Behind the alarmist click bait headline, some serious issues. Striking silence on the impact of social media discourses. They fraying of the consensus is largely based on concerns over housing, healthcare and infrastructure, all exacerbated by Liberal government excessive levels of both temporary and permanent residents, largely encouraged by provincial governments, business and advocates:
…On top of the economic impacts, there’s the matter of Canada’s fraying social fabric.
A huge surge in wealth migration from the People’s Republic of China in recent years has swamped Canada’s long-standing Cantonese communities and introduced grave threats to Canada’s political sovereignty. After all the scandals involving compromised federal politicians and manipulated federal election races, there is still no sign that the Carney government intends to proceed with a foreign influence registry.
With politically active immigrants from the Middle East emerging as a heavy counterweight to Canada’s long-standing affinity with the Jewish state of Israel, profound changes are underway in the formulation of Canada’s foreign policy and Canada’s traditions of religious tolerance.
For all the Liberals’ recent admissions of error, the Trudeau government’s immigration legacy is with us still, and there’s little evidence that a Carney government, despite its reassurances, will be making much of a break with it.
While Toronto has lately adopted an American-style “sanctuary city” policy through its Access T.O. initiative (“Access to City Services for Undocumented Torontonians), this doesn’t mean that Canada is hurtling towards American-style standoffs between federal and local enforcement authorities.
It’s just that while Americans are going through distinctly American convulsions related to immigration, Canada doesn’t have anything to brag about. Canada’s old consensus on immigration has been broken. The public trust in a functioning immigration system has been badly shaken.
While regular pathways for workers are preferable to irregular ones, don’t think eliminating visitor visa requirements is the right way to go. Invites perceived abuse and thus contributes to less support for immigration compared to work visas (which of course can also be abused):
…Mr. Carney’s “nation-building” agenda – the accelerated construction of millions of homes and transportation and energy infrastructure projects – will require unprecedented numbers of skilled-trades and construction workers, many from abroad. It’s an opportunity to forge a migration co-operation agreement with Mexico that could provide the incentives and processes needed to restore visa-free travel.
The G7, given the elephant in the room, is probably not the place to start mending this rift. But the two heads of government should meet soon, and in person, to restore both human mobility and political cooperation between two countries that have more in common with each other than with the untamed animal lying between them.
Without, of course, giving any numbers. At some point, both Poilievre and critic Rempel Garner need to provide some numbers to define what they mean by “severe”. Halving numbers back to the Harper government, less or more?
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the Canadian population has grown out of control and is calling on the Liberal government to further reduce immigration.
“We want severe limits on population growth to reverse the damage the Liberals did to our system,” Poilievre said during a press conference Tuesday in the foyer of the House of Commons.“The population has been growing out of control, our border has been left wide open. This has caused the free flow of drugs, illegal migration, human trafficking and much worse.”
Poilievre did not take followup questions from reporters on what he meant by “severe limits on population growth.”Global News has reached out to the Conservative Party of Canada for clarification but did not receive a response at the time of publication…
Le nombre de demandes d’admission d’étudiants internationaux dans les universités québécoises a chuté de près de moitié en un an au Québec. Une situation qui menace de nuire à la survie financière de plusieurs établissements, à la recherche scientifique et à la vitalité économique de plusieurs secteurs, montre une vaste étude obtenue par Le Devoir.
Le document, de plus de 230 pages, a été réalisé par le cabinet de conseil en management Volume 10, qui rendra celui-ci public mercredi au terme d’une démarche marquée par une importante collecte de données gouvernementales et universitaires de même que par la réalisation de plus d’une centaine d’entretiens avec des chanceliers d’université, des acteurs du milieu des affaires et des personnalités, parmi lesquelles figurent Pauline Marois, Jean Charest et le scientifique en chef du Québec, Rémi Quirion.
