Housing crisis, economic woes and Trump: How Canada turned against immigrants

TORONTO —  Canada long sold itself as a beacon for immigrants, who were widely viewed as key to economic growth in a vast nation with a small and rapidly aging workforce.

“Study, work and stay” was the slogan of a government campaign to lure international students, part of a broader push that included recruiting temporary workers and resettling refugees. After President Trump banned travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority countries in 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada’s doors were open.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he wrote on the platform now known as X. “Diversity is our strength.”

But in recent months, Canada has changed course.

For the first time in a quarter-century, a majority of Canadians say there is too much immigration. Hate crimes are on the rise, along with rhetoric blaming newcomers for the country’s economic woes.

Under fire for admitting record numbers of migrants, Trudeau’s government recently slashed the annual total allowed into the country. It also announced a plan to beef up security along the U.S. border.

“The reality is that not everyone is welcome here,” Canada’s immigration minister declared last month.

The abrupt about-face has scrambled life for hundreds of thousands of migrants who came here and planned to stay. And it puts Canada in the company of the United States and many countries in Europe that have seen a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and policy in recent years.

In Canada, a nation of 41 million where 2 in 5 people are either immigrants or children of one, the debate has triggered an identity crisis, with a surge in xenophobia that is out of sync with the country’s reputation as a place that is welcoming to newcomers.

“We are known as the nice guys, right? That’s the Canadian trope,” said Gurpartap Singh Toor, a council member in the immigrant-heavy city of Brampton, outside Toronto. “There are a lot of people asking, ‘What happened to us as a country?’”

Many point to rising costs and Canada’s long-standing housing crisis — and a new breed of political leaders eager to blame migrants for those problems.

Others cite the influence of Trump, who as he prepares to return to the White House has promoted anti-migrant ideas, and who recently threatened to tax imports from Canada unless the country tightens its border.

“When you have the most powerful person on the planet talking about closing borders and talking about immigrants in a very derogatory way, you’re emboldening a lot of people to go down the same path,” Toor said.

Maxime Bernier, the leader of the far-right People’s Party, which has called for a moratorium on immigration in Canada, also said the U.S. president-elect had made anti-immigrant sentiment more acceptable.

“It’s the start of a new era in Western countries,” Bernier said. “And Trump has catalyzed that.”

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Inside a meeting hall for the Royal Canadian Legion, a few dozen members were waiting out a snowy afternoon playing card games and snacking from a box of Tim Horton doughnuts.

Chris Woodcock, 75, and Sandy Furloch, 70, were debating a topic that comes up frequently these days: immigration.

“There’s just too many of them,” Woodcock, a retired factory worker, said of immigrants. “It’s not really fair to the people who are born and raised here.”

Canada’s economy has been sluggish in recent years, with unemployment at nearly 7%. Woodcock’s family was suffering: One of his sons couldn’t afford his own place and had to move back home, and the other had seen his hours cut at an auto parts factory.

Woodcock also complained about the demographics in Toronto, where about 1 in 2 residents is an immigrant. “You walk into a store and look around and you’re the only white person,” he said.

Furloch shook her head. She said she thought that Canada’s multiculturalism was “beautiful,” and that a certain level of immigration was necessary. “We don’t procreate enough to keep our population up,” she said. “Who’s gonna do the farming?”

Still, Furloch said that in recent years she had become convinced that too many people had entered the country too quickly. “We need more vetting,” she said.

Canada, which is the second biggest country in the world in land area and one of the most sparsely populated, was built by immigration.

In the centuries after colonization by France and Britain, the government recruited migrants to settle rural corners of its sprawling landscape. For many years, white Europeans were given a preference. But by the 1970s, race-based discrimination in immigration policy had largely ended, and most people entering Canada were from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.

The government’s reliance on immigration to spur economic growth accelerated in with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Canada admitted nearly 3 million people in three years. The influx of temporary workers, international students and refugees helped the economy recover in the short term — and helped push the country’s population from 38 million to 41 million.

But local governments, which are responsible for health, housing and education, were not prepared. Already high housing costs skyrocketed, and it became harder to see a family doctor.

Just five years after a 2019 Gallup study named Canada the most accepting country for immigrants, polls today show that views have shifted dramatically, with an increasing number of Canadians expressing concern about the number of newcomers, the government’s ability to provide for them and how well immigrants are integrating into society.

Migrant advocates say public opinion has been shaped by far-right firebrands like Bernier, who has said immigrants represent a threat to “our values and way of life,” and more mainstream opposition leaders, such as Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has described the country’s immigration system as “out of control” and “chaos.”

Polls show the Conservatives are poised to win a majority of parliamentary seats in the country’s next election.

