What our immigration policy needs is comprehensive reform. Instead, we are getting piecemeal changes of a kneejerk nature, and self-congratulatory messaging from the Immigration Minister.
DEFINING ISSUE
In Canadian politics, the topmost issue in 2024 has been that of immigration. Or maybe my perception is influenced by the fact that I have spent a lot of time over the year researching, writing about and commenting on the multi-component mess that our immigration policy has become. My possible predilection notwithstanding, it can be said safely that all the other major issues of the present times are also impacted heavily by excessive immigration over the past few years.
In the course of my research, I stumbled upon Motion M-44, which was passed in the House of Commons in May 2022, asking the government to create Permanent Residency Pathways for ‘all skill levels’ for temporary foreign workers including international students (meaning that the international students were officially being viewed as a subset of temporary foreign workers). Since this Motion had passed unanimously by a vote of 324-0, I wondered if the Conservative Party of Canada, under the new leadership of Pierre Poilievre, still agreed with the text and contents of this Motion (you can see my video chat on this point at this YouTube link).
When I wrote about Motion M-44 on X, it came as quite a revelation to many Canadians. This is not surprising; there hadn’t been much media coverage of the Motion, despite its potential (later realized in spades) for far-reaching impact on Canadian society. HOWEVER, in recent research, I came to the realization that the process of diluting the formerly praiseworthy – and praised globally – immigration system of Canada had been going on for much longer than 2 years. In this article, I will provide some snippets to demonstrate how this process has unfolded over a couple of decades.
REVISING (RECENT) HISTORY
Before we get to that, however, a couple of points need to be made. The common factor in these two points is that they show, irrefutably, that increased intake of newcomers under various categories, viz., permanent residents, refugees, temporary foreign workers and (the seldom talked about, but considerably larger that TFW) International Mobility Program has been happening for a lot longer than 2 or 3 years. Prime Minister Trudeau released a video today (see this link), which the highly knowledgeable Professor Mikal Skuterud aptly characterized as ‘historical revisionism at its worst’.
Secondly, over the past 10 years (from 2013 to 2023), there has been a whopping 1,390% increase in the number of asylum claims in Canada, from 10,365 claims in 2013 to 144,035 claims in 2023. We can see the bar chart from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) below and rightly wonder why the government was either unwilling or unable to keep these numbers from rising at such a rapid rate (link here).
Further, in a parliamentary committee meeting earlier this month, an immigration official confirmed that there are 200,000 asylum claims pending with the department, with 70% of these having been filed in the preceding 12 months (see the video at this X post by CPC MP Arpan Khanna). This official added that the current processing time for these claims is a mind-bending 44 months. If, as feared, there is an exodus of illegal migrants from the US to Canada in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as president, the system is very likely to crumble totally – the number of illegals in the US said to be around 11 million, so even 2% of that number would more than double the number of pending claims in Canada.
DEEPER ROOTS
Clearly, there is appetite at the federal government for increasing the intake of newcomers to Canada at massively higher rates than was the case in earlier periods. But how far back does this shift away from what we always understood the focus of our immigration policy to be go? And how did that shift go unnoticed? I believe that if we are to bring about meaningful policy reforms in immigration, such that both Canadian society and newcomers experience positive outcomes, it will be crucial to derive proper answers to these two questions.
Let me attempt an answer to these questions in reverser order: The shift didn’t go unnoticed – the reports that highlighted the shift weren’t given much traction in the public sphere. And this shift goes back a couple of decades. My first source is an October 2021 report (i.e., much before Motion M-44 was passed) for Canadian Labour Economics Forum, by Professor Mikal Skuterud of the University of Waterloo and Ian O’Donnell, then a PhD candidate at the Western University (see this link).
According to this report, it is stated that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) was introduced in 1973, to enable employers to recruit foreign workers of two types: (1) those with specialized skills, such as academics, business executives, engineers etc. and (2) two groups of low-skilled migrant workers, viz., seasonal agricultural workers and live-in caregivers. Then, according to this report, it was decided in 2002 to expand eligibility for TFWP to a larger set of low-skilled occupations requiring no more than a high school diploma. By 2012-2013, there were (predictably) media reports of alleged employer abuse of the program. In May 2014, Justin Trudeau penned an article on the issue in the Toronto Star, with the rather ambitions title “How to fix the broken temporary foreign worker program”. In that article, Mr. Trudeau blamed the then Prime Minister Stephen Harper of ‘transforming’ TFWP “into one that has brought in a large pool of vulnerable workers”. I think Prime Minister Trudeau of May 2022 would have been well-advised to heed the cautionary words of MP Trudeau of May 2014.