« Il n’y a tout simplement pas assez d’étudiants québécois qui poursuivent des études avancées en science. Quand j’étais chercheur, sans l’apport des étudiants internationaux, mon laboratoire n’aurait jamais pu connaître un tel succès international », a d’ailleurs déclaré M. Quirion dans un entretien accordé aux auteurs de ce rapport, le président de Volume 10, Félix-Antoine Joli-Coeur, et la chercheuse Leila Dhar.
Or, entre avril 2024 et avril 2025, l’ensemble des universités québécoises a enregistré en moyenne une baisse des demandes d’admission provenant de l’international de 45,9 %, montre ce rapport, qui associe cette chute à une série de décisions prises par Québec et Ottawa dans les dernières années.
Le gouvernement fédéral a notamment mis en place en janvier 2024 un plafond du nombre de permis d’études pouvant être remis à des étudiants internationaux à l’échelle du pays, venant ainsi réduire de 35 % la délivrance de ceux-ci par rapport à l’année précédente. Il a par la suite abaissé ce seuil maximal de 10 % en janvier dernier par rapport à 2024….
The number of applications for admission from international students to Quebec universities has fallen by almost half in a year in Quebec. A situation that threatens to harm the financial survival of several institutions, scientific research and the economic vitality of several sectors, shows a large study obtained by Le Devoir.
The document, of more than 230 pages, was produced by the management consulting firm Volume 10, which will make it public on Wednesday at the end of an approach marked by an important collection of government and academic data as well as by the conduct of more than a hundred interviews with university chancellors, business actors and personalities, including Pauline Marois, Jean Charest and Quebec’s chief scientist, Rémi Quirion.
“There are simply not enough Quebec students pursuing advanced studies in science. When I was a researcher, without the contribution of international students, my laboratory could never have been so successful internationally, “said Mr. Quirion in an interview with the authors of this report, the president of Volume 10, Félix-Antoine Joli-Coeur, and researcher Leila Dhar.
However, between April 2024 and April 2025, all Quebec universities recorded an average decrease in international admission applications of 45.9%, shows this report, which links this fall to a series of decisions taken by Quebec and Ottawa in recent years.
In particular, the federal government implemented in January 2024 a ceiling on the number of study permits that can be issued to international students nationwide, thus reducing the issuance of them by 35% compared to the previous year. It subsequently lowered this maximum threshold by 10% last January compared to 2024….
Good question, force only or with other migration management measures that started under the Biden administration:
Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen to lows not seen since the 1960s. In April, the U.S. Border Patrol reported intercepting fewer than 8,400 irregular crossers—a stark contrast from the record high of nearly 250,000 encounters witnessed in December 2023. And data picked up elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere suggest unauthorized migration headed northward is slowing across the region: Reporting from the Darien Gap, the treacherous jungle that divides Panama and Colombia, shows there were just 200 crossings in March, compared to more than 37,000 the same month a year earlier.
With these near-historic lows, the Trump administration can rightfully claim that it has secured the border at this time, building on declines that began in early 2024 and accelerated in the second half of the year. The longer-term test, however, is whether this success can be sustained through the administration’s new show of force alone, without the less visible migration management ingredients that led to the quieting border the administration inherited.
A Year-Long Story of Reduced Migrant Flows
The current lows build on a pattern of reduced irregular arrivals that started with changes in Biden administration policies in early 2024. Amid the record level of Southwest border arrivals witnessed in December 2023, which came on the heels of two years of record border encounters during the Biden administration, the U.S. and Mexican governments negotiated increased Mexican enforcement at Mexico’s northern border and throughout the country, including checkpoints throughout well-traveled interior routes.
With this ongoing additional enforcement from Mexico, irregular arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased by 53 percent between December 2023 and May 2024 (see Figure 1). The impact of Mexican enforcement cannot be overstated: Mexican authorities recorded more encounters than did the U.S. Border Patrol every single month between May 2024 and March 2025 (the most recent month for which Mexican enforcement data are available).
