Demonizing and alienating individual immigrants or immigrant groups won’t do anything to fix our broken immigration system, and will only further divide our nation.
When it comes to immigration, Canadian public opinion has shifted rapidly.
This country was once one of the most welcoming and pro-immigrant nations in the world, and for good reason.
We are a country of immigrants.
A huge portion of the country, aside from Indigenous People of course, can trace our history to a foreign country at some point or another.
Canada is also a member of the Anglosphere, the countries most devoted to individual rights and most open to the idea that citizenship and a sense of belonging to a nation is based not just on the soil one was born on, but on the values someone is willing to embrace and defend.
Aside from small groups on the fringes, most Canadians readily accept that people of all backgrounds can be equally Canadian.
There’s another reason we were such a pro-immigration country:
The immigration system was handled extremely well.
Canada long focused on bringing in sustainable numbers of people, and ensuring that most newcomers were a good economic fit for the nation.
This approach worked for a very long time and was so successful that our immigration system was often held up as an example for other nations. In the United States, both Democrats and Republicans often praised Canada’s immigration system.
But now, all of this has changed.
And it changed because the Liberals shifted Canada away from the reasonable, moderate, well-managed immigration we once had, and towards a radical immigration surge that has proven to be completely unsustainable.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to a significant backlash.
This backlash is based on anger that is 100% justified.
Canadians have every right to be angry that the housing market is unaffordable.
We have every right to be angry that our social cohesion is rapidly declining.
We have every right to be angry that our social services are overburdened.
And we have every right to be angry that more and more young people are unable to find work.
Misdirected anger
With that said, just because anger is justified doesn’t mean it is always being directed in the right place.
A quick look online will show that significant anger is being directed against individual immigrants and immigrant groups. In particular, some have gone beyond criticizing the consequences of unsustainable immigration and are now seemingly focused on demonizing Indo-Canadians – often in explicitly racist terms.
Not only is this wrong from an ethical perspective, it is counterproductive.
Individual immigrants are not to blame for what has happened to our immigration system.
The vast majority of people would – if given the opportunity – leave a poorer nation to go to a richer one.
Anger and racism towards immigrants represent misdirected energy.
Instead, that energy should be put into demanding a change in government policy.
MPs need to hear from the Canadian People – respectfully – that we want immigration levels to be brought back down to a reasonable level.
If we can do that, we can start to fix our broken immigration system without losing the open and welcoming nature that has been such a pillar of our success as a country.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has made this point quite effectively, noting that Justin Trudeau, not immigrants, caused this problem:
Pierre Poilievre on immigration: "The problem is that [Trudeau] destroyed the common sense approach that worked for 150 years." pic.twitter.com/KHlV9qxJaY
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) July 29, 2024
As always, all of us need to ensure that the backlash to failed government policy doesn’t result in Canada losing our soul or losing our sense of basic decency.
Spencer Fernando
