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 past 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 three years; at the fourth year they can apply for citizenship, assuming they have met permanent residency requirements. In 2022, Indian students, mostly Punjab, made up 54% of Canada’s international student population. Recently, Marc Miller, minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, announced policies that include a cap on study permit applications, stricter eligibility criteria for post-graduation work permits, and limited access to open work permits for international students’ spouses, the equivalent to the U.S.’ H-4 visa.
The government’s awakening is too little too late; 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 crisis. Demand for housing far outstrips supply. An exposé published by The Canadian Press revealed federal 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. Immigrant-driven population growth has a direct effect on housing. A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. report that focused on housing shortages concluded that “by 2023 over 22 million units will be required to achieve affordability for everyone living in Canada.” The national benchmark home price, which measures the price of a so-called typical home, was $735,900 in April 2024, a 0.8% monthly increase. In British Columbia, the benchmark price is a staggering $985,000.
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 Donald 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 gross domestic product, 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 past decade. Canada’s GDP per capita has fallen 0.4% 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 consistently is. In July 2021, the Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship met. Chair Zoe Lofgren, D-California, 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-California, more rationally said: “Canada’s pre-pandemic GDP growth was 39% lower than the United States; their unemployment rate 60% higher; and their average wages 38% 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. Housing becomes unaffordable, social services are strained, education diluted, and jobs lost. In U.S. pre-election polling, immigration consistently ranks as voters’ major issue; in Canada, 63% think immigration negatively effects housing. 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.