Figure 1. Irregular Migrant Encounters by U.S. Border Patrol at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2023–25
Note: The data here reflect encounters recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol of migrants crossing the border without authorization; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations encounters of migrants arriving at a U.S. port of entry without prior authorization to enter are not included here. Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters,” accessed May 29, 2025.
Following implementation of the Biden administration’s June 2024 Secure the Border rule, irregular encounters continued to drop, with the ongoing aid offered by increased Mexican enforcement. This rule sought to disincentivize illegal entries and incentivize arrivals at a port of entry by further limiting access to asylum for those who crossed between ports of entry and permitting an appointment, through use of the CBP One app, to be screened at an official port of entry. Those who entered through the CBP One app could later go on to apply for asylum.
Irregular crossings dropped from 84,000 that June to 47,000 in December, a 43 percent decrease. Notably, encounters in December 2024 were 81 percent lower than the same month a year earlier. Proof that the carrot-and-stick approach was beginning to turn the tide was seen in November 2024, when for the first time more migrants arrived at ports of entry than between (see Figure 2). Though by a small margin, this shift established a pattern of more migrants seeking to enter lawfully via CBP One rather than risk entering irregularly.
Figure 2. Migrant Encounters At and Between Ports of Entry at U.S.-Mexico Border, 2024
Note: Office of Field Operations (OFO) encounters occur at ports of entry; U.S. Border Patrol encounters occur between ports of entry. Source: CBP, “CBP Nationwide Encounters.”
Inheriting an Increasingly Quiet Border
Thus, the current lows seen under the Trump administration represent a continuation of trends established during the prior administration—and momentum the Biden team put in place by increasing migration management cooperation with Mexico and other countries in the Western Hemisphere as well as further narrowing access to asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, upon taking office, the Trump administration shuttered many of the programs that had become the basis for dramatic reductions in irregular arrivals.
During his first days in office, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the border and a migrant “invasion.” By cancelling use of the CBP One app while leaving the Secure the Border rule restrictions in place, the Trump administration made asylum inaccessible at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most notably, the administration terminated access to Biden-era humanitarian pathways that had helped reduce chaotic arrivals at the Southwest border. The Trump administration swiftly ended admissions under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) parole program, which reduced irregular encounters of those nationalities at the border by 92 percent between October 2022 and December 2024. Nearly 532,000 individuals were admitted through the CHNV program, allowing them access to work permits and temporary relief from deportation. The administration also closed the Safe Mobility Offices (SMOs) that had been set up in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala to consider migrants for refugee resettlement or other lawful pathways before they reached the U.S. border. More than 40,000 people were approved for U.S. refugee status through the SMOs.
Not surprising as applicants are generally pretty savvy at understanding systems and ways to improve their chances:
Ottawa is cracking down on skilled immigration applicants who manipulate the point system to boost their ranking scores for a spot in the increasingly competitive permanent resident draws.
Since 2015, the Immigration Department has used the current system to score and rank skilled immigration candidates based on their age, education, language proficiency, work experience and adaptability. Periodic draws are conducted and candidates with the highest scores in the pool are invited to apply.
There are two scoring grids: for candidates who are single, and for those who have spouses and get points for the partner’s qualifying attributes. To balance out this potential advantage for married candidates, singles can earn more points for the same attributes (education, language proficiency, etc.). The potential maximum is 600 points, whether married or single.
However, married candidates have the option to exclude their spouses in the application and be assessed as if they were single, and benefit from the additional points as an individual applicant. It could bump up their score by up to 40 points and make a difference in the current immigration landscape.
Due to the influx of study and work permit holders after the pandemic ended in 2022, the pool of candidates in the system has grown, and new priorities arose for applicants in occupations experiencing skill shortages to bypass the score ranking system.
That has resulted in higher passing scores and more competition for those who aren’t in a prioritized occupation in areas such as health care, education, STEM and skilled trades.
