In 2021, Gallup polled 127,000 adults in 122 nations. It asked about their interest in immigrating to another country. In South Asia, one of every nine people said they hoped to move. The figure in Southeast Asia was one in seven. In the Middle East and North Africa, more than a quarter of the population wanted to leave. In Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, the tally was 37 per cent.
Gallup has been conducting this survey periodically since the early 2000s, and each update shows an increase in two figures: the number of people who want to emigrate, and the number who say Canada is where they want to go.
Gallup concluded that nearly 900 million people hoped to move to another country in 2021. Eighteen per cent had the United States as their first choice. The next most popular destination was Canada at 8 per cent. The pollster estimated that 74 million adults hoped to immigrate here.
There is, in other words, a lot more demand for Canadian residency than there is supply. No matter the chosen immigration level, this country can be – must be – highly selective about who we admit.
That should be obvious, but apparently it isn’t.
In recent years, Canada stopped being selective. We’re the Harvard of countries – everybody wants in – but we stopped taking advantage of our built-in advantage. Instead, the provinces (led by Ontario), much of the higher-education system (especially Ontario’s public colleges, often in partnership with visa-peddling private colleges), the business sector and the Trudeau government all pushed for volume, volume, volume.
That changed Canada’s immigration system in three profound and problematic ways.
The number of people coming to Canada shot to unprecedented heights; between April, 2023, and April, 2024, more than 1.2 million people arrived, nearly three times the Trudeau government’s planned official immigration rate. Most are temporary foreign workers and students; the latter largely a subset of the former. And most were recruited for low-skill, low-productivity, low-wage positions.
Canadian immigration previously put the accent on choosing future citizens with high skills and good career prospects. The Trudeau government stood that on its head. Today’s immigration system is heavily focused on importing record numbers of notionally non-permanent residents, to permanently fill jobs stocking shelves and flipping burgers, at the lowest legal wage or lower.
Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault wrote earlier this week on X that, “abuse & misuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program must end.”
What an excellent idea.
Over the last few years, work visas have been issued in unlimited numbers, with effectively no questions asked. That’s not how things used to be.
It should be quick and easy for a Canadian business to get a temporary work visa to fill a specialized, high-wage position. If an aeronautical engineering firm needs to recruit a senior production manager at $250,000 a year, they should get that visa yesterday.
But visas for $15-an-hour sandwich artists? Particularly when Statistics Canada says the summer jobless rate among students is at its highest level in decades? Forget it.
The temporary foreign worker streams must become smaller and more selective. Jobs paying, say, at least 150 per cent of the average Canadian full-time wage – that’s roughly $110,000 a year – should be possible to fill from overseas. Lower-wage applications should be auto-stamped “Denied.”
Yes, exception will have to be made for the long-standing program of seasonal agricultural workers. But other industries have to be weaned from their addiction to low-wage, low-rights labour. Going cold turkey will leave businesses with no choice but to raise wages and invest in productivity.
Selectivity should also be the rule when it comes to student visas. Immigration Minister Marc Miller is finally putting a cap on numbers, which were long unlimited. Infinite supply spawned an ecosystem of what Mr. Miller correctly dubbed “puppy mill” colleges, selling entry to Canada in exchange for minimal tuition. It’s a racket that Mr. Miller says he’s scaling back, but which he has hardly ended.
Canada should give student visa priority to programs with the best labour market outcomes, and the highest tuition. Some provinces, led by Ontario, appear to be doing the opposite. Foreign students at Ontario’s public universities pay tuitions that are generally several times those at public colleges, yet the lion’s share of Ontario’s student visas are allocated to colleges, not universities.
It’s not anti-immigration or anti-immigrant for Canada to be selective. It’s how we used to do things. It’s also how, from the 1980s until recently, through governments Progressive Conservative, Conservative and Liberal, Canada had higher levels of immigration than the rest of the developed world – and higher public support for immigration.