers in recent years has raised doubts about integration, a common Canadian culture, and shared norms. Numbers have risen too high, too fast to make integration of immigrants possible. But, as a matter of policy, the government seems to have given up trying. This is the force of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s theory of Canada as a post-national state with “no mainstream” and “no core identity,” which he announced in 2015.50 In his view, the country more properly belonged to immigrants, who chose to live in Canada, than to those whose ancestors had long been established here.51 In other words, there is, in his opinion, nothing to assimilate to, nor any unifying Canadian culture or norms.
Then came Trudeau’s infamous tweet about refugees and diversity: “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.”52 The proximate motivation for the tweet was President Trump’s Executive Order banning refugees and visitors from Muslim-majority countries Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—what Trump’s critics called the “Muslim ban.”53 Trudeau’s tweet did not result in any change of policy: the number of refugees admitted to Canada remained the same, and there is no evidence that those excluded from the USA then came to Canada. The main effects of the tweet were further to politicize immigration and to emphasize the Liberal theory of diversity as an unqualified source of strength.
Polling data show that Canadians largely reject that vision of a post-national state. More than half the Canadian population now believe that immigration harms the country.54 Nearly 60 percent of Canadians of all backgrounds now claim that newcomers do not share Canadian values and that they fail to integrate themselves within Canadian society.55 A majority are now sceptical of multiculturalism: 51 percent expect government institutions to do more to integrate newcomers and 55 percent believe that immigrants must adopt “broad mainstream values and traditions and leave behind elements of their cultural identity that may be incompatible with that.”56 And the theory that “diversity is our strength” is accepted without qualification by only 24 percent of the population: most Canadians now see diversity as a source of some benefits but also of conflict.57
Such beliefs have been reinforced by foreign interference in our domestic politics. This interference may be direct or indirect. Direct interference was seen in the cases of attempts by China, India, and Russia to effect certain electoral outcomes through manipulation of diaspora communities.58 In contrast, indirect interference takes the form of importing foreign conflicts. One example is the violent clashes between pro-Khalistan Sikhs and members of a Hindu congregation in Brampton.59 Another example is the increasingly violent pro-Hamas demonstrations occasioned by the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war. Denunciations of Canada as an illegitimate, “settler-colonial” state have accompanied calls for the destruction of Israel, which have been directed at Jewish-owned business and predominately Jewish neighbourhoods, not at embassies or consulates.60 Outrage at a foreign conflict is, however, a smaller problem than the failure to respect prevailing norms governing public protest.
But perhaps the most alarming example of failure to integrate newcomers comes from the immigrants themselves. More and more are leaving, having formed no permanent connection to the country, and moving on to other economic opportunities abroad. Patterns of onward migration vary across the country. But, according to a recent study, overall, 25 percent of all immigrants will leave within 25 years and a little over a third of them will do so within the first five years.61 Those who leave may be found in every immigration category, but 48 percent are economic immigrants.
When contemplating integration of immigrants, we should also consider what is done, and not done, abroad. Here we begin with examples from the Anglosphere (Australia, New Zealand, and Britain) where the main mechanism for integration of foreigners is involvement within the labour market. These countries are perhaps most similar to Canada in that they all use a points system which they adapted from us. Next, we turn to the Nordic countries for examples of successful and unsuccessful cultural integration, as well as controversial approaches to asylum policy. Finally, we consider the especially rigorous and difficult approaches to integration in The Netherlands, Switzerland, South Korea, and Singapore. In comparison with all cases here examined, Canada is significantly more generous and lenient. Citizenship may be acquired here with few requirements: three years of permanent residency during which taxes were paid in full, competence in one of our two official languages, and a declared intention to continue residing in Canada.
Australia, New Zealand, and Britain all use a points system derived from the Canadian example.62 All seek to emphasize and reward “human capital” factors for ostensibly high-skill jobs but differ notably from our system.
The points system in Australia is most similar to our own. Nevertheless, it assigns significantly more weight to factors that have the greatest influence on economic and cultural integration. Twelve percent of an Australian immigrant’s points come from age, though in Canada it is only 8 percent. Twenty-six percent of the points in the Australian system subsume “other factors,” whereas in Canada it is an astonishing 50 percent. Australia prioritizes Australian education, whereas Canada emphasizes Canadian work experience. An immigrant to Australia receives bonus points for high-demand occupations and is screened for necessary credentials and proficiency in English. The Australian system has produced better labour-market integration: outcomes for immigrants equal or surpass those of non-immigrants.