To outscore others, married applicants have increasingly excluded their spouses in applications and opted to sponsor them later, after they themselves secure permanent residence….
…Dana Wagner, co-founder of TalentLift, a non-profit international recruitment company that matches displaced people with employers, said that with no direction from the federal government both employees and refugees are in limbo. Letting the program just expire would be ”counterproductive and cruel,” she said.
“You can’t turn economic visas on and off like a tap without harming Canadian workplaces. Employers put time and resources into international hiring, and that investment is lost if a visa pathway suddenly ends,” she said.
“People in really tough refugee situations around the world are also investing in their job search with Canadian teams. There’s a number of people waiting on the results of an interview, or working hard to get one, who’d be facing yet another major lost opportunity if Canada ends this program.” …
Valid call for separate bill with proposed cheeky title:
…It’s a package clearly meant to appease Mr. Trump. But Canada’s immigration problems are not a border security issue the way they are at the U.S. frontier with Mexico.
Other than the anomaly of the Roxham Road crossing, which has been fixed by a renegotiation of the STCA, Canada’s problem has not been a porous border but, rather, the mismanagement of its immigration and refugee system by Mr. Carney’s predecessor.
Lumping in these needed reforms with criminal matters glosses over the Liberals’ failings while doing a disservice to people legitimately fleeing persecution or looking for a new life in Canada.
The government should put the immigration reforms in their own bill. A suggested name would be, “Belatedly Undoing the Incompetence of the Trudeau Government Act.”
Immigration section. Correct assessment regarding stakeholders who will oppose any further restrictions or limits. Fails to acknowledge provincial government complicity however:
…And then there is the other side of the housing crisis: demand. More specifically, immigration. It is now widely accepted that our astronomically high levels of immigration, which ramped up under Trudeau, have played a major role in doubling housing costs in the last 10 years. But even though Carney has signalled that he wants to lower immigration levels to something more sustainable, his promise seems shallow.
Immigration targets outlined in the Liberal platform largely represent a continuation of Trudeau-era levels of immigration. And even if Carney is genuinely dedicated to reducing immigration levels, doing so will require regaining control of a completely broken immigration system, not just commitments on the numbers. There has been recent reporting that the government doesn’t even know how many people are in the country right now.
More significantly, fixing immigration will require taking on powerful stakeholders who benefit from the broken status quo they helped build. Many of our major businesses and the service sector have become addicted to cheap, temporary foreign labour. 1
Canada’s post-secondary institutions, colleges being some of the worst offenders, exploit international students as cash cows who have also become another source of cheap labour. And of course, high immigration levels keep the demand for housing high to maintain our real estate pyramid scheme. Similar to housing, fixing this system requires not only serious structural reforms but also the willingness to take on powerful stakeholders with a lot to lose from any reform….
…A complete ban of a country’s people, or a closure of legal border crossings to significant populations, does the opposite. It inverts the risk equation by reducing the odds of a legal, controlled application succeeding to zero. And therefore the comparative benefit of sneaking in or simply showing up or overstaying rises infinitely. In other words: bans strongly incentivize illegal immigration.
That should be well known to American leaders by this point. Despite the walling-off of the southern border and closure of most forms of legal entry and asylum at its crossings under Mr. Trump in his first term and continuing under Joe Biden, the proportion of irregular entries and dangerous smuggled crossings rose. They were reduced to negligible levels in 2024, mainly through judicious use of limited legal pathways.
The Safe Third Country Agreement has the same effect in Canada: By completely banning entire categories of people from any regular-entry application, however unlikely its success, it creates a powerful incentive structure to make dangerous irregular walks across the border. Therefore, when people seek to flee Mr. Trump’s policies, as they did in his first term, they seek to come through fields, forests and lakes, at great risk.
A restricted, controlled immigration system is good for everyone, including immigrants. But restriction becomes a perverse incentive to illegality, as Mr. Trump keeps failing to learn, if you reduce the target to zero.
Multicultural Meanderings 