CANADA (Commonwealth Union)_ Canada is counting big on immigration to fill the economic void created by retiring Baby Boomers, but not everyone is on board with bringing in so many people from abroad.
Earlier this month, the federal government announced an aggressive plan to admit 500,000 new immigrants per year by 2025, with nearly 1.5 million new arrivals over the next three years. According to this plan, Canada would welcome around eight times the number of permanent residents per population as the United Kingdom, and four times more than its southern neighbour, the United States. Meanwhile, a recent poll has revealed that there are a significant number of members of the public who are concerned about admitting so many newcomers.
For many years, Canada has attempted to attract permanent residents – landed immigrants with the right to stay in the country eternally but who are not citizens – in order to maintain demographic and economic growth. Last year, the country welcomed 405,000 permanent residents, the highest number in its history.
In some sense, the reasons are about simple math. Canada, like many Western countries, has an older population and a decreased birth rate. That means that if the country wants to develop rather than contract, it will need to bring in more immigrants. According to a government news release, immigration already accounts for nearly all of the country’s labour force growth, and by 2032, it is predicted to account for all of the country’s population increase as well.
The administration said earlier this month that by 2025, they intend to bring in 500,000 new immigrants per year, a 25% increase from 2021 numbers.
Today, about one in every four Canadians is an immigrant, the highest rate among G7 countries. In comparison, only 14% of Americans are immigrants, despite being recognised as the world’s melting pot. The UK also boasts a 14% immigrant population.
According to Madeleine Sumption, head of Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, these figures do not indicate that the UK is falling behind in terms of immigration, but rather that Canada is an “outlier”. The United Kingdom, a small island with twice the population of Canada, already has a high population density, whereas Canada, with a population of just over 38 million people and one of the world’s largest land masses, has capacity to develop.
Prior to Brexit, a wave of European Union migrants from Eastern Europe arriving to the UK sparked anti-migration sentiment. However, Sumption claims that public support for immigration has grown in recent years, in part because people believe the country now has more control over who comes in than it did previously.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that there are no immigration issues. An inflow of migrants at the US border has caused some controversy in recent years, and the creation of a new fringe right-wing party, the People’s Party of Canada, in 2018, kept the matter in the national debate in the run-up to the 2019 federal election.