New Zealand awards points for occupation and education as we do. But there is a unique emphasis on securing income surpassing the national median wage. English is required to a high standard, points diminish as an immigrant’s age rises, and no points are awarded above the age of 55. Surprisingly, though, New Zealand sets no limit on the total number of high-skill admissions. Older immigrants’ labour-market outcomes are slightly behind those of the native population, but there is no difference for those aged 25 to 44.63
The distinctive feature of the points system in Britain is its emphasis on job offer, education, and salary. High points are awarded for those with a doctoral degree in a field relevant to their job with bonus points if that degree is in a STEM subject. There is a threshold of £25,600, above which more points are awarded, and there are no points for a salary below £23,040. This system was introduced in 2021 after Brexit, and it may be too early to tell its effectiveness. Economic outcomes of recent immigrants to Britain have not been good. According to a recent study, they “ear[n] less, wor[k] longer hours, and [are] more likely to be [employed] in low-skilled occupations or temporary employment.”64
Of those three examples, none explicitly enforces a policy of assimilation. Nevertheless, it is arguable that Australia has achieved some of the effects of such a policy, albeit indirectly, by emphasizing education in Australia and proficiency in English.
All Anglosphere countries confer citizenship on the basis of passing a citizenship test after four years of permanent residency in Australia, and five years in both New Zealand and Britain.
Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark are five related Nordic countries with starkly different approaches to immigration.65 Their political systems differ greatly from our own, and yet their approaches are instructive.
Among the countries of the OECD, Iceland has seen the steepest rise in immigration.66 As of 2024, 18.2 percent of the Icelandic population was born abroad.67 These migrants came mostly to fill gaps in the low-skill end of the labour market. Apart from them, the influx of refugees and asylum seekers to Iceland in the 2010s was one of the highest in the OECD as a proportion of population. There have been significant challenges in integrating those newcomers, chief amongst which are teaching the Icelandic language and educating immigrants’ offspring who did not learn to speak Icelandic in childhood.68 And housing and infrastructure in urban areas have not kept up with the pace of immigration. This has triggered public demand for a stricter immigration policy.
Sweden is unfortunately the regional example of immigration gone wrong. The country had long been one of the primary destinations for refugees. Since the 1990s, Sweden tried to balance a generous, humanitarian approach with one emphasizing the needs of the labour market. A reform of 2008 notably made it easier for immigrants from outside the EU to work in Sweden. But then came the refugee crisis of the 2010s. In 2010, the number of refugees admitted annually began at around 30,000 and rose to about 163,000 in 2015. Numbers fell closer to the 30,000 mark after that. Most admissions were unaccompanied men from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The worst effect of this apparently well-meaning policy was a breakdown of norms in a once orderly and stable society. The primary symptom is gang violence—bombings, shootings, and other forms of violent crime—which spread from major urban centres even to small towns.69
Unsurprisingly, there has been a dramatic shift in the Swedish public’s view of immigration, and stricter policies have been introduced in the form of new immigration legislation.70 These include stringent rules on family reunification, and measures to deport or repatriate migrants, including paying them to leave. The Swedish government also aims to ratchet down the number of low-skilled labourers. There are certain exceptions, but work permits will be granted only to immigrants earning a monthly salary of at least 80% of the national median salary. Outward migration and repatriations of former asylum-seekers now outnumber new claimants. Domestic troubles remain, however, and it is too soon to tell whether the new policy on low-skill labour will be effective.
In contrast, Norwegian policy has been somewhat more successful. The proportion of the country with an immigrant background has risen rapidly over the past 30 years and now constitutes about 17 percent of the total population. But the country has avoided Sweden’s problems by means of restrictive policies on asylum-seeking. One of Norway’s measures, introduced at the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015, was to grant most successful claimants only temporary residency. A policy of quick returns for rejected asylum claimants was also established. Return may be voluntary, but claimants can also be forced to leave and paid to do so. This was in large part a reaction to the fact that many asylum claimants originating from Syria and Afghanistan had come through Russia where they ought to have stayed.71 In 2021, the UNHCR sent an open letter to the Norwegian government denouncing what it called “restrictive measures” designed to dissuade future arrival of asylum-seekers.72 Such policies have, nevertheless, remained in force—with the notable exception of an influx of 87,000 Ukrainian refugees as of 2025.
