Rising anti-immigrant sentiment is less about numbers and more about deflecting responsibility for inequality, writes Eric Wilkinson. Photo from Flickr.
Anti-immigration sentiment has a reached an historic high in Canada. A recent Environics poll found that 56 percent of Canadians believe that the number of immigrants admitted to the country is too high. This, and similar findings from other polls, suggest that the longstanding national consensus that favours immigration is collapsing. The trend is driven by Conservatives, of whom over 80 percent believe that we should admit fewer immigrants, while only about 40 percent of Liberals and New Democrats agree. There has also been an uptick in anti-immigrant racism, particularly online. The country of origin for the largest number of immigrants in recent years has been India, and anti-immigrant rhetoric is now frequently directed at South Asian newcomers.
Our political parties have responded by incorporating immigration reductions into their rhetoric and platforms. The Carney government has announced lower immigration targets, including a 43 percent reduction in the number of temporary residents that will be admitted, from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026. Canada’s immigration and border authorities are also seeking mass visa cancellation powers “due to concerns of fraud from India and Bangladesh.” The Conservatives, meanwhile, have called for “hard caps” on immigration and to cancel the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which they say is crowding the job market and making it too difficult for people, especially young Canadians, to find work. At Conservative events you can find members of anti-immigrant groups like the Dominion Society calling for ethnic cleansing. Their co-founder’s stated goal is to get Pierre Poilievre to use the phrase “remigration” (a far-right euphemism for mass deportations).
Recently, when visiting my hometown, I overheard someone complaining that the government has been subsidizing the wages of recent immigrants working entry-level jobs. This falsehood is based on disinformation that is circulating on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Naturally, the point of disinformation campaigns like this one is to foster negative attitudes toward recent immigrants, particularly visible minorities. In a similar vein, anti-immigrant groups heavily publicize news stories about members of minority communities committing crimes or engaging in “un-Canadian” behaviours. Online, the same handful of stories about conflict between Sikhs and Hindus, rioting Eritreans, or pro-Palestine demonstrations are repeated ad nauseam, helping to shape a more hostile climate toward these groups.
Of course, we should not automatically conflate a belief that Canada should reduce its immigration targets with discriminatory anti-immigrant sentiments. There might be good cultural or economic reasons to admit fewer people, and we can reasonably disagree over the optimal number of newcomers to accept each year. However, both the upswing in anti-immigration and anti-immigrant attitudes are often based on a shared premise: that immigration is a major contributor to social issues presently facing Canada, like a poor job market or the housing crisis. In reality, immigration has little to do with these issues. Yet, scapegoating immigrants is convenient for our political leaders who are all too often reluctant to address the root causes of the crises we face. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant groups are happy to point to the government’s new anti-immigration messaging as vindication of their discriminatory views.
The most common national issue that is said to be made worse by immigration is the housing crisis. Yet its main causes have little to do with immigration. The commodification of housing and its treatment as a speculative investment is mostly responsible for driving up prices. Wealthy landlords and property management companies buy up available dwellings, while an underclass of renters pays their mortgages. Since real estate is such a safe and profitable investment, purchasers are constantly entering the market not because they need housing, but because being a landlord is easy money. A decade of supply-focused solutions have failed because, if that supply is commodified, new builds will simply be bought by the wealthy and rented back to everyone else. Solving the housing crisis would require deeper decommodification by building more social and non-market housing.
Where does immigration fit into this picture? Hardly at all. Although there is occasional correlation between immigration levels and rising home prices, it is a marginal contributor to this. A recent Statistics Canada study found that immigration accounted for only 11 percent of the overall increase in housing prices. Notably, between 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic, house prices skyrocketed at exactly the same time that immigration levels dropped significantly. If it was immigration that was driving skyrocketing valuations, we should see them drop at the same time. By 2022, when immigration levels began to recover, the rate of increase in housing prices declined. Thus, in the past five years, immigration has been inversely correlated with the growth in housing prices.
Similarly, immigration has been blamed for overburdening Canada’s health care system. Once again, this is a misdirection from the real problem. Our health care system has been underfunded since at least the 1990s, when the Chrétien and Martin governments decreased federal health transfers to the provinces in exchange for loosening conditions on how they could spend the funds received. Regardless of immigration levels, Canada’s health care system is suffering from decades of austerity and neglect. Indeed, recent immigrants are less likely to access the health care system than those born in Canada, due to both a lack of familiarity and socio-cultural barriers. Meanwhile, these same immigrants are paying into the health care system through their taxes at the same rates as everyone else. As with housing, the problems with our health care system have little to do with immigration.
In October, Conservative MP Jamil Javani asked the assembled crowd at an event at the University of Toronto, Mississauga how they could “restore the North.” Several attendees blamed immigrants for being unable to find work. While unemployment has risen in recent months, the forces driving this are largely unrelated to immigration. A general lack of affordability has led older Canadians to delay retirement or re-enter the workforce, reducing the number of new positions opening up. Nevertheless, at the beginning of this year, the labour market was stabilizing before the trade war with the United States slowed the economy. Notably, unemployment among South Asian and Black persons in Canada has risen faster than the national average. There is considerable irony in blaming immigrants for rising levels of unemployment when they are more likely to be laid off.
At Javani’s event, members of the anti-immigrant Dominion Society called for mass deportations. Javani responded: “Look, my personal view on this is that a moratorium on immigration is not a bad idea, right?” The Dominion Society subscribes to the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely claims that political elites are deliberately replacing white populations with non-white immigrants. Thus, they call for the deportation of four to eight million people — including permanent residents, temporary visa holders, and foreign workers. With anti-immigration sentiment running high, groups like the Dominion Society are seeking to move their ideas into the political mainstream.
Anti-immigrant groups decry immigration as a threat to Canadian culture and national identity. The irony is that they have little genuine interest in either. They go out of their way to demean the contributions of immigrant communities and disparage national institutions like the Charter and the Multiculturalism Act, which safeguard our freedom to explore and share our cultural identities. When it comes to the real threat to Canadian culture—American imperialism—they have nothing to say. This is no surprise; they would prefer Canada to resemble the United States, particularly Donald Trump’s version of it. They neither understand nor seem to like the culture of the nation they claim to defend.
At the outset, I noted that anti-immigration attitudes range from the benign belief that we should reduce immigration levels to the racist demand for mass deportations. These views should not be conflated. We can have a sober national conversation about how much immigration is appropriate to meet our social and economic goals. But scapegoating immigrants for the state of housing, health care, or employment helps no one. It obscures the real causes of these crises and stokes resentment against vulnerable members of our communities.
Eric Wilkinson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.
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