Canada's immigration crisis

By Joe Guzzardi
Syndicated columnist

Canada faces an immigration crisis on multiple levels.

Years of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s endorsed over-immigration into Canada have pushed housing prices into the stratosphere, sent per capita income into a tailspin, and precipitated a brain-drain to the U.S.

While skilled or semi-skilled Canadians are headed south, the millions of illegal aliens who have entered the U.S. in the last three years will head north should Donald Trump win the 2024 election.

By lowering its immigration standards, Canada created insurmountable obstacles. Foreign nationals arriving on student visas are the biggest driver of Canada’s dramatic population growth. Student visa holders, many of whom obtain diplomas from uncredited schools, are eligible for a Canadian green card within 3 years; at the fourth year they can apply for citizenship assuming they have met permanent residency requirements.

Canada’s current population is 42 million, with immigration the biggest contributor. From 2016 to 2021, Canada’s population grew at almost twice the pace of every other G7 country. While growth slowed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it rose again in 2021 and, from January to March 2022, it was the highest of all first quarters since 1990.

Canada is bracing for a much larger immigration-fueled population spike. Official Statistics Canada, a government agency, projected in 2022 that “the Canadian population would reach 47.7 million in 2041, and 25.0 million of them would be immigrants or children of immigrants born in Canada, accounting for 52.4% of the total population…Canada’s population may reach…between 44.9 million and 74.0 million in 2068, according to the various projection scenarios.”

Over-immigration has created a Canadian housing affordability crisis. Demand for housing far outstrips supply.

An exposé published by The Canadian Press revealed that federal public employees warned government officials two years ago that large increases to immigration could negatively affect housing affordability and services. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request showed that, as it prepared its immigration targets for 2023-2025, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada analyzed but ignored the potential consequences immigration would have on the economy, housing and services.

Canada’s population increased by more than 430,000 during the third quarter of 2023, marking the fastest pace of population growth in any quarter since 1957. Mikal Skuterud, a University of Waterloo economics professor who specializes in immigration policy, said the federal government appears to have “lost control” of temporary migration flows, a reference to the student visa holders and migrant workers influx.

Unchecked immigration and the fallout that followed in terms of increased housing prices and decreased per capita income has sent native-born and immigrants to Canada fleeing to the U.S. In 2022, a record 126,340 moved to the U.S., a 70% increase from 2012.

While workers are leaving Canada in droves, former U.S. ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman told a national security conference on June 3 that if Trump wins in November, “These people [U.S. illegal immigrants] aren’t just going to sit there and wait to be rounded up.” Should Trump win, Heyman said, they will immediately begin making plans to leave, and they will not go south, but north.

Like their U.S. expansionists’ soulmates, Canadian advocates like to parrot that more immigration lifts GDP, true but deceptive, and not the major factor in quality of life. More immigrants – more people – automatically creates a larger economy but depresses per capita income. If population growth drove economic growth, then countries like Canada and Australia that have among the highest rates of immigration and resulting population growth should vastly outpace a country like Japan, which has relatively little immigration and whose population actually declined over the last decade. Canada’s GDP per capita has fallen 0.4 per cent a year since 2020, the worst rate among 50 developed economies.

Immigration has been Canada’s downfall and proves how foolish and wrong Congress’ immigration cabal is consistently.

In July 2021, the Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship met. Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) wailed that the U.S. urgently needs to overhaul its “failed” immigration laws or risk losing “highly skilled” employees to Canada. Countering, Ranking Member Tom McClintock (R-Calif.), more rationally said: “Canada’s pre-pandemic GDP growth was 39 percent lower than the United States; their unemployment rate 60 percent higher; and their average wages 38 percent lower.”

Lofgren embarrassingly and, as an immigration lawyer, purposely tried to mislead the public. Today, three years later, Canadians flock to the U.S. where, to their disappointment, they will find widespread IT layoffs. In April alone, 50 organizations including Google, Microsoft, and Tesla laid off 21,473 tech workers.

The harsh, inescapable truth is that too much immigration – the excesses plaguing the U.S. and Canada – hurts the native-born economically and societally.

In U.S. pre-election polling, immigration consistently ranks as voters’ major issue. Even though sovereign Canada and America are crushed under its burden, nothing stops both governments’ insatiable quest for more immigration.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has written about immigration for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

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