The result has been a Norwegian immigration system prioritizing economic immigration of self-sufficient foreigners and rigorous emphasis on integration. Such measures include mandatory language and social-studies courses, job-placement services, and processes for recognizing foreign credentials. Notably, the Norwegian government emphasizes openness and public information. An annual “statistical overview” on integrating immigration, known as Integration Goals, forms part of the annual budget. It covers the current number of immigrants, their regions and countries of origin, their ages, educational levels, employment and unemployment status, whether they rent or own houses, and many other data points. These statistics inform the public and help the government to develop policies to give immigrants and their children “equal opportunities, rights and duties.”73
Finland has been similarly willing to take in a large number of refugees. In 2015, 32,746 Syrian asylum-seekers also came across the Finnish border with Russia. This was the beginning of a populist backlash, made all the worse by difficulties of integrating the newcomers into the Finnish labour market.74 The government drastically reduced refugee targets down to a mere 1,050 in recent years, and yet has not hesitated to take in about 100,000 Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion. Finland’s principal fear is that Russia may use mass migration across their mutual border as a form of hybrid warfare to undermine the European Union. Accordingly, the border has now been more heavily fortified.75 A new Integration Act will come into force in 2025 in order to encourage migrants’ active participation in Finnish civic life.76
The development of Denmark’s immigration policy can be understood as one effort after another on the part of centre-left governments to outflank the populist, anti-immigration right. Since the 1990s, immigration policy has increasingly focused on deterring asylum-seekers. Measures include negative advertising abroad, solitary confinement, cutting benefits to refugees, banning masks, niqabs, and burqas, and confiscating migrants’ property to offset the costs of taking them in.77 In 2022, a plan was announced, now officially on hold, to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda. Efforts at assimilation are aggressive. They include so-called anti-ghetto legislation, introduced in 2022, which aims at breaking up neighbourhoods where more than 40 percent of residents are non-Western immigrants or their descendants; unemployment is above 40 percent; more than 60 percent of 30- to 50-year-olds have no upper-secondary education; crime rates are three times the national average; and average gross income is less than 55 percent of the regional average. Measures include allowing outright demolition, forcible removal of inhabitants and settlement elsewhere, new regulations allowing more housing at market rates, mandatory day care, and harsher than normal punishments for crimes committed in ghettos. Nevertheless, Denmark welcomed nearly 70,000 Ukrainian refugees and exempted them from the anti-ghetto legislation.
As for the granting of citizenship, all Nordic countries require language proficiency, financial independence, and societal integration tests, and the applicant must not have a criminal record. For most of them, the process distinguishes between fellow Nordic countries and the rest of the world.
The Netherlands has one of the most rigorous integration processes. Non-EU citizens must take part in a civic integration program called inburgering and then pass an examination. Topics covered include knowledge of the Dutch language, society, and labour market. Municipal strategies further assist integration through programs which are often adjusted to meet specific needs. Asylum-seekers receive financial support for integration courses and exams, but other migrants, like family members, must often finance this themselves. Family reunification often requires a migrant to pass a basic civic integration exam in his or her home country before arriving in the Netherlands.
In Switzerland, the paths to permanent residency and citizenship alike are long and difficult. Integration, however, is taken very seriously through a combination of legal obligations, financial support, educational opportunities, and community involvement, tailored to the unique federal structure where much of the relevant responsibility lies with the 26 cantons and their municipalities. Volunteering within communities is strongly emphasized, as is participation in local and national cultural activities.
South Korea is noted, and often criticized, for a stringent asylum policy with very few admissions. Immigration policy otherwise emphasizes economic needs and cultural identity. There is no pathway to permanent residency for low-skill, non-professional immigration for “dirty, dangerous, and demanding” jobs, and quotas for these are set annually. Professional visas emphasize high wages. The so-called Digital Nomad Visa allows professionals to live and work remotely for up to two years, provided that their income be twice the per capita gross national income determined by the Bank of Korea. It is notoriously difficult for immigrants to obtain citizenship without marrying a Korean. Even then, integration is a challenge. The country has reacted by encouraging multicultural families through integration programs emphasizing language and culture for foreign spouses and their children.
Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has relied on immigration for population growth. Policy is nevertheless highly restrictive with an emphasis on maintaining the racial balance in Singapore, where the ethnic composition of immigrants is believed to preserve social harmony. New citizens are required to renounce foreign citizenship. Temporary visas are granted for foreign professionals and entrepreneurs at high- and mid-skill levels which both involve wage thresholds. Semi-skilled and unskilled workers in sectors like construction, manufacturing, and domestic services are subject to quotas and levies to control admissions carefully.
Canada must return to prioritizing high-skill, high-wage immigration above all other forms. However, overall numbers must come down while we focus on integrating recent newcomers. Henceforward, moderate levels of high-skill, high-wage immigration should be part of a larger economic and cultural strategy to make Canada competitive in the new era of de-globalization, re-shoring, friend-shoring, and so forth. Furthermore, we must understand our recent failure to integrate immigrants as a symptom of a larger crisis of national identity, which now exposes us to foreign political interference and a revival of American continentalism, manifest destiny, and hyperbolic threats of annexation. The federal government must accordingly emphasize Canadian unity, national identity, and shared history above diversity.
