Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting [sic, immigration]

Hard to disagree “The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.:”

…Eight years later, it is all in tatters. After letting in record numbers of immigrantspost-pandemic, the federal government has lost almost complete control of who comes into the country, and who stays. Unsurprisingly, for the first time in a quarter century, popular opinion has turned sharply against our still-high immigration levels. And a populist policy backlash is brewing in the form of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives or, worse, Donald Trump’s MAGA crazies. 

And so after nine years of smugly lecturing the world and their fellow Canadians about their superior virtue, it seems to be slowly dawning on the Liberals just how badly they have screwed things up. But as night follows day, as sunshine follows rain, as the Leafs lose in the first round of the playoffs, everything the Liberals do to fix the problem only makes things worse. 

In October, the government turned on a dime and realised that maybe their target of 500,000 newcomers per year for the next two years might be a bit more than the system could take. So they cut that figure by about a fifth, targeting 395,000 permanent residents in 2025, with that number dropping to 365,000 by 2027. 

This came after an announcement earlier in the year that Ottawa would be capping international student visas, which come with a highly prized post graduate work permit. While there was no guarantee this would lead to permanent residency, the promise that this would be the case was pretty much implicit. Come here and study, stick around and work, bring your family over and stay — that was the Canadian dream for hundreds of thousands of foreign students, encouraged ad nauseaum by federal politicians. But in September, Ottawa announced that it would not be renewing the work permits for current permit holders, with 200,000 of those set to expire by the end of 2025. 

Anyone think those 200,000 former students are going to just pack up and head home next year? Don’t make us ell oh ell. 

Indeed, count us amongst the ranks of the completely unsurprised when it was reported this week that so far this year, 14,000 people here on international student visas had filed refugee claims between January 1 and September 1 of this year. It was already a record, surpassing the 12,000 asylum claims filed in 2023. And the final 2024 number will be almost an order of magnitude higher than the 1,800 such claims that were filed in 2018. 

Immigration minister Marc Miller was quick to denounce these as largely false claims, filed in bad faith by students advised to do so by unscrupulous consultants. Well, maybe. But hey, if they are false claims, the feds can always just deny them and send these fraudsters home, no?

Well, no. Because in addition to losing control of the immigration system, Ottawa has also lost control of the refugee claimant system. As the Globe writes in an excellent editorial this weekend, when the Liberals came to power in 2015, the backlog of refugee claimants was a hair under 10,000 claims. Today, there are well over a quarter of a million (!!!) pending cases, and the IRB is losing ground every day, not gaining. The wait for a refugee hearing is now in the ballpark of four years, during which claimants are entitled to both work and study. And on the off chance Ottawa denies your claim four years from now, what are the odds you will actually get put on a plane and sent home? Almost zilch. The result is a vicious cycle where the more claims that are made, the longer they will take to be processed, which raises the incentive for making a claim, and so on. 

The upshot of all this is that Canada’s immigration system is no longer the prized coconut of old. Today, it’s more like a post-Halloween pumpkin — rotten all the way through.  

It’s not clear what is to be done about this, short of simply closing the border for a few years until we get things under control. One possibility would be for Canada to declare something like immigration bankruptcy: Every non citizen in the country on a certain date, regardless of the status as a student, immigrant, or refugee claimant, gets permanent residency. After that, visa requests and refugee claims get processed as they come in under a new set of hard and transparent rules.

More than likely, though, the Liberals will keep muddling along, making the problem worse and worse and worse as they continue to play whack a mole with each new unintended side effect of their ad hoc policy making. You can be sure the Trump people are paying close attention….

Source: Dispatch from the Front Lines: Peace, order and really bad governmenting