Let’s look at the conundrum Marc Miller faces. The Immigration Minister must choose between bad policy and disaster.
Mr. Miller announced in March that the government will reduce the number of temporary residents in Canada from 6.2 per cent of the population to 5 per cent over the next three years.
That’s a belated effort to slow the runaway train of population growth sparked by a boom in the number of foreign students and temporary workers.
But reducing the numbers is not going to be easy. The proportion of temporary residents in the population has already risen to 6.7 per cent, or 2.8 million people. The Bank of Canada recently expressed doubt that Ottawa will meet the target. No wonder: getting there requires choosing between bad options.
The ugliest of those options could involve building an immigration-enforcement machine to deport large numbers of people, as the United States does.
To avoid that, the Liberal government will probably settle for bad immigration policy: permanently admitting more of the lower-skilled immigrants who are already here as temporary residents and rejecting more of the brightest prospects.
Mr. Miller took a major step by cutting the number of student visas that will be issued this year by 35 per cent. That sparked a lot of squabbling from colleges, universities and provincial governments that are going to lose billions in revenues.
But it won’t be enough. The reduced intake of foreign students will slow the growth, but many of the one million foreign students in Canada are here for multiyear programs, and eligible for a three-year work permit when they graduate. Former students are by far the largest group of temporary foreign workers. It will take years for the lower intake to slash the total numbers.
The government has adjusted visa rules for students and temporary workers, and will again, but it’s not easy to cut big numbers quickly without altering the terms of visas that have already been issued.
And there’s another concern: To meet the target, the government would have to reduce the number of temporary residents by about 700,000. If that many people are told to leave, some large number will stay anyway. And then Canada would have a large number of residents without status and an enforcement problem.
Many of those temporary residents came in the hope, or expectation, of becoming permanent residents. The federal government doesn’t have an estimate of the number who have stayed in Canada after their visas expired, but CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal estimated last year that the stock of overstayers between 2017 and 2022 was more than 750,000.
You can bet that the last thing Mr. Miller wants is to turn the temporary-resident mistake into an enforcement crisis. That would fuel politicization of immigration and calls to get tough. In the U.S., where removal of illegal immigrants is one of the hottest political issues, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than 20,000 employees and a tip line.
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So what can Mr. Miller do instead? He can turn a lot of those temporary residents into permanent residents. He has already suggested that is part of the plan.
The problem is that means turning the goals of Canada’s economic immigration program upside down.
It is supposed to bring in people with the best potential to help Canada’s economy – highly educated or highly skilled applicants. But in recent years, the big growth in international students has come in private and public college students, with less education and fewer skills. Turning large numbers of temporary residents into permanent residents means accepting lower-skilled applicants.
And like it or not, those immigrants will take the place of others. There’s a target of 301,250 economic immigrants for 2025, and if the government creates a special program for lower-skilled temporary residents, that means fewer spots will be available for highly qualified applicants. Whiz kids with bachelor degrees in math or computer science will be left in the queue.
But for the next few years, the government will be digging the immigration system out of a hole. The big mistake has been made.
Ottawa didn’t stop provincial governments, particularly in Ontario and B.C., from letting their foreign-student industries grow to excess. The Canadian population grew at its fastest rate since the peak of the baby boom because of unchecked growth in temporary residents, rather than planned immigration. That fuelled a housing crisis.
Now Ottawa has little choice but to do something. And Mr. Miller doesn’t have any good options to choose from.