We have the right and the obligation to raise the value of Canadian citizenship, and to demand more of our citizens. Above all, however, efforts at integration should proceed not from a dislike of other places, but from a love for Canada.
With all that in mind, the following policies are recommended:
1. Lower the annual permanent residency target to a more manageable level, perhaps 200,000 or lower (subject to Cabinet discussion and approval) for at least 2 years while we prioritize (a) integration of recent permanent residents and citizens and (b) repatriation of those whose temporary visas have expired. Permanent residency targets may rise gradually thereafter.
2. Strengthen the process of deportation for any non-citizen found guilty of violent crime, supporting any terrorist organization, disturbing the King’s Peace, prosecuting foreign conflicts within Canada, or expressing hatred for Canada.
3. Execute an international campaign, based on the Danish model, that would discourage immigration by anyone unwilling or unable to respect our founding cultures, and unwilling or unable to integrate into at least one of them.
4. Prioritize international students pursuing courses of study of high importance to our labour market and supply chains. In cooperation with the provinces, universities and colleges, and industry, we must integrate the education and settlement of international students into a general industrial strategy covering high-end manufacturing, robotics, advanced engineering, and so forth. Meanwhile, we must ban fly-by-night schools seeking to recruit and exploit foreign students.
5. Re-engineer the points system so as to emphasize language, age, and domestic education, similar to the Australian model.
6. Consolidate all “population” ministries to create the Ministry of Human Resources Canada (MHRC). Combine into a single ministry all the relevant parts of the ministries of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, of Employment and Social Development, of Labour, and possibly of others—covering immigration, integration, the labour market, demographics, family-formation, and so forth.
7. Make the main mandate of MHRC to ensure that economic immigration serves the national interest. In consultation with the provinces, this ministry will also be required to keep immigration at a manageable level, taking into account the present state of infrastructure, housing, and integration services. On the Norwegian example, MHRC will also be required to publish the total immigration numbers, along with all other relevant population and labour-market information as part of every budget, as well as ad hoc studies and reports when required.
8. Require MHRC to implement a pro-natalist strategy. Canada must aim to become the most desirable country in the world in which to have and raise children. Together with the provinces, we must develop a pro-natal strategy in order to halt or, ideally, to reverse the decline in fertility. No economic and cultural measures should be left unconsidered, including bonuses, tax breaks, awards, and other signs of public esteem for parents. And, wherever possible, Canadian society and infrastructure must be made as “child-friendly” as possible. We may also consider prioritizing immigration of young families from peer English- and French-speaking countries wishing to settle and raise children in Canada.
9. Lengthen the time requirement for citizenship, except for immigrants from peer English- and French-speaking countries. Immigrants from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, and Switzerland may apply for citizenship after three years of permanent residency. For those from all other countries the time will be raised to at least five years (ideally longer, if politically feasible). Meanwhile, we must establish more rigorous educational and integration requirements and processes similar to the Dutch policy of inburgering.
10. Phase down and abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker Program permanently—except in the few instances where it is actually needed and has proven uncontroversial, such as seasonal agricultural work, fish-processing, and so forth. We must use all reasonable federal and provincial tools to reward businesses for investing in, and training, a domestic workforce. And, conversely, we must denounce and punish all those who refuse to do so.
11. Establish a uniform standard of credential recognition in self-regulating professions and skilled trades. This will require the federal government to work with the provinces, for the purpose of making it easier to hire Canadians from one province in order to fill labour shortages in another. This will alleviate pressure to hire abroad, while the TFWP is wound down. Provincial trade monopolies and interprovincial barriers to the free movement of labour must be abolished, so as to allow Canadians born and educated here to fill labour shortages without friction, and to assist in the economic integration of newcomers.
Canadian immigration policy, if rightly executed, can be a powerful force for nation-building. It can help create and maintain a prosperous and orderly society. But if immigration policy goes wrong, as we have seen, the effects can be disastrous. The solution, however, goes beyond simply lowering overall numbers. We must resist and defeat the instinct to use immigration to offset unfavourable demographics and artificially to suppress wages and keep prices low in certain industries. Immigration policy must be oriented towards the general demographic and economic health of our country, but it cannot be the only demographic and economic measure. A new approach to immigration is needed—one informed by examples abroad and working in conjunction with pro-natal policies—to help ensure a prosperous and stable Canada.
Please see PDF for references.
Michael Bonner, DPhil (Oxon), is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. An historian and public policy advisor, Dr. Bonner has served as a senior policy advisor to a Minister of Immigration in the Government of Canada and as the director of policy to four ministers within the Government of Ontario. He is the author of In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present.
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