Good account of the discussion. But don’t agree that the plan is controversial for most Canadians apart from the various immigration interest groups:
Appearing before the House of Commons immigration committee on Monday to pitch the controversial plan, Miller was under fire from the right for the lack of details on how to ensure temporary residents with expiring status will voluntarily leave Canada and from the left for scapegoating migrants for the country’s affordability and housing crisis.
“You’re not giving me much confidence or Canadians confidence that you have a plan,” said Tom Kmiec, immigration critic for the opposition Conservatives, who repeatedly questioned Miller how his department is going to ensure people do leave when their time is up.
“You haven’t provided any information on the means. How are you going to do it? You say you have partner organizations. You’re working with people. What are you actually doing? What’s the process? How are you going to ensure people abide by the visa conditions?”
In response, Miller said there are many ways that people leave the country and the majority of people do. And if they don’t, he added, border agents will investigate and remove them from Canada.
He admitted an increasing number of study and work permit holders have sought asylum in the country to extend their stay, but people are entitled to due process and be assessed if they have a legitimate need to seek protection.
When pushed by the Bloc Québécois how the federal government was going to respond to an anticipated surge of irregular migration from the U.S. under the incoming Trump administration, Miller said a cabinet working group is developing a contingency plan but he’s not going to roll it out in public.
Last month, Ottawa unveiled a three-year immigration level plan that will reduce the annual intake of permanent residents by 21 per cent to 395,000 next year, 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027. It will also slash the temporary population including international students and foreign workers to 445,901 in 2025 and to 445,662 in 2026 but will increase it modestly by 17,439 in 2027.
The reduced targets are meant to achieve a population decline of 0.2 per cent in each of the next two years before returning to a population growth of 0.8 per cent in 2027. However, it’s predicated on the assumption that 1,262,801 temporary residents would leave the country voluntarily next year, and another 1,104,658 in 2026.
Earlier on Monday, a coalition of advocates and migrants demanded the opposition parties reject the Liberal government’s plan to slash immigrationand expel 2.36 million temporary residents with expiring status in the next two years. Some of them also attended the committee meeting with protest signs saying “Don’t deport us! Don’t be racist!”
Sarom Rho of the Migrant Rights Network said fewer permanent resident spots mean further temporariness and exploitation for vulnerable international students and temporary workers.
“They hide the fact that the super-rich are making record-breaking profits while the majority of us go hungry, that corporate landlords are buying up housing stock to manufacture scarcity and that the public institutions we value so deeply, like health care and education, are being … sold by the pound to private profiteers,” she told a news conference.
“By reducing immigration, Prime Minister Trudeau is affirming the racist idea that migrants are responsible for the affordability of housing crises.”
Jenny Kwan, the NDP’s immigration critic, said successive Conservative and Liberal governments have brought in more and more temporary residents to reduce migrants’ rights and make them more vulnerable.
What the federal government needs to do, she said, is to rein in corporate interests that are profiteering off people’s basic needs and also invest in housing, health care and infrastructure for all Canadians.
“You blame (migrants) as though somehow they created the housing crisis when in fact successive governments abdicated their responsibility and entirely just relied on the private sector to provide the housing,” said Kwan. “When are you actually going to take up responsibility and do what is right?”
Miller said temporary residents are meant to be here temporarily and there’s no “automatic guarantee” for permanent residence.
“A lot of institutions have entertained explicitly or implicitly a sense of false hope that people will become immediately a Canadian citizen,” he said. “My heart does go out to those who have had that false hope entertained. But the reality is that not everyone can stay here.”
Multicultural Meanderings 