Political experts say Trudeau, of Canada’s Liberal Party, is trying to win back voters with his new immigration plan, which calls for the number of people granted permanent residency to be slashed by nearly 20% next year, and many fewer temporary workers and international students to be allowed in.

“In the tumultuous times as we emerged from the pandemic, between addressing labor needs and maintaining population growth, we didn’t get the balance right,” Trudeau said, explaining the cuts. “Immigration is essential for Canada’s future, but it must be controlled and it must be sustainable.”

Syed Hussan, executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, said immigrants were being scapegoated for the failures of government.

Canada has not built enough homes in recent years, and everyday buyers must compete with wealthy private investment firms. The average price of a home has soared nearly 50% since 2018.

The country’s medical system has also been strained for years, with a growing shortage of family doctors.

“It’s an intent to distract working people from holding the government and big business responsible,” Hussan said. “Everyone is struggling to pay the bills, and they want to know who’s to blame, and they’re being told that it is the foreigner.”

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For migrants already in the country, the changes have triggered vast uncertainty. Millions of temporary work permits for students and temporary laborers are set to expire in the coming years, and paths to permanent residency have suddenly narrowed.

Enrique García and his family moved from Mexico City to Toronto this year so that his wife could enroll in an MBA program. International students pay as much as five times as their Canadian counterparts, money that universities have used to fill reserves and build new infrastructure. Tuition ate up much of the couple’s savings, but they saw it as an investment in Canadian citizenship.

Then overnight, the rules had changed — and international students no longer had an easy track to citizenship.

“It’s not a sure thing anymore,” said García, 49.

A weak economy has made things harder.

In four months, García, who worked as an insurance agent in Mexico, has applied to more than 100 jobs. But not even McDonald’s has called him, and his wife’s part-time gig washing dishes in a restaurant barely covers the $2,500 they pay each month in rent for an apartment infested with bedbugs.

He said he is thankful to be in Canada, where his daughters are enrolled in a good public school and the streets feel safer than in Mexico. But on a recent chilly morning, as he stood in line for groceries at a food bank, he seemed dejected.

“It’s been a lot more complicated than I thought,” he said.

Teresa Andrade, 47, started working as a nanny in Toronto in 2019. During rare free moments, she called the Philippines, helping her five children there complete their homework or celebrate birthdays.

Being apart from them was a painful sacrifice, but the promise of Canadian residency for her and eventually her children seemed worth it.

“I was told that they were giving permanent residency here,” she said. “We were always told Canada was the land of dreams.”

Over the summer, Trudeau government officials announced that it would give migrant caregivers a pathway to residency. But in the months since, the government has gone silent — and meanwhile has announced cuts to the number of new residents.

“I’m so disappointed,” Andrade said. “We’re not bad people, and we’re already here.”

Yvonne Su, director of the Center for Refugee Studies at York University in Toronto, said it was clear that Trudeau had “let in too many people.”

But it was cruel, she said, to deny those already in the country the chance to stay.

“We went to the world, we asked them to come, and they came,” she said. “Then we decided there were too many? We used them.”

She has tracked a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment online, where videos of Canadians making racist statements have proliferated, as well as in the real world, where reports of hate crimes more than doubled between 2019 to 2023.

Meanwhile, immigrant leaders say there has been an uptick in suicides among international students who went into debt to pay their tuition, and now see little opportunity to recoup that money in Canada.

Su, who was born in China and moved with her family to a small town in Ontario as a child, said the current moment is exposing anti-immigrant attitudes that have long simmered under the surface. She mentioned her parents’ longtime neighbors, who always seemed nice enough, but who privately complained that her father spoke in Chinese too loudly.

“There’s always been that quiet Canadian racism,” she said.

Significantly, the movement to restrict immigration is supported by many immigrants themselves.

Among them is John Ede, 45, who moved from Nigeria to Vancouver to get a masters degree in public policy and global affairs in 2017. Angered by vaccine mandates during the pandemic, he found himself drawn to the far-right People’s Party, which opposed Canada’s COVID-19 public health policies.

Ede also found himself agreeing with the party’s stance on immigration: that the number of new immigrants be vastly reduced, and those living in the country on expired visas be deported. He will stand as a candidate for Parliament for the party in the next elections.

He said people often question his anti-immigrant turn, but that to him it makes practical sense.

“Imagine that you escaped a shipwreck because of overcrowding,” he said. “Now you make it on another ship to save your life, and you see that the new ship is running the same course of the one you abandoned. You have a real incentive to shout and say, ‘You know what? I’ve seen this before.’”

“I have a motivation to protect this country that has invited me in and to ensure that its economic and social and political constructions remain intact,” Ede said. “I have a duty to protect this beacon.”