This controversy caused the Harper government to curtail the size of TFWP – but as happens often, the solution to one problem only ended up begetting another: the work permits that did not require a Labour Market Test (or LMT, the current equivalent of which is the Labour Market Impact Assessment, or LMIA) were separated into a new program named International Mobility Program, or IMP. It is worth noting that today, IMP is significantly larger than TFWP. Another problem resulting from this ‘solution’ was that, since “most IMP permits are open permits, allowing work for any employer anywhere in Canada… the government’s administrative data on these TFW inflows identifies neither the location nor the occupation in which these workers are employed”. This lacuna in official data leads to the question as to how much of the current government policy is based on an actual reading of the ground reality. As the authors O’Donnell and Skuterud note, with remarkable restraint, “Whether or not the intention is to obfuscate data to mitigate controversy, that has been the effect.” To this, I would add (perhaps a bit cynically) that the obfuscation of data has become politically useful, in that it would be difficult to protest the current policy with the help of pinpointed data, because it is not available.
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE
My second source is an arm of the government itself, viz., Statistics Canada. An October 2023 report (see this link) by Yuqian Lu and Feng Hou contains a whole bunch of pertinent data that we can crunch, but if you scroll down below the table of data, this part would, I think, be more worrisome:
The questions are obvious: if work permits are being issued to foreigners to address LABOUR SHORTAGES, how is it possible that they (a) may not have the *intention* to work, or (b) be unable to find employment? And if “their earnings were not formally reported”, how does this non-reporting affect the government’s data and assessment of labour shortages?
This snippet lends credence to the widespread suspicion that work permits are, at least to an extent, merely conduits to enable people to come to Canada. As we have discovered recently to our chagrin, some of these individuals can have nefarious objectives to carry out in Canada. As you can see in the last part of the snippet, as of 2020, some 29% of the people holding work permits in Canada did NOT have employment (at least, not formally). I think this needs a deeper investigation to examine as to how much of a security threat this poses to Canadians. To be clear, I am not insinuating that these foreigners are all criminals – but a prudent government that has the best interests of the Canadian population at heart needs to keep tabs on this aspect.
SELF-PRAISE
The vigorous debate on immigration has so far been solely about numbers (and justifiably so), be they in relation to the annual intake, housing supply or availability of jobs etc. But when I say that our immigration policy needs ‘comprehensive reforms’, what I mean is the nuts and bolts of the policy where, for example, there is no doubt that a person who is in Canada on a work permit is in fact employed, and one on a study permit is actually attending a course that would enable them to have a career in their field of study, whether in Canada or elsewhere.
Instead, Immigration Minister Marc Miller spends his time posting media reports about the changes to immigration policy, posing as if he is doing something useful. Take, for example, the PBO report saying that the recently announced cuts to immigration would be helpful in narrowing the housing shortage by 45%, of which he posted links to several media outlets on his X account: Bloomberg, Financial Post (which is merely the Bloomberg article, republished), Toronto Star and CBC. Of course, this PBO finding means that the increase in immigration was a major factor in Canadians’ woes on the housing front – but the minister is either choosing to gloss over that fact, or not bright enough to realize it.
He followed this up with another instance of what is either extreme cluelessness or gaslighting on steroids, by claiming in a post on X that the revelation that more than 10,000 international students came to Canada on the basis of acceptance letters (from colleges) that may be fake means that “Our reforms are working. Identifying fraud and deceit before people get to Canada is essential to maintaining the integrity of the immigration system.”
On the issue of record numbers of international students claiming asylum in Canada (14,000 so far this year), he wrote a letter to the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, after the media reported these numbers, asking it to convey to its members that (essentially) advising clients to make bogus claims is a bad thing. Didn’t he know until now that these numbers were skyrocketing?
UPHILL TASK
It is clear that this government does not have any inclination of the comprehensive reform necessary to bring our immigration system to a state where it works to everyone’s benefit. My assessment is that they will continue to make piecemeal changes (and to brag about these) until the election. If, as expected, the Conservative Party wins the people’s mandate, their government is going to have the mother of all uphill tasks on its hands on the front of immigration.
In this regard, and considering how the issue of immigration has been Kryptonite for Conservatives over the decades, I am impressed by the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s communications strategy on this issue. In the latest instalment of the tidbits that he has been revealing over the past 16 months, he stated (at the 1:30 mark in the video posted in this X post) that “We have to look at legislative changes, if necessary, to prevent people from abusing our system”. I sincerely hope that his meaning here is that he would, if elected, carry out the comprehensive reforms that I am talking about here.
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