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The approach that worked for decades was pro-immigration and pro-immigrant, but with a lot of fine print. There was a door, but it was protected and supported by load-bearing walls. There was a welcome mat, but it was surrounded by a bed of nails. The world saw Canada as a place with a progressive and welcoming immigration policy, and that was not mistaken. But the view from a distance glossed over key details. The country’s approach to immigration was arguably more generous and softer-hearted than the United States, but less noticed were all the ways the Canadian system was harder-headed and harder-assed. Canada’s hard and soft approaches were not a contradiction. The former enabled the latter. The walls held up the door. The nails delineated the path to the welcome mat. That was then. This is now. In 2023, Canada added 1.3 million immigrants. That was five times more than in 2015, and more than two-and-a-half times the Trudeau government’s own official immigration target. In one year, Canada took in as many immigrants, relative to the size of its population, as the United States during the four years of the Joe Biden administration. And that Biden-era immigration surge was the biggest in U.S. history, topping the peak of arrivals at Ellis Island more than a century ago. Canada’s 2023 immigration record was not a one-off, nor was it intended to be. It had been preceded by the arrival of nearly one million people in 2022. And in 2024, even as the Trudeau government finally began to backpedal in the face of public dismay, Statistics Canada estimates that the country still added 880,000 net immigrants—more than triple the immigration level of the early to mid-2010s. Between the start of 2022 and the end of 2024, the number of immigrants who entered the United States minus the number who left is estimated by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office at 8.8 million. In Canada over the same period, Statistics Canada’s estimate is 3.1 million. Given Canada’s smaller population, that’s equivalent to the U.S. taking in 26 million people in the space of 36 months. The U.S. experienced the largest immigration surge in its history, and it blew up American politics. Canada’s surge was three times bigger. A country that prided itself on welcoming newcomers as future citizens also discovered that most immigrants were now coming through alternative routes that the government left out of its annual immigration targets and barely mentioned—at least not when talking to Canadians. Canadians were the last to learn that their country had an immigration side door, which was busier than the front door. And the side door was so busy because, unlike the front door, there was no limit on the number of people who could use it. Those using it were generally low-skilled workers in low-wage jobs, and though they did not enter with permanent residency status, that is what most were after. By the fall of 2024, Statistics Canada estimated that the country had more than 3.1 million legal temporary residents—7.6 percent of the population. This influx of labour with uncertain immigration status and menial jobs had something of the flavour of Qatar or the United Arab Emirates. It was also kind of American. An immigration program formerly focused on attracting skilled and educated future citizens had somehow become refocused on attracting notionally temporary migrants to do work—fast food, retail, hospitality, delivery—that Canadians allegedly would not do, and at wages Canadians wouldn’t accept. The greatest numbers were coming through the student visa stream. It became the country’s main supplier of temporary foreign workers thanks to Ottawa’s decision to allow visa students to work full-time while in school. That empowered educational entrepreneurs to sell the right to enter and work in Canada, in return for a few thousand dollars of tuition in short and low-value programs at no-name schools. By 2023, Canada had a million foreign students—as many as the United States. The drivers of the business were what Immigration Minister Marc Miller would later concede were “puppy mill” colleges. Then there was the asylum system. Canada had traditionally accepted relatively large numbers of refugees selected and screened overseas, but strenuous efforts were always made to ensure that people couldn’t just show up and make asylum claims here. That also was stood on its head. By the summer of 2025, there were 288,000 refugee claimants in Canada awaiting a decision—up 2,800 percent since 2015. Statistics Canada counted 497,000 people living in the country who had made a refugee claim or had recently been given a positive decision; that was nearly triple the figure of just three years earlier. The 2023 federal budget proudly proclaimed that, thanks in part to high immigration, “Canada’s economy is now 103 percent the size it was before the pandemic.” GDP growth the previous year had topped the G7, with “strong population growth” cited as a cause. “Immigration is a significant driver of economic growth,” said the budget, touting how “Canada continues to post the fastest population growth in the G7, with strong immigration levels pushing population growth to its fastest pace since the 1950s.” The more people arrived, the more prosperous Canadians became, apparently. If only it had been so. Gross domestic product, the benchmark measure of the economy’s total output, was rising, and all else equal, that was a good thing. But all else was not equal. Per capita GDP—the pie divided by the number of forks in it—was shrinking. Over a period of 27 months, from the summer of 2022 to the fall of 2024, Canada had seven quarters of positive economic growth and two quarters of negative growth. But per person economic growth—GDP per capita—was the opposite story: two quarters of expansion, and seven of contraction. Canada’s population was growing faster than the economy. The slices were getting smaller. Between 2015 and 2024, Canada was arguably the rich world’s poorest economic performer. Real GDP per capita—economic growth per person, less inflation—grew by 2 percent, according to the OECD. Not 2 percent per year. Two percent, in total, over a decade. In 2025, real GDP per capita was no higher than it had been in 2019. Rapidly rising immigration and rapidly falling standards were not the recipe for an economic miracle. In July 2023, the polling firm Abacus Data surveyed Canadians’ attitudes to immigration. Told by the pollster that the government planned to admit half a million people—as always, the figures ignored the temporary stream—fully 61 percent said that immigration was too high. By fall 2023, the figure was 67 percent. By fall 2024, it was 72 percent. An Environics poll found a similar abrupt shift in attitudes. For the first two decades of the 21st century, the share of Canadians who agreed that “overall there is too much immigration” was around one-third, with roughly two-thirds disagreeing. But in 2024, those figures flipped, with 58 percent of respondents saying immigration was too high versus just 36 percent who disagreed. The good news is that Canada’s backlash against the immigration policy of the last few years hasn’t been a backlash at all. The public response, despite some attempts to categorize it as anti-immigrant, has been a mostly rational reaction to irrationally high numbers and irrationally low standards. It has been against the policy, not the people. It has been a necessary pushback against a federal government that, gripped by ideology and urged on by the provinces, progressives, the higher education sector, and the business lobby, stopped making policy for the common good. Canada’s history is proof that immigration can be positive and popular, but it takes thought and work. Step away from the ideological poles, and it’s clear to see that immigration, like most things, comes with both benefits and costs. For immigration’s positives to outweigh the negatives, and for voters to believe it, care must be taken and details must be sweated. Who do we let in? How many? How? Why? Canada’s answers were never perfect, but for a long time, it did immigration better than most. Why was the Canadian way of immigration abandoned? And how can we get it back, and even improve on it? Now that’s a tale. Adapted from Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong by Tony Keller.
